James Baldwin was beginning to be recognized as the most brilliant black writer of his generation when his first book of essays, Notes of a Native Son, established his reputation in 1955. No one was more pleased by the book’s reception than Baldwin’s high school friend Sol Stein. A rising New York editor, novelist, and playwright, Stein had suggested that Baldwin do the book and coaxed his old friend through the long and...

Hemingway's classic memoir of Paris in the 1920's is filled with irreverent portraits of other expatriate luminaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein.