Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions.

First edition of Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions; From the collection of young Ernest Hemingway with his ownership inscriptions to each volume

Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions.

HARRIS, Frank. [Ernest Hemingway].

$25,000.00

Item Number: 141864

New York: Printed and Published by the Author, 1918.

First edition of Shaw’s appreciation of Wilde. Octavo, original publisher’s cloth. From the library of young Ernest Hemingway with his ownership name and address to the pastedown of each volume, “Ernest Hemingway Windemere Walloon Lake Michigan” and additional ownership name to volume one, “Hemingway.” Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, an affluent suburb just west of Chicago about which resident Frank Lloyd Wright said, “So many churches for so many good people to go to.” He was the second child of Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, a physician, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician. Each summer the family traveled to Windemere, a cottage designed by Hemingway’s mother, on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan. There young Ernest joined his father and learned to hunt, fish, and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan, early experiences that instilled a life-long passion for outdoor adventure and living in remote or isolated areas. Hemingway spent every summer at Windemere (from 1900 – 1920, save 1918) and he and his first wife, Hadley, honeymooned in the cottage in 1921. Hemingway returned to the cottage only once more in his life, in the early 1950s, despite the fact that his mother willed it to him upon her death. Hemingway used the northern Michigan setting in a number of his works, most featuring his character Nick Adams. The cottage appears in “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife,” “Ten Indians,” “The Indians Moved Away,” “The Last Good Country,” and “Wedding Day.” In very good condition, the books were heavily read by young Hemingway. From the library of Ernest Hemingway by way of Hadley Hemingway. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box made by the Harcourt Bindery. Very rare and highly desirable.

Wilde’s “theme is not, as is often supposed, art’s divorce from life, but its inescapable arraignment by experience. His creative works almost always end in unmasking. The hand that adjusts the green carnation suddenly shakes an admonitory finger. While the ultimate virtue in Wilde’s essays is in make-believe, the denouement of his dramas and narratives is that masks have to go. We must acknowledge what we are. Wilde at least was keen to do so. Though he offered himself as the apostle of pleasure, his created world contains much pain” (Ellmann, xvi).

Add to cart Ask a Question SHIPPING & GUARANTEE