Three years later the manuscript was published as "A Moveable Feast." The title apparently was chosen by Hemingway's widow, Mary, who recalled words he had written to a friend in 1950: "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." Hemingway himself may have wanted to delay its publication so long as people mentioned in it were still alive (though such a kindness would have been uncharacteristic of him), but the essentially finished condition of the manuscript and the tone of the preface suggest that he wanted it brought out sooner or later. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." He did not submit the manuscript for publication, and the next year he was dead, a suicide at the age of 61 at his ranch in Idaho. "If the reader prefers," he wrote in a three-paragraph preface, "this book may be regarded as fiction. Sometime in 1960 Ernest Hemingway completed a memoir of his years in Paris from 1921 to 1926. An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.
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