Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, Including Americana

8vo. Original red cloth; dust jacket (some toning to spine with chipping at ends, joints rubbed). Provenance: Bennett Schneider Book Seller, Kansas City (ticket at rear); Ruth White Lowry (1884-1974), Hemingway's cousin and Kansas City native (recipient of Hemingway's inscription).

FIRST EDITION. INSCRIBED BY HEMINGWAY TO HIS COUSIN, RUTH LOWRY: "Dear Ruth, In the jacket on this book Mr. Crane looks like Ernest Wahl but that is just the old T. B. Watley look and Mr. Walsh, who came later, may have seen pictures of Mr. Crane too. Ernest."

Hemingway admired Stephen Crane's work and considered him an important influence on his own writing. Hemingway specifically praised The Red Badge of Courage in the introduction to his 1942 anthology, Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time, where he described it as "one of the finest books of our literature, and I include it entire because it is all as much of a piece as a great poem is."

Hemingway was known to have frequented Bennett Schneider's bookshop in Kansas City, where he likely acquired this book for his cousin, with whom he was staying at the time.