Paris Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Donald Pizer

Critical Essay by Donald Pizer

SOURCE: “The Moment Remembered and Imagined: Autobiography,” in American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment, Louisiana State University Press, 1996, pp. 7-72.

In the following essay, Pizer relies on the autobiographical writings of Ernest Hemingway (A Movable Feast), Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), and Anaïs Nin (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931-1934) to explore three American writers' perspectives of life in Paris during a time of cultural ferment.

Ernest Hemingway

A Moveable Feast

The first impression left by Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his Paris apprenticeship is that it consists of a number of loosely connected anecdotal sketches dominated by the author's animus toward his fellow expatriates.¹ With the exception of two sequences of sketches—those on Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald—each sketch is an independent unit with little evident relationship, either in subject matter or causality, to the adjacent sketches. The only immediately evident principle of form for the volume lies in...
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