The Old Man and the Sea

HEMINGWAY, Ernest

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

Location: London, England

Date: 1952

Binding: Octavo, full-bound cloth with stamped illustration to front and spine with title to latter.

Edition: FIRST EDITION UK

Printing: 1st Printing

Description:

First Edition UK, First Printing of Ernest Hemingway's masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea. Presenting very well in its original Dust Jacket. A handsome example.

"The final work of fiction published in the author's lifetime, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and cited by the Nobel Prize Committee, "The Old Man and the Sea" cemented Hemingway's legacy as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century and would turn him into a household name. The story follows the tribulations of an aging and suddenly unlucky fisherman, Santiago, as he tries to catch a gigantic marlin in the Straits of Florida. Hemingway wanted to show the simple dignity and biblical nature of Santiago’s trials – and succeeded mightily. The book was originally published in full in an issue of Life Magazine, which subsequently sold 5 million copies in less than a week. 

“No outbursts of spite or false theatricalism impede the smooth rush of its narrative. Within the sharp restrictions imposed by the very nature of his story Mr. Hemingway has written with sure skill. Here is the master technician once more at the top of his form, doing superbly what he can do better than anyone else.” (Contemporary New York Times Review) "

Condition:

Binding tight and square. Original full-bound cloth boards present clean and unmarked with only moderate age-toning to edges and a very small faded spot to rear. Very mild wear to edges, corners, hinges and head and foot of spine. Moderate spotting to text blocks. Mild fading to spine. Internally very nice. Remnants of bookplate to front pastedown with very small bookstore plate affixed to bottom gutter corner of same. Mild to moderate spotting up to title page and vertical fold to rear endpaper. Text otherwise clean and unmarked. Dust Jacket presents very well with bright panels and spine. Mild wear to edges and hinges, a bit more moderate to corners and head and foot of spine with a tiny bit of loss. A few faint spots to rear. Light edge-wear with a few tiny closed tears and creases. Flaps clean with age-toning to top. A handsome example.

A Classic:

A classic work considered by many to be amongst the best, including The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow, All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, Animal Farm by George Orwell, Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume, The Assistant by Bernard Malamud, At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, Atonement by Ian McEwan, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, Call It Sleep by Henry Roth, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, A Death in the Family by James Agee, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen, Deliverance by James Dickey, Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone, Falconer by John Cheever, The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Others include titles such as, A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, Herzog by Saul Bellow, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul, I, Claudius by Robert Graves, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Light in August by William Faulkner, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, Loving by Henry Green, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, Money by Martin Amis, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs, Native Son by Richard Wright, Neuromancer by William Gibson, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) by George Orwell, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.

Even further, those recognize as the best of the best include The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion, Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth, Possession by A.S. Byatt, The Power and the Glory by Graham Green, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, Rabbit, Run by John Updike, Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow, The Recognitions by William Gaddis, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, The Sportswriter by Richard Ford, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré, The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Ubik by Philip K. Dick, Under the Net by Iris Murdoch, Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, White Noise by Don DeLillo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.