HEMINGWAY, Ernest.

£47,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

in our time. First edition, the Harlem Renaissance poet and novelist Claude McKay's copy, signed by him on the half-title. Hemingway's writing was a strong influence on McKay, who was then living in Montparnasse in the same circle of Lost Generation literary expatriates.McKay lived the bohemian life in Paris, supporting himself by posing nude in the city's art studios, including for the Cubist painter Andre Lhote. He remembers, in his 1937 memoir A Long Way from Home, that he was given this copy of Hemingway's breakthrough collection by an American friend, who read aloud from the book at the Dôme while McKay drank a double cognac. "My friend and host said, 'They are talking in a big way about this Hemingway, but I just can't get him. I like the young radical crowd and what they are aiming to do. But this thing here' - he pointed to in our time - 'I don't like it. It is too brutal and bloody... The only thing I admire about the book is the cover. That sure is in our time all right. If you like it you can have it.' My hand trembled to take it. The book was worth something between thirty and fifty francs, which was more than I could afford. I have it still" (pp. 249-50). The two writers met once on the Left Bank, when they were briefly introduced by the publisher Max Eastman.In his memoir, McKay confesses his "vast admiration" for Hemingway, praising his clarity and honesty. "When Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises [1926], he shot a fist in the face of the false romantic-realist

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