There is a mystery about these memoirs, hence their author. Harold Stearns, “splendidly endowed and so promising” (William Shirer’s opinion was typical), was once well known as a New York writer and intellectual. He was even better known as editor of an indictment, full of prominent contributors, called Civilization in the United States (1922)—also for delivering the manuscript of this book to the publisher and immediately boarding the Berengaria on the Fourth of July, 1921, in the vanguard of the American exodus to Paris, where he spent thirteen years. Next he appears as a standard piece of Left Bank scenery—the ghost of Greenwich Village, drunk, shabby, broke, alone. A. J. Liebling pegged him as the non-writing writer “hanging on the bar like a crook-handled cane.” Dozing at the Dome, he was wide open to “There lies civilization in the United States.” Stearns had been editor of The Dial, had written a couple of books, and would write three more on his repatriation. Today he is most often recalled under another name—as encountered early in The Sun Also Risesby Jake Barnes. Jake says he “walked past the sad tables of the Rotonde to the Select . . . and outside, alone, sat Harvey Stone. He had a pile of saucers in front of him, and he needed a shave.” (He was called Harold Stearns in the book until Hemingway, at Fitzgerald’s urging, changed it at the last minute in galleys.) Harvey tells Jake he hasn’t eaten in five