Death in the Afternoon. by HEMINGWAY, Ernest - 1932

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,, 1932. Introducing a hallmark theory of literary criticism First edition, first printing, of this prolifically illustrated contemplation of bullfighting, retaining the striking dust jacket, which was redesigned in all subsequent printings and editions. In this work, Hemingway introduced his famous iceberg analogy of writing, marking his first published statement on the theory of omission, crucial to the understanding of his fiction: "If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water" (p. 192). Hemingway spectated his first bullfight in 1923 at the festival of San Fermin at Pamplona, igniting a passion he revisited for the rest of his life and inspiring the events of The Sun Also Rises (1926). Explaining the important literary and aesthetic significance that bullfighting held in his heart, Hemingway writes, "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 book, affectionately called the Bible of bullfighting, made Hemingway "the leading exponent of the corrida outside the Spanish-speaking world" (Meyers, p. 117). A number of old newspaper clippings on bullfighting are loosely inserted. Octavo. Original black cloth, spine lettered and decorated in gilt, facsimile of author's signature stamped on front cover in gilt. With dust jacket, designed by Roberto Domingo. Colour frontispiece after a Cubist painting by Juan Gris, with captioned tissue guard, bull vignette on title page, and 81 half-tone photographic illustrations with facing descriptions. Contemporary ownership inscription of one Boardman H. Chase on front free endpaper. Bumps to edges, else fresh; jacket spine torn without loss, still holding, shallow chips and closed tears to edges, colours bright, not price-clipped: a near-fine copy in good jacket. Grissom A.10.1.a; Hanneman A10a. Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway: A Biography, 1985.