"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 moveable feast."

-Ernest Hemingway

A focus on Hemingway’s Paris

The writer Ernest Hemingway was one of the best know American expatriates to have lived in the city of Paris.  This walk with a focus on Hemingway’s favorite places, inevitably include a number of other artists.  Paris would be a magnet for the “Lost Generation”.  

“Paris was where the twentieth century was”, Gertrude Stein would say.  She is also given credit for naming the artists that would gather around her in this period “the lost generation”.  These would also include:  Ezra Pound, F.Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Elliot, John Dos Passos, Josephine Baker, Isadora Duncan, and Cole Porter.

Much of the artistic and literary colony found their way to the left bank quarter of Montparnasse.  Central to life in this neighborhood are four large cafés.  These dominate the crossroads where the boulevard Montparnasse meets the boulevard Raspail: La Coupole, and La Rotonde, Le Dôme and Le Sélect soon had international reputations. The twenties' expatriates were as closely identified with these cafés as Sartre and the Existentialists were with the Flore and the Deux Magots on the boulevard St. Germain in post WWII Paris.

Hemingway’s first Paris home was rented near the top of the Montagne Saint-Genevieve off of the rue Mouffetard.  He would eventually find a preference for working at the cafe La Closerie des Lilas.  Our wanders of Hemingway’s Paris can take us through these wonderful neighborhood streets, to the cafes and gardens where Hemingway and others would find their inspiration.