Ernest Hemingway

First edition, first issue of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms.

• Ernest Hemingway (American).
• New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929.
• Octavo.
• Bound in publisher's black cloth, gold paper title labels to upper board and spine printed in black in pictorial dust jacket.

Hemingway's first best seller! A Farewell to Arms was published on 27 September 1929 in a first printing of 31,050 copies, after serialization in Scribner's Magazine from May to October. Within four weeks sales climbed to 33,000 copies, and a month later, despite the stock market crash, they soared past 50,000. This was the book that made Hemingway financially independent. Hemingway struggled with the ending; in the 2012 new edition of the work, 47 alternate endings were printed with it.