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HEMINGWAY. Green Hills of Africa. d-day inscripti

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London: Jonathan Cape, 1936. 8vo. Publisher's green cloth in original dust jacket. Condition: sunning to spine, patch of soiling to upper cover, chipping to head and tail of dust jacket with some loss. First edition, second printing. an intriguing hemingway inscription, referencing d-day and to his "oldest friend". On June 6th, 1944 Hemingway was working as a war correspondent for Collier's magazine. He was aboard a LCVP in the English Channel observing the D-day deployment of troops onto Omaha Beach. Hemingway watched infantry working up the shore: "Slowly, laboriously, as though they were Atlas carrying the world on their shoulders, men were [climbing]. They were not firing. They were just moving slowly ... like a tired pack train at the end of the day, going the other way from home." At some point on this historic day it seems Hemingway found time make this inscription, "To my oldest friend / Freddy Casa (?) / Ernest June 6 / Mombasa 1944." Hemingway was finally able to make his way onto Omaha Beach with the 7th wave the following day, a delay that would vex him the rest of his life. Green Hills of Africa is Hemingway's second work of nonfiction. It details his month long safari with his wife in East Africa during the fall of 1933, a trip which would also lead Hemingway to write The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. His trip began in the picturesque port city of Mombasa, which is referenced in the inscription, and continued on to Nairobi, and Machakos in Kenya, finally moving on to Tanzania and Mount Kilimanjaro. The reference to Mombasa in the inscription, whether referring to a past meeting between the two men in the 1930's (or vice versa, perhaps this copy was signed in Africa after the war and refers to their meeting in WWII) is emblematic seamlessly joins two of Hemingway's most defining experiences, the decisive moment of WWII seen through the eyes of the war correspondent, and his first trip to Africa which became the inspiration for three of his most important novels. Hanneman A.39.a

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