University of Delaware Library

Special Collections Department

Ernest Hemingway In His Time

Placed in Paris

With Sherwood Anderson's encouragement and employment as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Ernest Hemingway moved to Paris in 1921 and joined the "lost generation" of American expatriates -- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound -- who were living and writing there. Hemingway's fiction and poetry began to appear in European and American little magazines, but it was in Paris that he found publishers for his first books. Three Stories and Ten Poems was published in 1923 at Robert McAlmon's Contact Publishing Co., and Hemingway's second collection, in our time, was printed the following year by the American journalist William Bird as part of a series of chapbooks edited by Ezra Pound.

Hemingway's years in Paris were recalled in A Moveable Feast, posthumously published, but one of his most popular works. Other Hemingway recollections of Paris appeared in introductions to memoirs by colorful characters from those times, Kiki and "Jimmie the Barman."

39 rue Descartes, Paris
photograph from the collection of Marguerite Cohn.

This 1974 snapshot presents the hotel where Verlaine died and where Hemingway had a room on the top floor to work at writing after he moved to Paris in 1921. The room, with a gabled window facing front and another window to the right of the chimney, "looked across all the roofs and the chimneys of the high hill of the quarter," as described in A Moveable Feast.

Hemingway's attic

Three Stories & Ten Poems Three Stories & Ten Poems
[Paris:] Contact Publishing Co., 1923.

Hemingway's first book was published by the American expatriate Robert McAlmon in an edition of three hundred copies. Hemingway inscribed this copy to Louis Henry Cohn and also made extensive autograph corrections to the story "Up in Michigan."

in our time
Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924.

Hemingway's second published book, this collection of stories was printed at the press of his friend, the journalist William Bird, as part of a chapbook series edited by Ezra Pound.

in our time

Kiki's Memoirs Kiki's Memoirs
Paris: Edward W. Titus, at the Sign of the Black Manikin Press, 1930.
Translated from the French by Samuel Putnam.

Hemingway wrote the introduction to this autobiography of Alice Prin, an exotic model known as "Kiki." Hemingway's introduction was also published separately as a pamphlet. Hemingway praised Kiki's skill as a writer and there is considerable evidence that suggests his own memoir, A Moveable Feast, was influenced by that of Kiki.

This Must Be the Place: Memoirs of Montparnasse,
by Jimmie the Barman (James Charters).
London: Herbert Joseph Ltd. [1934]

Hemingway contributed the introduction to this memoir by Jimmie the Barman, one of the most celebrated barkeepers in Paris during the 1920s.

Collected Poems Originally Published in Paris
San Francisco: Pirated edition, 1960.

This unattributed pirated edition of Hemingway's poetry, most of which had been published originally in little magazines when he lived in Paris during the 1920s, bears a striking similarity to the publications of the City Lights Bookshop in San Francisco.

Collected Poems Originally Published in Paris

A Moveable Feast A Moveable Feast
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1964.

The first edition of Hemingway's autobiographical account of his expatriate years in Paris was published three years after his death.

"Paris" in Life, 55 (April 10, 1964).

Selected passages from eleven of the sketches from A Moveable Feast are illustrated with photographs by Gordon Parks.

<< Previous section Return to start Next Section >>
Footer
Back to the UD Special Collections Home Page

This page is maintained by Special Collections

Last modified: 12/21/10
  • UD Library Special Collections  •   181 South College Avenue  •   Newark, DE 19717-5267  •   USA
    Phone: USA +1 302-831-2229  •   ©2013