ONE OF THE MOST SOUGHT-AFTER OF MODERN FIRSTS: FIRST ISSUE OF THE SUN ALSO RISES, IN THE EXCEPTIONALLY RARE DUST JACKET

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

First edition, first issue, of one of Hemingway’s rarest and greatest novels, a lovely copy in the scarce original first-issue dust jacket.

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). First issue (with “stopped” spelled incorrectly on page 181, line 26, and the quote from Ecclesiastes regarding vanity present on page [viii]). In very rare first-issue dust jacket, with the error “In Our Times” instead of “In Our Time” on front panel. This is one of the two rarest and most desirable dust jackets in 20th-century American literature (the other being Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby). The dust jacket “was printed in gold, black, and tan, with a gold apple on either side of the title and beneath it the figure of a drowsing woman clothed in the style of Greek antiquity. A Pan’s pipe lay near her sandaled foot and another gold apple rested in the palm of her left hand. At the bottom, Hemingway was identified as the author of In Our Times [sic] and The Torrents of Spring” (Lynn, 360). Hanneman 6A.

One page of text (page 23) with light soiling, book near-fine. Rare original dust jacket extremely good with minor expert restoration to spine ends and corners only. A lovely copy of this highspot of American literature.