23 “So We Beat On, Boats Against The Current, Borne Back Ceaselessly Into The Past” 27FITZGERALD, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York, 1925. Octavo, original blue-green cloth, custom clamshell box. $12,800 First edition of this landmark of 20th-century fiction. Noted critic Cyril Connolly called Gatsby one of the half dozen best American novels: “Gatsby remains a prose poem of delight and sadness which has by now introduced two generations to the romance of America, as Huckleberry Finn and Leaves of Grass introduced those before it” (48). First printing, with “sick in tired” on page 205 and all other first issue points. Without extremely rare original dust jacket. Bruccoli A11.1.a. A fine copy, scarce in this condition. “It Is Very Beautiful To Have A Book Like This Last One Come Out Because Then You Can See Who Really Likes What You Write” 26HEMINGWAY, Ernest. Unfinished, unsigned autograph draft of a letter. Piggott, Arkansas, December 25, [1930, 1932, or 1934]. One leaf of gray wove paper, 6-1/4 by 8-1/4 inches, penned on both sides for two pages. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $12,500 Unfinished, unpublished autograph two-page draft of an unsent and unsigned letter from Hemingway to Fanny Butcher, referencing the famous lost manuscripts that his first wife Hadley had left in a suitcase stolen after boarding a train to visit him in the early 1920s and discusses writing, criticism and critics. The letter reads, in part: “Dear Miss Butcher... I wrote a long one that was lost when all my mss was stolen in a suitcase my wife was bringing down to Lausanne... There is an entirely new school of criticism (with new reasons for disliking the same things) but if you can write and will write they can prove you are no good by any system of criticism they invent and it will not hurt your stuff if it is worth anything...” Fanny Butcher, was a writer and critic for the Chicago Tribune for 40 years, and first met Hemingway in 1929 in Paris. Faint horizontal fold line. Fine condition.
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