Ernest Hemingway First Editions A Farewell to Arms 1929, A Moveable Feast, Across The River Into The Trees, Old Man and The Sea 1952, Bangkok Rare Books.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms.
Published: Jonathan Cape. London. 1929
Edition: First English Edition.
Binding: Hardback with Dustjacket.
Price: U.S.$1,050

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8vo., First English Edition, original purple cloth, spine gilt but faded, in its decorated dust jacket by Lee Elliott, small chips to corners and edges, and half inch tear to top edge near spine, some soiling showing to lower cover of jacket, pp. 350, a few very light browning spots to endpapers, otherwise a very good copy of an early Hemingway.

Its detail is as marvelous as any yet given. The description of the wounding of the hero in a bombardment is as tremendously effective as anything current. In fact, I seriously question whether this description has been equalled. Its dialogue, possibly over plenteous here and there, is masterly in reproductive realism...... Dust Jacket Blurb

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast.
Jonathan Cape. London. 1964. 8vo., First English Edition, original brown cloth in dust wrapper, extremities of dust wrapper a little rubbed, ink signature on front free endpaper, pp.192, a very good copy. U.S.$345

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SOLD on 25th April 08

'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.' (Ernest Hemingway to a friend, 1950) 

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Hemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and The Sea.
Published: Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. 1952.
Edition: First Edition, Later Printing with "W" on copyright page.
Binding: Blue Cloth. Dust Jacket.
Price: U.S.$345

SOLD on 28th Dec 07

8vo., First Edition, original blind stamped blue cloth, silver lettered spine, in its pictorial book of the month dust wrapper, chipped with small loss to corners & spine, spine faded, pp. 140, internally very good. 

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Hemingway, Ernest. Across The River and Into The Trees
Published: Jonathan Cape. London 1950
Edition: First U.K. Edition.
Binding: Lime Green Cloth. Dust Jacket.
Price: U.S.$465

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8vo., First U.K. Edition, original lime green cloth with centre red motif, in its pictorial dust wrapper, rubbed and chipped at corners and edges, pp. 254, a very good copy.

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	Born:	July 21, 1899 Oak Park, Illinois
	Died:	July 2, 1961 Ketchum, Idaho (aged 62)
	Occupation:	Writer and journalist
	Literary Movement	The Lost Generation
	Genres:	fiction
		1923-1985

Early life

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago (during his early life, the area in which Hemingway was born split from Cicero and became Oak Park in 1902). Hemingway was the first son and the second child born to Clarence Edmonds ("Doctor Ed") and Grace Hall Hemingway. Hemingway's physician father attended the birth of Ernest and blew a horn on his front porch to announce to the neighbors that his wife had borne a boy. The Hemingways lived in a six-bedroom Victorian house built by Ernest's widowed maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, an English immigrant and Civil War veteran who lived with the family. Hemingway was his namesake.

Hemingway's neurotic mother had considerable talent and had once aspired to an opera career and earned money giving voice and music lessons. She was domineering and narrowly religious, mirroring the strict Protestant ethic of Oak Park, which Hemingway later said had "wide lawns and narrow minds.] His mother had wanted to have a set of twins and when this did not happen, she dressed Ernest and his sister Marcelline (eighteen months his senior) in girl clothes and also did their hair in the same style, keeping the image of "twins" in effect. Some biographers have suggested that Grace Hemingway further "feminised" her son in his youth by calling him "Ernestine," but male infants and toddlers of the Victorian middle-class were often dressed as females. Many themes in Hemingway's work point to destructive interactions between male and female sexual partners (cf. "Hills Like White Elephants"), within marital unions (cf. "Now I Lay Me"), and among most other combinations of men and women (cf. The Sun Also Rises); in addition certain posthumously published pieces contain ambiguous treatment of gender roles. However, the connection between Hemingway's depiction of these human conditions and his own early childhood experiences has not been presumptively established.

While his mother hoped that her son would develop an interest in music, Hemingway adopted his father's outdoorsman hobbies of hunting, fishing, and camping in the woods and lakes of northern Michigan. The family owned a house called Windemere on Michigan's Walloon Lake and often spent summers vacationing there. These early experiences in close contact with nature instilled in Hemingway a lifelong passion for outdoor adventure and for living in remote or isolated areas.

Hemingway attended Oak Park and River Forest High School from September, 1913 until graduation in June 1917. He excelled both academically and athletically; he boxed, played football, and displayed particular talent in English classes. His first writing experience was writing for "Trapeze" and "Tabula" (the school's newspaper and original literary magazine, respectively) in his junior year, then serving as editor in his senior year. He sometimes wrote under the pen name Ring Lardner Jr., a nod to his literary hero Ring Lardner.

After high school, Hemingway did not want to go to college. Instead, at age eighteen, he began his writing career as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star. Although he worked at the newspaper for only six months (October 17, 1917-April 30, 1918), throughout his lifetime he used the guidance of the Star's style guide as a foundation for his writing style: "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative." In honor of the centennial year of Hemingway's birth (1899), The Star named Hemingway its top reporter of the last hundred years.

