Hemingway’s genius for nonfiction is again underscored in A Moveable Feast, a memoir first published posthumously in 1964 by his fourth wife Mary, and then controversially re-edited and re-released in this “restored edition,” by his grandson Sean. Whether you are fascinated or repulsed (or a little of both!) by bullfighting or big game hunting, there are probably no better chronicles of these pursuits than, respectively, Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa. His roots as a skilled journalist made manifest the staccato bursts of short sentences that became his signature style, and without a doubt served as the basis for his ability to witness people and events and distill it all into captivating prose. Scott Fitzgerald spring to mind-such an accolade should probably be qualified by “among the greatest.” But I would still put Hemingway in first place, if only because his style was so unique and his reach so vast: he not only penned a handful of truly great novels- The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls-but also dozens of magnificent short stories, including “Hills Like White Elephants,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” plus the semi-autobiographical “Nick Adams” tales, as well as the striking vignettes inserted between the stories in the published collections. Because it is probably unfair to declare one author greater than another of their contemporaries when their styles and methods varied so much-William Faulkner and F. Arguably, Ernest Hemingway was the greatest American writer of the twentieth century.

A moveable feast book cover