The Torrents of Spring.

HEMINGWAY, Ernest.

Item Number: 99358

New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926.

First edition of Hemingway’s first novel, one of 1250 printed. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper to his nephews, “To Cliff and Dudley, with much affection, Ernest.” The recipients were Clifford and Dudley Bragdon, the nephews of Hadley Richardson, Hemingway’s first wife. Near fine in a very good dust jacket with some of the usual wear to the extremities. With the signature of the recipient, “Clifford R. Bragdon Paris 1927.” Housed in a custom clamshell and chemise case. Association copies of Hemingway’s first novel seldom appear in the marketplace.

Ernest Hemingway’s first novel and third published book was preceded by Three Stories and Ten Poems and the collection of stories In Our Time. “Hemingway was planning a carefully engineered campaign for breaking his contract with Boni and Liveright and maneuvering to place his novel [The Sun Also Rises] with Scribner’s. The vehicle was… [the] satirical novel, The Torrents of Spring, which was clearly calculated to cause problems with his publisher, since it was a deliberate parody of Sherwood Anderson [Boni and Liveright’s best-selling author]. Boni and Liveright had the option on his next three books, one of which had to be a novel. If, however, they turned down the book that Hemingway submitted next, he was free of his obligations to the publisher and could go elsewhere.” Hemingway wrote Ezra Pound that he “had written ‘a funny book’… It was a satire on America, he claimed, ‘Probably unprintable but funny as hell… Wrote it to destroy Sherwood [Anderson] and various others… It’s first really adult thing have done. Jesus Christ it is funny… It is a regular novel only it shows up all the fakes of Anderson, Gertrude [Stein], [Sinclair] Lewis, [Willa] Cather, Hergo [Joseph Hergesheimer] and all the rest of the pretentious faking bastards… I don’t see how Sherwood will ever be able to write again” (Mellow, Hemingway).