Hemingway, Ernest

8vo.  Original black cloth, front cover gilt-stamped in a geometric design. Original dust jacket bearing blurbs by several writers; the slightest fraying at top of spine, minute hole in front joint of jacket, but a superlative example and wholly unrestored.

Hanneman A3a; Connolly, The Modern Movement 49

First edition,  consisting of 1,335 copies, of Hemingway’s first regularly published book and his first to be published in America. Presentation copy, inscribed by him on the front free endpaper: “To Don Rafael Hernandez, hoping that some day it will be translated into Spanish so that, if he has absolutely nothing else to do, he may read it. From his friend Ernest Hemingway.” (Editions of Hemingway’s stories did not appear in Spanish until 1948 and 1950; this particular title was not among them.)

In Our Time, one of the most original and influential short story collections of twentieth-century literature, consists of sixteen stories alternating with the same number of vignettes or short “chapters” from the Paris 1924 in our time. The other two vignettes appear here as short stories. The dust jacket on this book, containing blurbs or appreciations by seven writers, including Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, and Waldo Frank, is of particular importance.
 
“In Our Time is a sequence of father-haunted short stories about the author’s boyhood in Michigan, counter-pointed by prose poems depicting the horrors of war. In later editions more stories were added but the structure, the growing up of Nick into the macabre world of the war vignettes until they merge, remains unaltered ... The combined effect of these two books [In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises] and the short stories (afterwards to become Men Without Women) was overwhelming. No other writer here recorded stepped so suddenly into fame, or destroyed with such insouciance so many other writers or ways of writing or became such an immediate symbol of an age” (Connolly). Rare in this exceptionally fine condition and inscribed.