“AS SHARP AS SPLINTERS OF GLASS”: FIRST EDITION OF HEMINGWAY’S MEN WITHOUT WOMEN

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. Men Without Women. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927. Octavo, original black cloth, gold paper labels, top edge orange, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box. $15,000.

First edition, first issue, of Hemingway’s famed collection of 14 stories, in unrestored first-issue dust jacket. The copy of novelist Glenway Westcott and his partner Monroe Wheeler, director of publications at MoMA, with their bookplate and blindstamp.

The 14 stories in this early collection "are as clear and crisp and perfectly shaped as icicles, as sharp as splinters of glass. It is impossible to read them without realizing that seldom if ever before has a writer been able to cut so deeply into life" (Time). Included are "The Killers," "Ten Indians," "Today is Friday" and "Hills Like White Elephants." In first-issue dust jacket, with plain orange bands across the front, and two errors on the front inner flap. Hanneman A7a. Bruccoli & Clark I:178. Grissom A.7.1.a. Small bookseller ticket. With the bookplate and blindstamp of novelist Glenway Westcott and his partner, Monroe Wheeler. Wescott, a novelist, poet, and essayist, lived in Germany and France during the Interwar period and was quickly absorbed into the Shakespeare and Company literary circle. Hemingway took an almost immediate dislike to Wescott, considering his writing "unsound" and his quasi-English accent affected. Wescott the model for the character Robert Prentiss in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. After meeting Prentiss, Hemingway's narrator, Jake Barnes, confesses, "I just thought perhaps I was going to throw up." (The character was originally named Robert Prescott, but the publisher made Hemingway change it because the reference to Wescott was too obvious.) In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Gertrude Stein wrote, "There was also Glenway Wescott but Glenway Wescott at no time interested Gertrude Stein. He has a certain syrup but it does not pour." Wescott was openly gay in a time when that was uncommon; his longtime partner, Monroe Wheeler, ran the press Harrison of Paris along with Barbara Harrison Westcott (Glenway's sister-in-law).

Book fine, unrestored dust jacket with shallow chipping to ends of mildly toned spine. An exceptional copy with an intriguing association.