Frederic Henry is an American ambulance driver in Italy during the last years of the First World War who meets a young English nurse, Catherine Barkley. They embark on a playful game of love in which neither of them invests too much emotion but, when Frederic is wounded and Catherine becomes his carer, their feelings intensify. She becomes pregnant. Frederic, now recovered, must return to the Front where he experiences the chaos and misery of the Italian retreat from Caporetto. Utterly disgusted by the madness and violence of war, he deserts and he and Catherine flee to neutral Switzerland. Happiness seems to beckon for both of them but fate has a cruel trick up its sleeve. The book draws extensively on Hemingway's own experiences when he came to Europe as a young man to serve in an ambulance unit during the First World War. Like Frederic Henry, Hemingway was wounded and, like him, he began an intense, short-lived relationship with the woman who nursed him. In the decades of his greatest fame, Hemingway's terse and minimalist prose style, so distinctive and influential, was parodied and imitated so often that it is difficult today to appreciate just how revolutionary it seemed in the 1920s. With its precision and its deliberate avoidance of over-complication, it seemed to herald a new honesty and directness in fiction. In later years, Hemingway himself drifted perilously close to self-parody but the novels and short stories of the 1920s are the real thing. A Farewell to Arms, more than other equally well-known Hemingway books such as the Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls and the Pulitzer Prize-winning novella The Old Man and the Sea, shows just why he was one of the great innovatory American writers of the 20th century.

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