Hemingway, Ernest

4to, FIRST EDITION, NUMBER 137 of 170 COPIES, on Rives handmade paper, woodcut frontispiece portrait by Henry Strater, original printed tan boards, edges uncut, the usual browning to endpapers, very slightly bumped at head and foot of spine, collector's bookplate

Hanneman A2A

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing, where appropriate.
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AN USUALLY FINE COPY OF HEMINGWAY'S SECOND PUBLISHED WORK, AND THE FINAL TITLE IN THE SERIES OF SIX WORKS EDITED BY EZRA POUND AT THE THREE MOUNTAINS PRESS. 

Having met Hemingway in February 1922, Pound quickly became one of the young author's more influential mentors. When Pound devised his "Inquest into the state of contemporary English prose", he selected Hemingway as one of the six writers whose work would be issued under his "editorial direction" before Hemingway had apparently even settled on a title: a broadside printed to announce the series lists his contribution as "BLANK by Ernest M. Hemingway". "Pound", writes Jeffrey Meyers in his biography of Hemingway, was "the first significant writer to recognise Hemingway's talent [and] did everything possible to help him achieve success" (Hemingway: A Biography (1985), p.73).

The first six chapters of in our time had first been published in The Little Review in the Spring 1923 issue. The twelve additional sketches were written in "a concentrated spurt of creativity" (ibid, p.141) over the last weeks of the same summer. Compiled in one slim volume issued in only 170 copies, the work's originality quickly brought Hemingway to significant critical attention. 

Contemporary reviews included that of Marjorie Reid for the Transatlantic Review (the same April 1924 issue in which the first excerpt of what would become Joyce's Finnegan's Wake was published); Reid's review read: "[Hemingway] projects the moments when life is condensed and clean-cut and significant, presenting them in minute narratives that eliminate every useless word. Each tale is much longer that the measure of its lines..."