Writing in Private

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”

So said Ernest Hemingway when accepting the Nobel Prize in 1954. And yet, a few decades earlier (according to his recollections in A Moveable Feast) he wrote many of his short stories in public—surrounded by (and occasionally taking inspiration from) the strangers who came and went as he sat in Parisian cafés.

Here’s his account of settling down to work in a café on the Place St.-Michel:

It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, a...