TUNNEY, Gene.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Man Must Fight. First edition, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper with an apposite quotation from Tennyson, "'Made weak by time and fate; but strong in will; To strive, to seek, to find, but not to yield.' Gene Tunney, Greenwich Conn., 1/15/45."Tunney's autobiography builds to the triumphant denouement: his defeat of the unbeatable Dempsey in the Long Count Fight. It is "one of the very few works attributed to a champion boxer which was written unaided, without the assistance of a 'ghost writer'" (Hartley).At the time of the inscription, which quotes from "Ulysses", Tunney was a captain in the US Navy and the head of its physical fitness programme, a responsibility he acquired in 1940.

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