Death in the Afternoon.

“Any man's life, told truly, is a novel": First Edition of Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon; Wallace Stegner's copy with his ownership signature

Death in the Afternoon.

HEMINGWAY, Ernest.

Item Number: 98378

Charles Scribner's Sons: New York, 1932.

First edition of Hemingway’s early work on bullfighting. Octavo, original cloth, frontispiece by Juan Gris. Wallace Stegner’s copy, with his signature to the front free endpaper. Often referred to as “The Dean of Western Writers”, Wallace Stegner taught at both Harvard and Stanford University where he founded the creative writing program; his students included Sandra Day O’Connor, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, and Larry McMurtry. Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose won him the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and established him as major literary figure. The story of a wheelchair-using historian, Angle of Repose relays the saga of the protagonist’s frontier-era ancestors. Hemingway, too, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1940 triumph For Whom the Bell Tolls, also a historical drama; retelling the story of a young American in the International Brigades attached to a republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Jacket illustration by Roberto Domingo. From the library of Wallace Stegner. An excellent association linking these two great American novelists and Pulitzer Prize-winning writers.

Published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon is Hemingway's masterwork on the magnificence of the art of bull-fighting. John Dos Passos praised the book as "an absolute model for how that sort of thing ought to be done," and a contemporary review in The New York Herald Tribune described it as "full of the vigor and forthrightness of the author's personality, his humor, his strong opinions—and language… In short, it is the essence of Hemingway" (Mellow, 415).

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