The title turned out fine in the end, of course, but an old document recently unearthed from the files at Charles Scribner's Sons shows that Ernest Hemingway had a hard time coming up with something to call his memoir of life in Paris in the 1920s. In fact, he considered, and then mercifully discarded, dozens of titles for the book that became "A Moveable Feast." They included "The Parts Nobody Knows," "To Love and Write Well," "How Different It Was" and the even less inspired "With Due Respect."
A list of the rejected titles as Hemingway scribbled them down on a pad on April 18, 1961, less than three months before he died, is in the 40th-anniversary issue of The Paris Review.Some authors settle on a title before they begin a book, but Hemingway apparently liked to wait until he was finished and then scrawl out a slew of possibilities. Many of his books had working titles that were tossed out. "The Sun Also Rises" was at one point "The Lost Generation," and "A Farewell to Arms" was "As Others Are."
How did "A Moveable Feast," which doesn't even appear on the list of possible titles, end up as the title?
According to The Paris Review, Hemingway settled on "The Eye and the Ear" before he died. But his widow, Mary, and Scribner's, rejected that title, deciding instead to take "A Moveable Feast" from another manuscript entirely.