Editing A Moveable Feast (section)

==Background==
In November 1956, Hemingway recovered two small steamer trunks containing his notebooks from the 1920s that he had stored in the basement of the [[Hôtel Ritz Paris]] in March 1928. Hemingway's friend and biographer [[A. E. Hotchner]], who was with him in Paris in 1956, recalled the event:<ref name="Hotchner"/>

<blockquote>In 1956, Ernest and I were having lunch at the Hôtel Ritz Paris with [[Charles Ritz]], the hotel’s chairman, when Charley asked if Ernest was aware that a trunk of his was in the basement storage room, left there in 1930. Ernest did not remember storing the trunk but he did recall that in the 1920s [[Louis Vuitton]] had made a special trunk for him. Ernest had wondered what had become of it. Charley had the trunk brought up to his office, and after lunch Ernest opened it. It was filled with a ragtag collection of clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting and fishing paraphernalia, skiing equipment, racing forms, correspondence and, on the bottom, something that elicited a joyful reaction from Ernest: 'The notebooks! So that’s where they were! Enfin!' There were two stacks of lined notebooks like the ones used by schoolchildren in Paris when he lived there in the ’20s. Ernest had filled them with his careful handwriting while sitting in his favorite café, nursing a [[Café au lait|café crème]]. The notebooks described the places, the people, the events of his penurious life.{{cite news| url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20hotchner.html | work=The New York Times | title=Don't Touch 'A Moveable Feast' | first=A. E. | last=Hotchner | date=2009-07-19 | access-date=2015-12-08}}</blockquote>

Hemingway had the notebooks transcribed and began to turn them into the memoir that would eventually become ''A Moveable Feast''.<ref name=HowItWas/> After Hemingway's death in 1961, his widow Mary Hemingway made final copy-edits to the manuscript before its publication in 1964.<ref name="Hotchner"/><ref name=HowItWas/> In a "note" in the 1964 edition of the work, she wrote:

<blockquote>Ernest started writing this book in Cuba in the autumn of 1957, worked on it in Ketchum, Idaho, in the winter of 1958-59, took it with him to Spain ... in April, 1959, and brought it back with him to Cuba and then to Ketchum late that fall. He finished the book in the spring of 1960 in Cuba.... He made some revisions ... in the fall of 1960 in Ketchum. It concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris. - M.H.
<ref>Mary Hemingway's prefatory note to: Hemingway, Ernest - ''A Moveable Feast'', Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1964, p. xi.</ref></blockquote>

Researchers, including literary scholar Gerry Brenner from the University of Montana, examined Hemingway's notes and initial drafts of ''A Moveable Feast'' in the collection the [[John F. Kennedy Library]] in Boston, Massachusetts. In a 1982 paper titled "Are We Going to Hemingway's Feast?", Brenner documented Mary Hemingway's editing process and questioned its validity. He concluded that some of her changes were misguided and that others had questionable motives.<ref>{{cite journal|author=Brenner, Gerry|title=Are We Going To Hemingway's Feast?|journal=American Literature|volume= 54|number=4|date=December 1982|pages=528–544 |doi=10.2307/2926004 |jstor=2926004 }}</ref>  Brenner suggested that the changes contradicted Mary's "hands off" policy as executor.<ref name=HowItWas>{{cite book|last=Hemingway|first=Mary|title=How It Was|location= New York|publisher=Ballantine|year=1977}}</ref> Brenner stated that Mary had changed the order of the chapters in Hemingway's final draft to "preserve chronology" and disrupted the juxtaposition of character sketches of individuals like [[Sylvia Beach]], owner of the bookstore [[Shakespeare and Company (1919–1941)|Shakespeare and Company]], and [[Gertrude Stein]].{{Citation needed|date=December 2015}} Mary reinserted a chapter titled "Birth of a New School", which Hemingway had dropped from his draft.{{Citation needed|date=December 2015}} Brenner's most serious change was that the 1964 book deleted Hemingway's lengthy apology to [[Hadley Richardson|Hadley]], his first wife, which had appeared in various forms in every draft of the book.{{Citation needed|date=December 2015}} Brenner suggested that Mary deleted it because it impugned her role as wife.{{Citation needed|date=July 2024}}

Biographer Hotchner said that he had received a near final draft of ''A Moveable Feast'' in 1959, and that the version Mary Hemingway published was essentially the draft he had read then. In Hotchner's view, the original 1964 publication was the version that Hemingway intended and Mary Hemingway carried out Ernest's intentions.<ref name="Hotchner">{{cite news| url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20hotchner.html | work=The New York Times | title=Don't Touch 'A Moveable Feast' | first=A. E. | last=Hotchner | date=2009-07-19 | access-date=2015-12-08}}</ref> Hotchner described Hemingway's memoir as "a serious work", which Hemingway "certainly intended it for publication", and contended: "Because Mary was busy with matters relating to Ernest’s estate, she had little involvement with the book.... What I read on the plane coming back from Cuba [in 1959] was essentially what was published. There was no extra chapter created by Mary.<ref name="Hotchner"/>