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A Farewell to Arms: The Special Edition

A Farewell to Arms: The Special Edition

Summary

WITH A FOREWORD BY PATRICK HEMINGWAY AND AN INTRODUCTION BY SEAN HEMINGWAY

In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experience came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway’s unforgettable book recreates the fear, the courage and the comradeship of warfare with total conviction. But A Farewell to Arms is not only a novel of war, it is also a love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion.

This special edition lifts the lid on Hemingway’s creative process. Included here are his early drafts, all 47 alternative endings and the author’s 1948 introduction, providing a fascinating glimpse into the construction of this great masterpiece.

Reviews

  • A most beautiful, moving and human book
    Vita Sackville-West

About the author

Ernest Hemingway

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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