A Farewell to Arms

Hemingway’s masterpiece is not only one of the best novels we have about World War I but is also a tender, haunting love story.

Ernest Hemingway drew from his own war experiences when he crafted this remarkable story of an American ambulance driver serving on the Italian front and his love for a beautiful English nurse. The novel, Hemingway’s first best seller, is marked by vivid depictions of the horrors of the battlefield—but also by the heartrending vicissitudes of a passionate affair of the heart between his protagonists, Frederic and Catherine, leading up to a tragic ending that is all the more powerful for its famously understated expression.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961) was born in Illinois and began his career as a reporter before enlisting as an ambulance driver at the Italian front in World War I. Hemingway and his first (of four) wives lived in Paris in the 1920s, as part of the "Lost Generation" exapatriate community, before moving to Key West, Florida, and later to Cuba. Known first for short stories, his literary reputation was further enhanced by his novels, including A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, and The Old Man and the Sea.

About the Introducer: AMANDA VAILL is the author of Hotel Florida:Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War; Everybody Was So Young, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award; Seaman Schepps; and Somewhere, for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has written on arts and culture for New York, Esquire, Ballet Review, Architectural Digest, Town & Country, and other publications. She lives in New York City.