The Nobel laureate's first book, published in a limited edition of 300 copies. Hemingway expected Bill Bird to publish in our time as his first book, with this to be his second, and the rear panel of this volume lists the other title as available. But in our time was scheduled to be the sixth volume in Ezra Pound's "inquest" series, forcing a delay of publication until early 1924. Thus Robert McAlmon at Contact had the distinction of introducing in book form one of the greatest and most influential writers of modern literature (in retrospect, it was the expatriate's most famous publication). Though Hemingway earned essentially no money from this book, he was already associated with Pound and Gertrude Stein and soon found influential support in the critic Edmund Wilson and the anthologist Edward O'Brien. Within a few short years he was among America's best-selling and most lauded writers, a status he cemented for posterity in the 1950s after winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea, and later the Nobel Prize for Literature.