ONE OF THE MOST SOUGHT-AFTER OF MODERN FIRSTS, RARE FIRST EDITION PRESENTATION COPY OF THE SUN ALSO RISES,WARMLY INSCRIBED BY HEMINGWAY IN THE WINTER OF 1927

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926. Octavo, original black cloth with gold paper labels, uncut. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

First edition, second issue, of one of Hemingway’s rarest and greatest novels, one of the most sought-after highpoints in American literature, a rare presentation copy inscribed by Hemingway while on a skiing vacation in Switzerland with his soon-to-be second wife, inscribed by Hemingway in French and English “A Cricri du Boisrouvray hommage a l’Americaine from her friend Ernest Hemingway Gstaad Hiver 1927.”

An immediate success, The Sun Also Rises was published on October 22, 1926 in a first printing of only 5090 copies. A second printing of 2000 copies was ordered in November, and by mid-December, both the first and second printings had sold out. By 1961 it was estimated that the novel had sold over one million copies. “The emergence of Hemingway… gave the Modern Movement one of its few men of action… [In The Sun Also Rises] the post-war disillusion and the post-war liberation are united in the physical enjoyment of living and the pains of love. Perhaps that is what expatriation was about… No other writer 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 50). Second issue, with corrected “stopped” on page 181, and the Ecclesiastes quotation present on page [viii]. Hanneman 6A. A rare presentation copy from the estate of Bolivian mining heiress Countess du Boisrouvray. At the time of this inscription Hemingway and journalist Pauline Pfeiffer, soon to be his second wife, had traveled to Switzerland in early 1927 with “the MacLeishes for an extended skiing vacation.” It was there, at the Hotel Rossli in Gstaad, that “he learned that [his first wife] Hadley had been granted a divorce in Paris on January 27” (Lynn, 360). Christine “Cri Cri” du Boisrouvray is said to have also skied in Gstaad the year before the date of this inscription, when Hemingway met Harry Crosby of the Black Sun Press.

Text fine, original cloth about-fine, with only lightest toning to gilt labels on front board and spine. A memorable presentation copy in about-fine condition.