Hemingway’s Enduring Classic

Written when he was only only thirty years old, Ernest Hemmingway’s classic novel of love during a time of war was heralded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I.

This semiautobiographical tale features an American ambulance driver, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, stationed on the Italian front, who falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a beautiful English nurse. Set against the horrors of war on the battlefield, with tired, demoralized men facing the German attack on Caporetto, Hemingway unforgettably captures their despair as well as the pain of lovers caught in the harsh realities of war, which threaten to pull them apart.

A Farewell to Arms is an unforgettable tale of love and pain, loyalty and desertion. With sparing prose and a realistic account of the pain and intensity of a love overshadowed by the creep of global war was Hemingway’s first best-seller. The novel has been adapted a number of times: initially for the stage in 1930; as a film in 1932, and 1957; and as a three-part television miniseries in 1966. The 1996 filmIn Love and War, depicts Hemingway's life in Italy as an ambulance driver in events prior to his writing A Farewell to Arms.