A Farewell to Arms

By Ernest Hemingway and Ernest Heminquey

Book Overview

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 Se n Hemingway, this edition of A Farewell to Arms is truly a celebration.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1476764522
• ISBN13: 9781476764528
• Release Date: July 2014
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.4" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Good book with a great ending

I read The Fisherman and The Sea a few years ago and wanted to read some more Hemingway so I picked up this book and chipped away at it. I’ve never felt like I’ve been slapped in the face by an ending until I read this book. Make sure if you start it, you finish it.

One of Hemingway’s Best Works.

A tragic ending to a great story.

Hemingway kept me on edge of my seat

This was the first book in a really long time that kept me reading past 1am.

Being Brave

Hemingway uses love and war to find a bit of truth. Life breaks you--it kills you--if you're "very good" or "very brave." Nature washes over humanity like a flood, merely moving over anyone that lays down for it, but crushing people who stand against it. Hemingway pits Catherine & Frederick against the tide, while taking note of those just swimming along, like Count Greffi. At ninety-four, the Count has survived so long because he, like other old men, did not "grow wise...[but]careful." He hasn't "become more devout" either--perhaps he doesn't care about anything enough to be broken by its loss. He values life because it's all he's got. Catherine dies in the end standing against the flood: she was brave and good and gentle, and those qualities are the antithesis of a world that produces such a meaningless war. Frederick had the honor the bow out of that war when it became obscene to him, and loved Catherine so much she took away his loneliness. He was broken by her death, and I wonder if it will kill him in the rain on the way back to his hotel. Hemmingway wrote a romantic story, and a realistic war novel, but he also wrote something about the difference between living and just existing. That's why this book is great.