Some inscriptions reveal more in their modesty than a page of praise ever could. On the front free endpaper of a 1940 first edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway wrote to his cousin Ruth and her husband Malcolm Lowry: “For Ruth and Malcolm, from their child producing house guest who is very fond of them.” Then, with the self-deprecation of a man far more at ease behind a typewriter than in a dedication, he added, “what a lousy dedication when there is so much to say.” It is a rare and unguarded glimpse of the private Hemingway, and it opens a window onto one of the most human chapters of his life.
The Lowry home in Kansas City was one of the few places where Ernest Hemingway could simply be family. Ruth White Lowry (1884 to 1974) was a first cousin of the author’s mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, which made Ernest her first cousin once removed. The families were close enough that he called her, plainly, “Cousin Ruth.” When Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, returned from Paris to the United States in 1928, they came to Kansas City for the birth of their first son, Patrick, delivered at St. Mary’s Hospital that June. They stayed with the Lowrys both before and after the birth. Pauline returned to the same house three years later, in November 1931, for the arrival of their second son, Gregory, while Ernest moved back and forth between Kansas City and Key West during the final stages of Death in the Afternoon.
Far from the expatriate glamour of Europe and the mounting pressure of his fame, the Lowry household gave Hemingway something rarer than either: ordinary domestic calm. That is the quiet joke behind the inscription. To the cousin whose home had twice welcomed his growing family, the most celebrated novelist of his generation signed himself, simply, their “child producing house guest.”
Published in 1940, For Whom the Bell Tolls was Hemingway’s third great novel and, for many readers, his finest. Drawn from his firsthand experience of the Spanish Civil War, it is a story of love, duty, and the futility of war, and it confirmed his standing at the very center of twentieth-century literature. Association copies inscribed to the Lowry family are among the most significant in all of Hemingway collecting, uniting the author’s public identity as a literary titan with the private Midwestern family life that steadied him.
We are pleased to offer this remarkable association copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls at Raptis Rare Books on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, and online at RaptisRareBooks.com.
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View all of the first editions, documents and photographs signed and written by Ernest Hemingway currently in our collection here.
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