Ernest Hemingway

First edition, first printing of Hemingway’s tragedy of ill-fated love amidst the fighting of World War I.         

• Ernest Hemingway (American).
• New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929.
• No legal disclaimer on [x].
• Bookseller label of the Norman, Remington Company, Baltimore, in gutter of rear pastedown.
• In original full black cloth, gold metallic printed paper labels on front board and spine.
• Includes original unclipped blue pictorial dust jacket designed by Cleonike Damianakes Wilkins (front flap includes “Katherine Barclay”).

“Some people used to say, why is the man so preoccupied and obsessed with war, and now, since 1933 perhaps it is clear why a writer should be interested in the constant, bullying, murderous, slovenly crime of war.” – Hemingway, 1948 introduction to A Farewell to Arms.

Based in part on Hemingway’s own experiences as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, this novel is a disillusioned indictment of war. Heavily influenced by the modernist approach to fiction developed by Gertrude Stein (especially in Three Lives), Hemingway’s prose largely directed the critical judgments of style in the second half of the 20th century. “Hemingway’s words strike you, each one, as if they were pebbles fetched fresh from a brook. They live and shine, each in its place. So one of his pages has the effect of a brook-bottom into which you look down through the flowing water” (Ford Madox Ford, Intro to the Modern Library Edition, 1932).

Introduction to Men At War (1942) by Hemingway [first quote].

Ryan, Dating Hemingway’s Early Style/Parsing Gertrude Stein’s Modernism.

Grissom, Descriptive Bibliography.