HEMINGWAY, Ernest.

The Old Man and the Sea.

FIRST British EDITION OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA; Inscribed by Him to Fellow Fisherman and Friend Lew Parsons

London: Johnathan Cape, 1952.

$14,000.00

Out of Stock Item Number: RRB-92811

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First British edition of Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and one of his most famous works, which helped earn him the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. Octavo, original blue cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "To Mr. and Mrs. L. M. Parsons with sincere good wishes from their friend Ernest Hemingway Havana 1953." The recipients, Lew and Marion Parsons, were personal friends of Hemingway's in Havana, Cuba, where Mr. Parsons fished with the author. By the 1950s, Hemingway's health was declining and he seldom ventured into the public, as he had been accustomed to doing in previous decades. As a result, this work, one of the high spots in the Hemingway canon- seldom turns up signed or inscribed. Bookplate of the recipient to the front pastedown and a newspaper clipping to the half-title page and rear pastedown, near fine in a near fine dust jacket with light rubbing. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Most rare and desirable signed and inscribed with a nice association linking two avid fisherman, particularly as this work is based on fishing life in Cuba.

Upon its publication in 1952, The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year and was cited by the Nobel Committee as contributing to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Hemingway in 1954. The novel reinvigorated Hemingway's literary reputation. It initiated a reexamination of his entire body of work. The novel was received with such alacrity, that it restored many readers' confidence in Hemingway's capability as an author. Indeed, the publisher even wrote on an early dust jacket, calling the novel a "new classic," and it was compared by many critics to such revered works as William Faulkner's "The Bear" and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.