The Old Man and the Sea.

"But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated": First Edition of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; Inscribed by Him to Close Friends

The Old Man and the Sea.

HEMINGWAY, Ernest.

Item Number: 107827

New York: Charles Scribner's & Sons, 1952.

First edition of Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and one of his most famous works. Octavo, original blue cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “For Mr. and Mrs. Clifford Hood, with all the best wishes from an old stockholder, Ernest Hemingway, Havana 1953.” The recipient, Clifford Hood, was a close friend and fishing buddy of Hemingway and was the CEO for the United States Steel Corporation. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket with light rubbing and wear. The back of dust jacket looks to have small blood stain on it, which was reportedly from a cut on Ernest’s finger, which was still bleeding when he signed the book. Photograph of Hemingway by Lee Samuels. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Signed first editions of this work are scarce, association copies of this magnitude are rare.

Upon its publication in 1952 by Charles Scribner's Sons, 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.

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