To say that my judgments changed in the ensuing four decades is understatement.

Even though I made no effort to emulate it, I knew it was unique in American literature and believed that it was uniquely important. I had begun to have second thoughts about most of Hemingway's novels and deep reservations about his strutting literary persona, but the best of his short stories still seemed to me small masterpieces, and like virtually every young American at that time I was in thrall to Hemingway's famous prose style. I remember very well its publication in 1964, first in Life magazine - which still did things like that in those lost days - and then as a book.

They still do it enjoys steady sales and is often taught in high school and college. Reviewers recognized it immediately as a valuable addition to its author's literary legacy, and readers gobbled it up. 'A Moveable Feast' is the one notable exception. It was the first of many posthumous publications that Mary Hemingway permitted - or, more accurately, actively encouraged - almost none of which did anything to enhance her husband's reputation, though presumably they enhanced the Hemingway estate's exchequer. Three years later the manuscript was published as 'A Moveable Feast.' The title apparently was chosen by Hemingway's widow, Mary, who recalled words he had written to a friend in 1950: 'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.' Hemingway himself may have wanted to delay its publication so long as people mentioned in it were still alive (though such a kindness would have been uncharacteristic of him), but the essentially finished condition of the manuscript and the tone of the preface suggest that he wanted it brought out sooner or later. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.' He did not submit the manuscript for publication, and the next year he was dead, a suicide at the age of 61 at his ranch in Idaho. 'If the reader prefers,' he wrote in a three-paragraph preface, 'this book may be regarded as fiction. Sometime in 1960 Ernest Hemingway completed a memoir of his years in Paris from 1921 to 1926. An occasional series in which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.

Books like a moveable feast