World War I

Hemingway left his reporting job after only a few months, and, against his father's wishes, tried to join the United States Army to see action in World War I. He supposedly failed the medical examination due to poor vision, and instead joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps. En route to the Italian front, he stopped in Paris, which was under constant bombardment from German artillery. Instead of staying in the relative safety of the Hotel Florida, Hemingway tried to get as close to combat as possible.

Soon after arriving on the Italian Front Hemingway witnessed the brutalities of war. On his first day on duty, an ammunition factory near Milan blew up. Hemingway had to pick up the human, primarily female, remains. This first encounter with death left him shaken.

The soldiers he met later did not lighten the horror. One of them, Eric Dorman-Smith, entertained Hemingway with a line from Part Two of Shakespeare's Henry IV: "By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death...and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next." (Hemingway, for his part, would quote this line in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, one of his famous short stories set in Africa.) To another soldier, Hemingway once said, "You are troppo vecchio [It. too old] for this war, pop." The 50-year old soldier replied, "I can die as well as any man."

On 8 July 1918, Hemingway was wounded delivering supplies to soldiers, which ended his career as an ambulance driver. He was hit by an Austrian trench mortar shell that left fragments in his legs, and was also hit by a burst of machine-gun fire. He was later awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valor (medaglia d'argento) from the Italian government for dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety in spite of his own injuries. Hemingway survived by plugging his wounds with cigarette butts, thereby staunching the blood flow.

Hemingway worked in a Milan hospital run by the American Red Cross. With very little in the way of entertainment, he often drank heavily and read newspapers to pass the time. Here he met Sister Agnes von Kurowsky of Washington, D.C., one of eighteen nurses attending groups of four patients each. She was more than six years older than he. Hemingway fell in love with her, but their relationship did not survive his return to the United States; instead of following Hemingway to America, as originally planned, she became romantically involved with an Italian officer. This left an indelible mark on his psyche, and provided inspiration for, and was fictionalized in, one of his early novels, A Farewell to Arms. Later in life, Hemingway identified even more closely with the protagonist of that novel, claiming (falsely) to have attained the rank of lieutenant in the Italian army and to have fought in three battles.

First novels and other early works

After the war, Hemingway returned to Oak Park. Driven from the United States in part due to prohibition, in 1920, he moved to an apartment on 1599 Bathurst Street, now known as the Hemingway, in the Humewood-Cedarvale neighborhood in Toronto, Ontario. During his stay, he found a job with the Toronto Star newspaper. He worked as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign correspondent. Hemingway befriended fellow Star reporter Morley Callaghan. Callaghan had begun writing short stories at this time; he showed them to Hemingway, who praised them as fine work. They would later be reunited in Paris.

For a short time from 1920 to 1921, Hemingway lived on the near north side of Chicago working for a small newspaper. In 1921, Hemingway married his first wife, Hadley Richardson. In September, he moved to a cramped fourth floor apartment (3rd floor by Chicago building standard) at 1239 North Dearborn in a run-down section of Chicago's near north side. The building still stands with a plaque on the front of it calling it "the Hemingway Apartment." Hadley found it dark and depressing, but in December, 1921, the Hemingways left Chicago and Oak Park, never to live there again, and moved abroad.

At the advice of Sherwood Anderson, they settled in Paris, where Hemingway covered the Greco-Turkish War for the Star. After Hemingway's return to Paris, Anderson gave him a letter of introduction to Gertrude Stein. She became his mentor and introduced him to the "Parisian Modern Movement" then ongoing in the Montparnasse Quarter; this was the beginning of the American expatriate circle that became known as the "Lost Generation", a term popularized by Hemingway in the epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises, and his memoir, A Moveable Feast. His other influential mentor was Ezra Pound, the founder of imagism. Hemingway later said of this eclectic group, "Ezra was right half the time, and when he was wrong, he was so wrong you were never in any doubt about it. Gertrude was always right."] The group often frequented Sylvia Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare & Co., at 12 Rue de l'Odéon. After the 1922 publication and American banning of colleague James Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway used Toronto-based friends to smuggle copies of the novel into the United States. His own first book, called Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), was published in Paris by Robert McAlmon. In the same year, during a brief return to Toronto, Hemingway's first son was born. He asked Gertrude Stein to be John's godmother. Busy supporting a family, he became bored with the Toronto Star and resigned on January 1, 1924.

Hemingway's American literary debut came with the publication of the short story cycle In Our Time (1925). The vignettes that now constitute the interchapters of the American version were initially published in Europe as in our time (1924). This work was important for Hemingway, reaffirming to him that his minimalist style could be accepted by the literary community. "Big Two-Hearted River" is the collection's best-known story.

In April 1925, two weeks after the publication of The Great Gatsby, Hemingway met F. Scott Ftzgerald at the Dingo Bar. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were at first close friends, often drinking and talking together. They frequently exchanged manuscripts, and Fitzgerald tried to do much to advance Hemingway's career and the publication of his first collections of stories, although the relationship later cooled and became more competitive. Fitzgerald's wife Zelda, however, disliked Hemingway from the start. Openly describing him as "bogus" and "phoney as a rubber cheque" and asserting that his macho persona was a facade, she became irrationally convinced that Hemingway was homosexual and accused her husband of having an affair with him.