A Moveable Feast
The clearest comparison: two writers remembering youth, little money, and artistic ambition in 1920s Paris.
Read our takeMemoirs of Montparnasse
John Glassco
Memoirs of Montparnasse
by John Glassco
John Glassco’s lively memoir of arriving in Paris at nineteen and spending the end of the 1920s among Montparnasse writers, artists, rented rooms, and late nights.
- 1970
- 296
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeIn 1928, John Glassco left Montreal for Paris with his friend Graeme Taylor and tried to build a life around writing, drinking, sex, and the freedom of being far from home. The memoir follows their years in Montparnasse and the literary people they met there. Glassco wrote with more comic recklessness than Hemingway, and he also reshaped parts of the experience when remembering it decades later.
What the memoir covers
Glassco arrives in Paris as a nineteen-year-old would-be poet and moves through cheap rooms, cafés, parties, friendships, love affairs, and encounters with the expatriate literary world. The book is less a formal history of Montparnasse than a young writer’s account of trying to live freely inside it.
The experience ends when his money and health fail. Because Glassco wrote the book decades later and fictionalized parts of the story, it should be read as a vivid memoir rather than a complete historical record.
Why we recommend it
Another young writer in 1920s Paris
It shares A Moveable Feast’s rented rooms, literary ambitions, café life, and remembered youth.
A less disciplined version of the same dream
Glassco is more openly reckless, sexual, and comic than Hemingway.
Montparnasse near the end of the decade
Glassco arrived in 1928, after the earliest Lost Generation years Hemingway remembers.
What this book explores
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Oxford University Press
- 1970
- Paperback
- NYRB Classics
- 2007
- 9781590171844
Reader reviews
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Memoirs of Montparnasse, its publication, and its place in literary history.
1Memoirs of Montparnasse
MemoirJohn Glassco, 1970Used forThe primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
i
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