Ernest Hemingway was twenty-two years old when he arrived in Paris in late December 1921. He had taken part in World War I as a volunteer ambulance driver, and after his experiences in Europe during the war he found life in the United States provincial and restrictive. He was part of a new generation of expatriates who did not have the cosmopolitan backgrounds of earlier expatriates such as Henry James and Edith Wharton. Like Hemingway, many of the young writers and artists who migrated to Paris in the twenties had been exposed to Europe during the war, and following the war a European economic recession, which caused the rate of exchange to favor the American dollar, brought many of these young Americans to France. However, for a young writer the economic enticement was secondary to the knowledge that some of the leading experimental writers of the day--James Joyce, Ezra...