Scribner, 188 pages, 1964
The guy who sold me on Tropic of Cancer--some acquaintance of my ex-boyfriend who we ran into in Moe's Books in Berkeley one day--said "It's a great book to read when you're depressed because Henry Miller is broke and cold and hungry and yet half the book is just him wandering around Paris thinking about what he's going to eat next," and I think that also sums up at least half of why I loved A Moveable Feast. The rest of it is Hemingway's approach to his work, his rules for writing--stop when the words are flowing and you know what's going to happen next; don't think about your work when you're not writing; read other books at night to keep your mind off your own work; write one true thing, write the truest thing you know. I love reading about writers' working habits (another example: Jack Kerouac's Belief & Technique for Modern Prose) and I especially love looking into artistic movements and communities of the past, where the cast of characters is peopled with huge names in art and literature, and everyone is constantly exchanging ideas and feeding off of the collective energy. (Not that being part of an artistic movement necessarily raises one above the level of a gossip column; the chapters about F. Scott Fitzgerald, self-absorbed and neurotic as he is, are brilliant.)
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