Hemingway, Ernest:

$2,250 · Offered by William Reese Company

DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON. First edition of Hemingway's passionate explication of the history and mores of the spectacle of bullfighting. He attended his first bullfight in June of 1923 and began writing in March of 1930. Early in the first chapter, Hemingway makes plain one of the primary reasons behind his attraction to a sport that he initially expected to dislike because of its cruelty to the horses: "...the only place where you could see life and death, i.e., violent death now that the wars were over, was in the bull ring and I wanted very much to go to Spain where I could study it. I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death" (p.2). The first printing consisted of 10,300 copies, but the somewhat out of the ordinary format makes it uncommon in fine condition.

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