A Moveable Feast

Source of title

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast. - Ernest Hemingway, to a friend, 1950

epigraph on title page of A Moveable Feast, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1964, p. v.

The title of A Moveable Feast (a play on words for the term used for a holy day for which the date is not fixed) was suggested by Hemingway's friend and biographer A. E. Hotchner, who remembered Hemingway using the term in 1950.[5] Hotchner's recollection of what Hemingway had said became the source of the epigraph on the title page for the posthumously published work in 1964.[5]

The term had also been used earlier (1946) in a non-religious context in an English translation of the novel The Stranger by Albert Camus: "Masson remarked that we’d had a very early lunch, but really lunch was a movable feast, you had it when you felt like it."[6]


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