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A Farewell to Arms: The Hemingway Library Edition Hardcover – Illustrated, July 10, 2012
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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 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—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 of 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.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateJuly 10, 2012
- Dimensions6.13 x 1 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-101451658168
- ISBN-13978-1451658163
- Lexile measure730L
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“A Farewell to Arms” stands, more than 80 years after its first appearance, as a towering ornament of American literature." ― The Washington Times
"This special edition of [Hemingway's] classic World War I novel, first published in 1929, contains several features that illuminate how Hemingway constructed his timeless tale of love and war." ― Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"A Farewell to Arms is a gem....To see Hemingway go from bold pronouncements and overwriting to his signature stripped-down style isn't just instructive, it's practically intrusive (but fun!)" ― NPR.org
About the Author
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Product details
- Publisher : Scribner; Illustrated edition (July 10, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1451658168
- ISBN-13 : 978-1451658163
- Lexile measure : 730L
- Item Weight : 1.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.13 x 1 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #58,220 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #229 in Classic American Literature
- #1,873 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #4,619 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899. His father was a doctor and he was the second of six children. Their home was at Oak Park, a Chicago suburb.
In 1917, Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921. In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris where he renewed his earlier friendships with such fellow-American expatriates as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Their encouragement and criticism were to play a valuable part in the formation of his style.
Hemingway's first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time but it was the satirical novel, The Torrents of Spring, that established his name more widely. His international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books; Fiesta, Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms.
He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing and his writing reflected this. He visited Spain during the Civil War and described his experiences in the bestseller, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
His direct and deceptively simple style of writing spawned generations of imitators but no equals. Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.
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A Farewell to Arms is the first novel I’ve read by Hemingway, although I have read some of his short stories. I generally prefer older books of naturalist and romanticist literature, and I was worried he might be too modern for my tastes. To my pleasant surprise, Hemingway uses modernist techniques like stream of consciousness sparingly, only in the most emotionally tense moments, when it is most appropriate. A Farewell to Arms is quite modernist, however, in another respect: its deliberate avoidance of drama. It is almost as if Hemingway goes out of his way to deprive his audience of any satisfying dramatic moments, as if to deliver a thrill or a tear would be a cliché. The narrator relates the most frightening and stressful moments of life like war, birth, and death with a delivery so deadpan he could be reading the phone book. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened—in feelingless monotone. I don’t require a war novel to contain combat scenes, but there ought to be some moments of emotional power that illustrate the effect that war has on human lives, instead of just a series of meals and pointless conversations. At one point, a person is shot and killed (not by the enemy) and the event is merely glossed over in a sentence or two as if nothing ever happened. That should have been a shocking moment in the character’s development, but to shock would be too conventional, so instead it is treated as a commonplace occurrence.
This deliberate eschewing of emotional stimulation is most evident in Henry’s romance with Barkley. They have sex, drink wine, and engage in terrible dialogue which makes her sound stupid. Henry repeatedly says he loves her, but it is difficult for the reader to see why, other than she’s beautiful and available. It is not easy to care for such a thinly drawn character, which makes any scene in which the two are in danger that much more difficult to become emotionally invested in. All bets are off in the final chapter, however, which is far more visceral and moving than the book that precedes it, even though it has nothing to do with the war. Though the outcome is predictable, Henry’s reaction to it is the best writing in the book. If the entire novel were as good as its final chapter, its status as a masterpiece of American literature would be easier to understand.
The novel is based on Hemingway’s own experiences as an ambulance driver in Italy, which would explain why he chose such an unusual perspective on the First World War, rather than something more indicative of the typical Doughboy’s experience. For all its faults, A Farewell to Arms is a pretty good war novel. It is worlds better than John Dos Passos’s boring and overly poetic World War I novel Three Soldiers, yet doesn’t succumb to the sensationalistic macho excesses of Norman Mailer’s World War II epic The Naked and the Dead. To some extent, I don’t see what all the fuss is about, and given Hemingway’s reputation, I doubt this is his best work, but it is good enough to make me want to give For Whom the Bell Tolls a try.
Not so with WW1. In that war, it seems that no one was quite clear why they were fighting or what, exactly, the objectives were. Like any war, it was kill or be killed, but for what purpose exactly? (The same can be said from the point of view of the American soldier in the later part of the Vietnam War).
In "A Farewell to Arms," Hemingway sucessfully captures the futility and madness of the War, and the absolute insanity that people fighting in it were driven to. Since the two main characters are an ambulance driver and a nurse, we see the horrible injuries and deaths suffered by soldiers on the battlefield, and get a good introduction to the wartime practice of medicine in the early 20th Century. Hemingway drove an ambulance during WW1 himself, and clearly knows his stuff.
