A Farewell to Arms - by Ernest Hemingway (Paperback)

About the Book

By turns romantic and harshly realistic, Hemingway's story of a tragic romance set against the brutality and confusion of World War I cemented his fame as a stylist and as a writer of extraordinary literary power. A volunteer ambulance driver and a beautiful English nurse fall in love when he is wounded on the Italian front.

Book Synopsis

The definitive edition of the classic World War I romance novel, featuring all of the alternate endings: "Fascinating...serves as an artifact of a bygone craft, with handwritten notes and long passages crossed out, giving readers a sense of an author's process" (The New York Times).

Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable tragic story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse.

Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield frontlines--weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion--this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep.

Ernest Hemingway famously said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right. This edition collects all the alternative endings together for the first time, along with early drafts of other essential passages, offering new insight into Hemingway's craft and creative process and the evolution of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

Featuring Hemingway's own 1948 introduction to an illustrated reissue of the novel, a personal foreword by the author's son Patrick Hemingway, and a new introduction by the author's grandson Seán Hemingway, this edition of A Farewell to Arms is truly a celebration.

Review Quotes

"I think A Farewell to Arms is Hemingway's greatest novel, the truest. It's also heartbreaking."
--Edna O'Brien

"We can't seem to stop using a certain kind of elevated, heroic language about war and it is our duty always to puncture it. No one has ever done that as eloquently as Hemingway, through the accumulating weight of his sentences, and the emotional clarity, the disgust and also the reverence for what has been done."
--Tobias Wolff

About the Author

Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His life and accomplishments are explored in-depth in the PBS documentary film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961.