Tag: Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway is one of the most notorious members of the Lost Generation, his time is Paris captured in his memoir A Moveable Feast.

Ernest Hemingway describes his two-room flat at 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine as having “no hot water and no inside toilet facilities except an antiseptic container.” His life was changing fairly quickly during his time there. On November 9 1923, he wrote to Gertrude Stein that she had ruined him for journalism and he was ready to “chuck” the profession: “You ruined me as a journalist last winter,” he wrote in the letter below. “Have been no good since. Like a bull, or a novillo, rather, well stuck but taking a long while to go down.”

It was his drive to become a novelist that brought him the financial challenges that relegated him to digs without basic necessities; you would think details like this would ease the nostalgia I still feel when thinking about that time in literary history but they don’t. I simply can’t help but romanticize those glory days when a handful of American writers had escaped the repression they felt in America and made Paris home, their activities turning the town into radical-literary central. I feature Hemingway in a number of posts here on The Diary of an Improvateur—all you need do is click on the tag to see them all.