The Sun Also Rises.

HEMINGWAY, Ernest. [Maxwell Perkins].

Item Number: 126342

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926.

First edition, first printing of Hemingway’s first major novel with the misprint “stoppped” on page 181 line 26. Octavo, original black cloth with bronze paper labels to the spine and front panel. Accompanied by a typed letter signed by American editor Maxwell Perkins on Charles Scribner’s Sons letterhead. Best remembered for discovering authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and James Jones, Maxwell Perkins met Hemingway through F. Scott Fitzgerald after facilitating the publication of Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise. It was Perkins who fought for the publication of Hemingway’s first major novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926 in the wake of objections to Hemingway’s profanity raised by traditionalists in the firm. The commercial success of Hemingway’s next novel in 1929, A Farewell to Arms, which topped the best-seller list, silenced colleagues’ questions about Perkins’ editorial judgment. In near fine condition. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

The Sun Also Rises was published by Scribner's in 1926, and a year later in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape under the title Fiesta. Though it initially received mixed reviews, it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work" (Meyers, 1985). The fictional plot depicts a love story between war-wounded and impotent Jake Barnes and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley, but the novel is a roman à clef; the characters are based on real people and the action is based on real events. Hemingway proposes that the "Lost Generation," considered to have been decadent, dissolute and irretrievably damaged by World War I, was resilient and strong. Naturally, themes of love, death, renewal in nature, and the nature of masculinity are heavily investigated. For example, the characters engage in bull-fighting, which is presented as an idealized drama: The matador faces death and, in so doing, creates a moment of existential nothingness, broken when he vanquishes the possibility of death by killing the bull (Stoltzfus, 2005). The Sun Also Rises is seen as an iconic modernist novel for future generations (Mellow, 1992), although it has been emphasized that Hemingway was not philosophically a modernist (Reynolds, 1990). "The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation" (David Laskin).