A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Summary
American Lieutenant Frederic Henry drives ambulances for the Italian army during the First World War and falls in love with Catherine Barkley, an English nurse he meets almost casually before the relationship becomes the only thing either of them takes seriously. Hemingway follows Frederic through a wound that sends him to recover in Milan, deepening the affair, and then through the catastrophic Italian retreat after the battle of Caporetto, when Frederic deserts the army rather than be executed by his own side's military police, who have taken to shooting officers separated from their units on suspicion alone. He and the now pregnant Catherine escape by rowing across Lake Maggiore into neutral Switzerland, and for a while the novel lets them have something like the peaceful life neither the war nor the army would grant them. That peace ends in a hospital delivery room: Catherine's labor turns difficult, the baby is stillborn, and she hemorrhages and dies with Frederic beside her, unable to do anything but watch. The novel's last page follows him alone, leaving the hospital and walking back to his hotel through the rain, offering no comfort and no larger meaning drawn from what has just happened.
Hemingway strips the prose to short, declarative sentences that refuse to editorialize about the war or the romance, letting both the violence of the retreat and the tenderness between Frederic and Catherine speak for themselves without any authorial commentary layered over them. It reads fast for a novel built on genuine devastation, and the plainness of the language is exactly what makes the ending land as hard as it does; nothing about the writing softens the reader for what is coming.
Hemingway reportedly drafted dozens of different endings before settling on the one that was published, a 2012 collected edition eventually gathering forty seven alternate versions he had tried and discarded, evidence of just how carefully he worked to avoid the sentimentality the material could easily have tipped into.
Historical Context & Significance
Reviewers largely admired the novel on its 1929 publication by Charles Scribner's Sons; the New York Times called it a moving and beautiful book, and it became Hemingway's first genuine bestseller, giving him financial independence for the first time in his career. It was not without controversy: Boston banned the Scribner's Magazine serialization from newsstands on obscenity grounds, and Fascist Italy would not permit its publication at all until 1948, objecting to its unheroic account of the Italian army's collapse at Caporetto. The 1930 Pulitzer for the novel went instead to Oliver La Farge's Laughing Boy, a novel of Navajo life that has since faded far more than Hemingway's has.
Hemingway would not win his own Pulitzer until 1953, for The Old Man and the Sea, more than two decades later. A Farewell to Arms has instead built its standing as one of the defining American novels of the First World War through steady readership rather than any early prize, adapted for the stage in 1930 and for film twice, in 1932 and 1957, each new version keeping Frederic and Catherine's ending in front of a new generation of readers.