First Draft, Last Draft: How Hemingway Became Hemingway

Reviewing the Celebrated Novelist’s Classic Memoir, ‘A Moveable Feast’

Near the end of his life, Ernest Hemingway cracked open a time capsule from its beginning. In 1928 he left two small steamer trunks in storage at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. He never retrieved them. Almost thirty years later in 1956 hotel staff asked him if he might finally take them off their hands. He did—and uncorked the past as he opened the lids.

Old c…