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Fine review copy of Hemingway’s first novel, printed in a tiny edition of only 1250 copies. Hemingway began the book while under contract to Boni & Liveright, who had published his first book, the collection of stories “In Our Time”. Hemingway was dismayed by the book’s lack of commercial success and blamed the publisher's poor promotion and use of blurbs by more famous writers -- most especially Sherwood Anderson, who was then the dean of American letters and Boni & Liveright's bestselling author. Hemingway felt the blurbs were off-putting and hurt, rather than helped, his book. One might also surmise that he chafed under the somewhat condescending implication of the more famous and highly regarded Anderson giving a glowing blurb to the younger, up-and-coming writer. Hemingway was working on “The Sun Also Rises” at the time and had completed the first draft, but he did not want to take the risk of having it presented poorly to the world and getting lost in the shuffle as his first book had. Although he was under contract to Boni & Liveright for two more books, Hemingway contrived a plan to free himself from the obligation: his contract stated that if Boni rejected one of his books, he would be free to terminate the contract and take his writing elsewhere. As such, he conceived of a short, comic novel which would lampoon Sherwood Anderson's most recent book, “Dark Laughter”, and which would be unpublishable by Boni, thus freeing Hemingway to go elsewhere. Hemingway wrote “The Torrents of Spring” in a few short weeks in November, 1925 and submitted it to Boni & Liveright where it was promptly, as he had expected, rejected. It was then that Hemingway moved to Scribner's, beginning his long association with the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins. Although “The Torrents of Spring” begins as a burlesque of “Dark Laughter”, it succeeds ultimately as a satire of the American cult of maleness, a subject to which Hemingway was no stranger and which would course through his writings for his entire career. F. Scott Fitzgerald later called The Torrents of Spring "the best comic [novel] ever written by an American." This copy of the first edition has a printed slip from Scribner’s “To the Literary Editor” asking for notices. It does not mention “Torrents of Spring” by name, but has the penciled in price of “1.50”. Hanneman A4.A.