Novel
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway · 1929
Synopsis
Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant in the ambulance service of the Italian army, is quartered at Gorizia with the surgeon Rinaldi, who introduces him to Catherine Barkley, an English nurse whose fiancé was killed on the Somme. Wounded in the legs by a mortar shell while eating cheese in a dugout, he is evacuated to the American hospital in Milan, where she joins him, and their affair lasts through the summer. He returns to the front in time for the Caporetto breakthrough and the retreat; at the Tagliamento bridge, carabinieri sort out officers separated from their units and shoot them.
Context
Wounded, the author had been nursed in Milan by an American Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, with whom he fell in love and who broke off the relationship by letter in 1919; she inspired the heroine. He said he had rewritten the ending thirty-nine times to find the right words; a 2012 edition brings together forty-seven versions. The novel first appeared as a serial in Scribner's Magazine in 1929, and the Boston police had one issue pulled from the newsstands. Banned under fascism because of its account of Caporetto, it was published in Italy only after the war. It was staged in 1930, then adapted again in 1932 and in 1957.
Who it is for
A novel in five books, with short sentences and stripped-down dialogue. Translated into French by Maurice-Edgar Coindreau, then again by Philippe Jaworski in 2024.
Prizes and reception
Its author's first best-seller, with an initial print run of some thirty-one thousand copies in 1929, and received by a mostly favourable critical response.
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