Hemingway, Ernest

A Farewell to Arms. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929

8vo. Publisher's black cloth with gilt labels to cover and spine; cover label slightly skewed. Blue pictorial dust-jacket designed by Cleonike (Katherine spelling on front flap);  lightly rubbed but without the usual spine fading, the white lettering remains white, tiny closed nicks to spine ends. In a quarter-morocco slipcase.

Connolly 60; Hanneman A8a

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First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed: "To Ludwig Lewisohn with all best wishes. Ernest Hemingway. Paris 1929." With a single pencil mark to each of three pages: 267, 288, 295. Upon his arrival in Paris in 1926, Lewisohn, described as “a middle-aged, German-born ex-journalist and teacher who had turned up in Paris in flight from [his wife]…” by Hugh Ford in Published in Paris (New York: Macmillan, 1975, p. 125), penned a libelous, barely fictionalized account of his marital tribulations: The Case of Mr. Crump. Horace Liveright, his fearful American publisher, rejected the manuscript, which was published in Paris by Titus’s Black Manikin Press. This was the year Hemingway would affect his break with Liveright, whom he blamed for his lack of popular attention, by writing a vicious parody of Liveright’s golden boy Sherwood Anderson. As both were Liveright authors, it is likely that Hemingway had  met Lewisohn prior to his Paris success—Crump quickly sold out its 500 copies and was reissued. As Lewisohn’s reputation grew, the two would publish through many of the same venues, and certainly traveled in the same circles.

The novel gave Hemingway his first substantial popular success, established his reputation, and, said Robert Penn Warren, served as the great romantic alibi for a post-war generation unable to come to terms with life in the old way.