A Farewell to Arms
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 Seán Hemingway, this edition of A Farewell to Arms is truly a celebration.
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Community Reviews
I went into this one being a little concerned - I'm generally not interested in romances. They tend to be quite repetitive and predictable. And to be fair, there were a few chapters in this book where I was rolling my eyes. However, it's a classic for a reason. The romance isn't really undercut, but it doesn't come out of it as idealized as you might expect - it is a place in which the characters find respite from the war and from the world's relentless suffering. But it is only a respite, and there is no safe place that lasts forever.
It's quite interesting to have read this so close to For Whom The Bell Tolls, because the main characters actually have a fairly distinct attitude toward what they fight for. They both have men being masculine and stoic and feeling the pull of duty. But FWTBT is about someone fighting for a cause he really believes in and AFTA is mostly the opposite. He fights for his friends, but that's about it. And especially when things fall apart on his side, just as they eventually did in Spain, Frederic Henry is willing to make 'a separate peace'.
Any way, very good. And I just breezed through it, too, which is always a plus. Strongly recommend. As I was reading, I was actually thinking 'man, they need to make this into a movie because it is so cinematic and so much better than the drivel in theatres at the moment' and thankfully they appear to be doing just that. The earlier versions were made in times where they had to sanitize and shave off raw edges. Of course now they usually just dumb things down, but it's being made by brits, so it has a little potential of not being garbage.
It's quite interesting to have read this so close to For Whom The Bell Tolls, because the main characters actually have a fairly distinct attitude toward what they fight for. They both have men being masculine and stoic and feeling the pull of duty. But FWTBT is about someone fighting for a cause he really believes in and AFTA is mostly the opposite. He fights for his friends, but that's about it. And especially when things fall apart on his side, just as they eventually did in Spain, Frederic Henry is willing to make 'a separate peace'.
Any way, very good. And I just breezed through it, too, which is always a plus. Strongly recommend. As I was reading, I was actually thinking 'man, they need to make this into a movie because it is so cinematic and so much better than the drivel in theatres at the moment' and thankfully they appear to be doing just that. The earlier versions were made in times where they had to sanitize and shave off raw edges. Of course now they usually just dumb things down, but it's being made by brits, so it has a little potential of not being garbage.
Hemingway captures men's suffering in a way that aches in the heart for the rest of your life. His subtlety is often overlooked, showing you the pain, expecting you to read between the lines of the inner turmoil men are expected to hide. Suffering. Hope. Betrayal. This book is one of the few to make me cry.
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