Read Streeter Gail Farrelly asked recently whether  authors should get a chance for a do-over. Well, Ernest Hemingway is getting the chance for an unusual, posthumous do-over: Scribner's release of a revised version of A Moveable Feast.

The book, a memoir of Paris' ex-pat society after World War I, has always had a ghostly quality. It was assembled from Hemingway's writings after he committed suicide in 1961, even though he did not consider the works finished. In a story about the re-release, the New York Times notes that he wrote a letter to his publisher, Charles Scribner, that “it is not to be published the way it is and it has no end.”

The differing versions highlight the problem of having an editor with a personal stake in the writings, the Times article points out. Hemingway's fourth wife edited the original, creating a final chapter on the dissolution of his first marriage and the start of his relationship with Pauline Pfeiffer (pictured here). Now Seán Hemingway, a grandson of Hemingway and Pauline, has re-edited the material. He removed part of that chapter and placed it in an appendix, while adding passages from Hemingway’s manuscript that Seán believes paint his grandmother in a more sympathetic light.

If only Papa could get his hands on the material himself.