"REAL WAR IS NEVER LIKE PAPER WAR": VERY RARE FIRST PRINTINGS OF VOYAGE TO VICTORY, 1944

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. Voyage to Victory. An Eye-Witness Report of the Battle for a Normandy Beachhead. (New York): Collier's—The National Weekly, 1944. Octavo, stapled, original paper wrappers original dust jacket; pp.12. Housed in custom chemise and three-quarter morocco slipcase. $75,000.

Very rare first separate printing of Hemingway's account of "a battle for a Normandy beachhead" in 1944, certainly one of the rarest items in any Hemingway collection.

Although Hemingway was loathe to have his journalistic pieces placed alongside his fiction ("If you have made your living as a newspaperman, learning your trade, writing against deadlines, writing to make stuff timely rather than permanent, no one has any right to dig this stuff up and use it against the stuff you have written to write the best you can"), his reportorial work clearly was a great influence on his fiction, with episodes and sometimes language being used in later fiction. His work for Colliers in 1944 was at a time when his marriage to Martha Gellhorn was unraveling in part because of the amount of time she was spending in Europe reporting from the front. "From his hospital bed, where he had been confined for five days by a head wound suffered in a London automobile accident, Collier's correspondent Ernest Hemingway boarded an attack transport on the eve of D-Day—despite the protests of his doctors. This is a report of what he saw the next morning, while taking part in the bloody assault on a Normandy beach."

As Hemingway notes in the prologue: "Real war is never like paper war, nor do accounts of it read much like the way it looks. But if you want to know how it was in an LCV(P) on D-Day when we took Fox Green beach and Easy Red beach on the sixth of June, 1944, then this is as near as I can come to it." "The first of six dispatches which Hemingway sent from England and France during World War II" (Hanneman C330), "Voyage to Victory" was released by Collier's in this very fragile separate printing as a promotional piece. Hanneman A21, C330. Grissom C432.

Two tiny closed tears to dust jacket front panel. A beautiful copy, most rare.