HEMINGWAY, Ernest.

£9,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington

"A Matter of Colour". The rare first printing of Hemingway's second published story, a humorous tale about a fixed boxing match, which appeared in his school magazine two months after his first story, "Judgement of Manitou".Influenced by the humorist Ring Lardner, whose sports columns Hemingway read and pastiched in the school newspaper The Trapeze, the story strongly prefigures the author's mature writing: it is in effect an early version of his boxing masterpiece, "Fifty Grand" (1927), which likewise takes the underbelly of ring strategy and double-crosses as its subject. The two stories are unique in his fiction for being narrated in the first person by a minor character, rather than the protagonist. As well as an early experiment in narrative style, the story offers an embryonic treatment of race, masculinity, and identity, which Hemingway explored in greater complexity throughout his career. The prize-fighting "Andreson, the Swede" also returns as "Ole Andreson" in "The Killers" (1927). "A Matter of Colour" was not reprinted until 1966, in Hemingway in Michigan.The magazine is offered together with a copy of Ernest Hemingway as Recalled by His High School Contemporaries (1973), a brief history of Hemingway's early and adolescent life and school years, which describes how he began writing in his final years at school, after taking classes on journalism and short story writing under "Miss Biggs and Miss Dixon" (p. 13).We trace only two other copies of the magazine in aucti

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