35
JOHN MILTON HAY’S FIRST BOOK-LENGTH PUBLICATION, WHICH ‘CONSTITUTED HAY’S MOST IMPORTANT
CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN LITERARY DEVELOPMENT’
126. HAY, John Milton. Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces. Boston: University Press Welch, Bigelow, & Co. for James R. Osgood and Company, late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood & Co., 1871.
£95
8vo (172 x 112mm). Original pebble-grain green cloth over bevelled boards, upper board lettered in gilt, lower board lettered in blind, spine lettered and decorated in gilt and with publisher’s device in gilt, chocolate-brown endpapers; pp. [i]-ix, [10]-167, [1 (blank)]; very slightly rubbed, text very lightly toned, otherwise a very good copy in the original cloth; provenance: C. Palmer Long, 179 Remsen Street, Brooklyn (early pencilled inscription on front free endpaper) — Percy Whiting Brown.
First edition. The poet, journalist, historian and politician Hay (1838-1905) studied at Illinois State University and Brown University, and then became a lawyer in
Springfield, Illinois in 1859, working for his uncle Milton Hay, whose office was next door to that of Abraham Lincoln. This convenient proximity led to Hay becoming assistant private secretary to the President- Elect, moving to Washington and gaining the confidence of Lincoln; in 1864 Hay became an Adjutant-General in the army with the rank of Major (later rising to Colonel) and was assigned to the White House, where he took the role of a military aide. The following year, shortly before Lincoln’s assassination, Hay was appointed Secretary to the American legation in Paris, and thus began a diplomatic career which saw him hold positions in Vienna and Madrid, and travel throughout Europe. In September 1870, Hay returned to the United States, to pursue a career as a journalist, becoming an editorial writer and night editor on the New York Tribune. In tandem with his journalism, he published literary works in the Tribune, and in 1871 he published Pike County Ballads, his first book- length collection, which included ‘Jim Bludso’ and ‘Little Breeches’ and was preceded only by appearances in newspapers and journals, anthologies, and broadsides or pamphlets. Following the publication of Pike County Ballads, ‘at once Hay became one of the leading literary figures of the United States [...] The Ballads, which introduced to poetry a new character in his homeland and constituted Hay’s most important contribution to American literary development’ (DAB). BAL distinguishes two issues of the binding, with no priority determined; this is ‘A’, with the publisher’s monogram at the foot of the spine 7/8” (21mm) high.
BAL 7740; Harris Collection p. 113.
127. HEMINGWAY, Ernest The Dangerous Summer. Hamish Hamilton. 1985.
£48
8vo., original cloth with dust wrapper; illustrated with photographs. A near fine copy.
First English edition.
128. [HEMINGWAY, Ernest]. HEMINGWAY, Valerie. Running with the Bulls. My Years with the Hemingways. New York. Ballantine Books. 2004.
£48
8vo., original paper covered boards lettered in gilt with dust wrapper. A fine copy.
First edition signed by the author on title-page. The memoir of a companion and secretary to Ernest and Mary Hemingway who later married Hemingway’s estranged son Gregory. With jacket blurbs by Norman Mailer, Tom Brokaw, Thomas McGuane and Jim Harrison.
“A chance encounter in Spain in 1959 brought young Irish reporter Valerie Danby-Smith face to face with Ernest Hemingway. The interview was awkward and brief, but before it ended something had clicked into place. For the next two years, Valerie devoted her life to Hemingway and his wife, Mary, traveling with them through beloved old haunts in Spain and France and living with them during the tumultuous final months in Cuba. In name a personal secretary, but in reality a confidante and sharer of the great man’s secrets and sorrows, Valerie literally came of age in the company of one of the greatest literary lions of the twentieth century.
Five years after his death, Valerie became a Hemingway herself when she married the writer’s estranged son Gregory. Now, at last, she tells the story of the incredible years she spent with this extravagantly talented and tragically doomed family.
In prose of brilliant clarity and stinging candor, Valerie evokes the magic and the pathos of Papa Hemingway’s last years. Swept up in the wild revelry that always exploded around Hemingway, Valerie found herself dancing in the streets of Pamplona, cheering bullfighters at Valencia, careening around hairpin turns in Provence, and savoring the panorama of Paris from her attic room in the Ritz. But it was only when Hemingway threatened to commit suicide if she left that she realized how troubled the aging writer was–and how dependent he had become on her.
In Cuba, Valerie spent idyllic days and nights typing the final draft of A Moveable Feast, even as Castro’s revolution closed in. After Hemingway shot himself, Valerie returned to Cuba with his widow, Mary, to sort through thousands of manuscript pages and smuggle out priceless works of art. It was at Ernest’s funeral that Valerie, then a researcher for Newsweek, met Hemingway’s son Gregory–and again a chance encounter drastically altered the course of her life. Their twenty-one-year marriage finally unraveled as Valerie helplessly watched her husband succumb to the demons that had plagued him since childhood.
From lunches with Orson Welles to midnight serenades by mysterious troubadours, from a rooftop encounter with Castro to numbing hospital vigils, Valerie Hemingway played an intimate, indispensable role in the lives of two generations of Hemingways. This memoir, by turns luminous, enthralling, and devastating, is the account of what she enjoyed, and what she endured, during her astonishing years of living as a Hemingway.”
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