Description

The very best American novel to emerge from World-War I, A Farewell to Arms may be the story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for an attractive English nurse. Hemingway’s frank depiction of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows by having an intensity unrivaled in modern literature, while his description of the German assault on Caporetto—of lines of fired men marching in the torrential rain, hungry, tired, and demoralized—is among the best moments in literary history. A tale of love and pain, of loyalty and desertion, A Farewell to Arms, written when he was thirty yrs old, represents a brand new romanticism for Hemingway.