The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. [John Steinbeck].

$6,500.00

Item Number: 145913

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938.

First edition, second printing of this famed Hemingway anthology, containing his only published play as well as the first appearance in book form of The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and Night Before Battle. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth. Association copy, inscribed on the pastedown by Carol Brown Steinbeck to her husband, John Steinbeck, “For John on his birthday. 1940 With love, Carol.” The recipient, Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck remains perhaps best-known for his 1939 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Grapes of Wrath. Throughout the course of his career, Steinbeck authored 33 books including 16 novels, six works of non-fiction, and two collections of short stories, most notably Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), East of Eden (1952), and Of Mice and Men (1937). Steinbeck and Hemingway did not know each other personally, although they had a number of  mutual friends. The only known correspondence between them is a letter sent by Steinbeck, who in 1939 wrote to Hemingway to express his admiration for Hemingway’s writing  technique in “The Butterfly and the Tank.” The letter led to Hemingway and Steinbeck’s now-famous singular meeting in 1944 at Tim Costello’s restaurant in New York, arranged by mutual friends at Hemingway’s request. Steinbeck married three times. He and his first wife Carol Janella Henning Brown married in January 1930 in Los Angeles and were divorced in 1942. Carole traveled with John when he wrote the Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious Battle, and Tortilla Flat, assisting and supporting him in the writing process. Very good in a very good dust jacket. From the library of John Steinbeck. Housed in a custom half morocco and folding chemise slipcase. An exceptional association copy.

The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories contains Hemingway's only full-length play, The Fifth Column, and 49 short stories. Many of the stories included in the collection appear in other collections, including In Our Time, Men Without Women, Winner Take Nothing and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Some of the collection's important stories are rather short. It also includes some longer stories, among them "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"