“THE PRETENTIOUS FAKING BASTARDS…”: RARE FIRST EDITION OF HEMINGWAY’S FIRST NOVEL

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. The Torrents of Spring. A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926. Octavo, original dark green cloth, original dust jacket.

Rare first edition of Hemingway’s satiric first novel, in original first-issue dust jacket.

Hemingway’s first novel and third published book was preceded by Three Stories and Ten Poems (Paris, 1923) and the collection of stories In Our Time (London, 1924; New York, Boni and Liveright, 1925). “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, 317-320). Hemingway’s strategy was successful: Boni and Liveright refused to publish the book, and Scribner’s published Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises (May and October, 1926) and all of his future books as well. The first printing consisted of only 1250 copies. In first-issue dust jacket, listing nine books in two columns on the back panel and with an undated ad for Scribner’s Magazine on the inside back flap. Hanneman A4a. Grissom A.4.1.a.

A few leaves with expert paper restoration to margins, front endpapers and dust jacket expertly restored.