The main contribution of the new edition is the value that any manuscript material brings to literary scholars and serious students of literature. And for people who care about literature, who are sensitive to literary nuance, and who have read both works, there is plenty of reason to believe that the 1964 edition edited by Mary Hemingway is far closer to what Hemingway intended his work to be than the 2009 edition clumsily and inconclusively slapped together by Sean Hemingway (whose professional expertise is in art history, not literature).Ĭertainly the 1964 edition is a vastly superior literary work–whole, complete and coherent in shape and theme, brilliantly well organized, with hardly a false note. Impossible to prove, but not impossible to hazard an informed guess about the validity of such a claim. Last year Scribner’s brought out, with great fanfare, a new “restored” edition of this classic edited by Sean Hemingway, a grandson of the writer, with the dubious (and impossible-to-prove) claim that the book was being published “for the first time as Ernest Hemingway intended.” Indeed, A Moveable Feast is also widely regarded as some of the best work Hemingway produced in his later years. The 1964 edition, which was edited by Mary Hemingway, Hemingway’s widow, with the help of Scribner’s editors, though subject to some criticism by scholars through the years, has been widely regarded as a classic literary memoir. Will the real Moveable Feast please stand up?Īny literary work that is published posthumously, unless it was left behind with explicit and unassailable directives from the author regarding its publication, is destined to be regarded with some doubt, if not outright controversy, about authorial intent.įirst published in 1964, three years after Ernest Hemingway’s death, this beautiful and poignant literary memoir, written by a middle-aged and sadly despondent Hemingway about his early days in Paris, has always dwelt in the unavoidable shadows and uncertainties surrounding any work published posthumously.

A moveable feast book