PBA Galleries

Greenish-black cloth, pictorial jacket. First Edition. 

Hemingway’s first novel, printed in an edition of only 1250 copies, the first of his books to be published by Scribner's. 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. 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. Hanneman A4.A.