Don't ask me how, but "Farewell" is the first Hemingway book I've ever read. For some strange reason, I managed to avoid his work through High School (I recall that I perhaps was supposed to read "The Old Man of the Sea," but I either forgot it entirely, or read the Cliff notes). I have to say that I certainly enjoyed "Farewell," and plan to read more Hemingway in the future, but I struggled, at first, to get used to the writing. In the first 100 pages or so, I found the terseness and simplicity of the sentences to be a distraction, and wondered if, perhaps, the author was vastly over-rated. I also found the dialogue stiff and, on occasion, down-right bizarre. For instance, often the characters (especially Fred Henry) would respond to each other with a flat sounding "all right," which I thought didn't flow at all.
But after awhile, the Hemingway style started to make an impression on me and I appreciated it, not only in the war scenes, but also concerning the romance between Fred and Catherine, which, although incredibly corny at times, worked for me. You could see the tragedy at the end a few chapters away (the blissful moments in rural Switzerland simply could not last), but it effected me even so. Frankly, I still prefer authors who use more complex sentence structure, but, as I kept reading this book, I grew more appreciative of what Hemingway was trying to accomplish with his style.
PS: A good companion to "Farewell" is "All Quiet on the Western Front," which is from the point of view of a WW1 German soldier. Apparently,the other side had no clue why they were fighting that particular war either.
Top reviews from other countries
A Farewell to Arms tells a story set in World War One. An American named Frederick Henry joins the Italian army as an ambulance driver. Caught in a chaotic retreat, he witnesses summary and arbitrary justice meted out by military policemen. Realising his own side is as lethal as the enemy, Henry deserts. The story then follows Henry through his desperate escape bid.
The writing of Henry’s story mirrors the breaking of rules in his life. As a narrator, Frederick Henry ignores all the civilised writing rules drummed into the aspiring author - repeated words, frequent adverbs, passive voice, limited vocabulary, confusing sentences, liberal use of intensifiers such as “very”, which intensify weak adjectives such as “nice”.
And yet the rules of good writing lurk, the demanding sense that these words are shaped. This “bad” writing aspires to excellence. In the famous opening paragraph, Hemingway uses repeated words like “the” to give rhythm, as in a spoken conversation. The use of “the” also serves to conduct us into Henry’s world, where mountains he describes are “the” mountains which narrator and reader both seem to be looking at, rather than any old range of hills introduced to us at the beginning of a story.
From then on every untutored line has a hidden quality. Take, for example, the following exchange:
“I went everywhere. Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Villa San Giovanni, Messina, Taormina——” “You talk like a time-table. Did you have any beautiful adventures?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Milano, Firenze, Roma, Napoli——”
A timetable might not seem like great writing, but there is undeniable beauty in simple place names. Place names, for example, are hugely influential in song writing, the music journalist Nick Coleman suggesting that apart from love, “pop is better on cities than anything else.”
The writing of A Farewell to Arms might have the literary quality of a timetable, but that doesn’t mean it can’t aspire to the sort of poetry informing thousands of songs.
A Farewell to Arms is a perfect combination of form and content, of what is said and how it is said. As in James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, A Farewell to Arms is a remarkable writing achievement in the form of not very good writing
What does war mean to a young man? To the protagonist Mr Henry, who serves as an ambulance driver in the Italian territory. It is unsound and unreasonable. He first gets wounded in the knee, gets himself treated and risks his life by going back to the front. When the army is in retreat, he almost gets himself shoot by high-rank officers, who do not reason nor do they care how many soldiers they have to shoot to kill.
Mr Henry decides to run away from such madness by jumping into a nearby stream and gets drifted away from the retreating army. With a floating log, he survives bad luck and comes back to visit his girl, Catherine. With the help of a barman, the young couple run away and seek refuge in Switzerland. The story concludes with the death of Catherine who dies of hemorrhage in hospital.
The story is written in the first person, with a linear storyline. Unlike For Whom the Bell Tolls, this is not punctuated with artistic effect which calls attention to the text itself; rather it has a smoothness that appeals to readers both contemporary and nowadays.
Though the delivery of my book is late for 5 works days, I am able to finish reading it in 2018, the 100th anniversary of the victorious ending of World War One, during which the fictionalized story took place and in which the author drew his experience. Deeply touching!

















