The Paris Pilgrims

Plot

This spirited, often startling novel entangles a brash young Ernest Hemingway intimately in the lives of the artists and exiles who haunted bohemian Paris in the early 1920s. He drinks with James Joyce, discusses poetry with Gertrude Stein, argues politics with a Ezra Pound, and explores sexual possibilities with a bewitching Djuna Barnes. He strides into the lives of the "ambisexual" dilettante Robert McAlmon; of the eccentric (and resentful) Alice B. Toklas, a sympathetic Sylvia Beach, and a bemused Nora Joyce. They tell some of Hemingway's story, as does his loyal wife, Hadley, who strives both to comprehend and understand. Out of the hushed confidences, sexual intrigues, drunken confessionals, and casual slanders emerges not just Hemingway the war correspondent, sportsman, bullfighting aficionado, and eminent writer being enigmatically born, but also Hemingway as you've never seen him before: from inside the eyes of his lovers, enemies, mentors, and friends.