The Sun Also Rises.

HEMINGWAY, Ernest.

Item Number: 110743

New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1926.

First edition of the Grosset and Dunlop edition of this cornerstone of modern literature. Octavo, original black cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “In Memory of Heywood Broun from his friend and admirer (he smacked me when I needed it) Ernest Hemingway. Havana 1940.” This copy was inscribed and signed by Hemingway in 1940 upon the death of Heywood Broun (a core member of the Algonquin Round Table). The two writers did not always get along it seems (given Hemingway’s remark here, and Broun’s one time comment about Hemingway, “I do not like the man, yet I must admit that I know no other phony in the whole course of English letter who could write so well about things of which he had not the slightest comprehension”). Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box.

The Sun Also Rises was published by Scribner's in 1926, and a year later in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape under the title Fiesta. Though it initially received mixed reviews, it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work" (Meyers, 1985). The fictional plot depicts a love story between war-wounded and impotent Jake Barnes and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley, but the novel is a roman à clef; the characters are based on real people and the action is based on real events. Hemingway proposes that the "Lost Generation," considered to have been decadent, dissolute and irretrievably damaged by World War I, was resilient and strong. Naturally, themes of love, death, renewal in nature, and the nature of masculinity are heavily investigated. For example, the characters engage in bull-fighting, which is presented as an idealized drama: The matador faces death and, in so doing, creates a moment of existential nothingness, broken when he vanquishes the possibility of death by killing the bull (Stoltzfus, 2005). The Sun Also Rises is seen as an iconic modernist novel for future generations (Mellow, 1992), although it has been emphasized that Hemingway was not philosophically a modernist (Reynolds, 1990). "The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation" (David Laskin).