A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway - Google Books A Farewell to Arms 12 Reviews "If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially."The greatest American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms cemented Ernest Hemingway's reputation as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century. Drawn largely from Hemingway's own experiences, it is the story of a volunteer ambulance driver wounded on the Italian front, the beautiful British nurse with whom he falls in love, and their journey to find some small sanctuary in a world gone mad with war. By turns beautiful and tragic, tender and harsh and realistic, A Farewell to Arms is one of the supreme literary achievements of our time.

What people are saying - Write a review User ratings LibraryThing Review User Review - chrisblocker - LibraryThing I've read many of Ernest Hemingway's most revered short stories, and I've read one of his more acclaimed novels, The Sun Also Rises. I like Hemingway for the most part. He wrote good stories, but the ... Read full review User Review - Flag as inappropriate I'm not going to pretend to know how to review a book or what to be critical about. But I will share my thoughts, which are influenced by an understanding of what Hemingway's philosophy of writing (reportedly) was. Description and dialogue is what you get. I was surprised by how much description of setting there was. The setting of time was often treated by mentioning the season and supporting descriptions that made you feel the seasons were turning and gave a somewhat detached sense toward the lives of the characters. I guess this is Hemingway's personality or his view coming through his work. Perhaps it is linked to his illustration of war. It seems a life is not above scrutiny, is not so big that it can't be understood. Hemingway does indeed write the facts. He reports only what the character sees so that we feel what he experiences.

Its like you don't identify with the character, you are the character. This isn't perfect though and though it describes the experience of reading Hemingway (understanding experience through observation of only the facts) one may feel more invested in characters of other novels. Hemingway very rarely goes off and just tells us what his character is thinking. When he does it plays out like a dialogue that seems more like the thoughts of the typical man than the coherent paragraphs of so many other characters. In this way Hemingway is relate-able. In terms of appeal, it is not a crazy twisting ride of a plot. It is a portrait of a time (both the era, but especially war-time in that era). It is enjoyable largely because of the no-nonsense approach to recreating an important time, place, and perspective through elegant presentation of dialogue and crisp description.If you are looking for a fun read or an escape this may not be the time for this book. Otherwise, I highly recommend this book, especially if you enjoy the concrete and the real, I think it will move you.

SparkNotes: A Farewell to Arms Home → SparkNotes → Literature Study Guides → A Farewell to Arms A Farewell to Arms by BubblyBaby5832 , August 04, 2012 The ending was good, but depressing. by doctordepp , October 14, 2013 I personally thought it was okay. It only got interesting for me towards the end. Boring in the beginning, considerable and touching in the second part by MrsMojito1 , November 06, 2014 I personally found the first half of the book a bit monotonous, and Hemingways distanced writing almost glacial. The second half of the book, particularly after the beginning of the Italian retreat, was far more involving with interesting reflections on war, life and death. The last part made me shed a few tears, it was impetuous and expressed Henry´s desperation, and eventually human desperation, perfectly. I´m quite ambivalent about the book, but the last chapters are definitely worth reading!

A Farewell to Arms : Ernest Hemingway : 9780099910107 A Farewell to Arms US$6.53 US$11.05 You save US$4.52 Free delivery worldwide Add to basket Add to wishlist Description In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the 'war to end all wars'. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came his early masterpiece, A Farewell to Arms. In an unforgettable depiction of war, Hemingway recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteers and the men and women he encounters along the way with conviction and brutal honesty. A love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion, A Farewell to Arms offers a unique and unflinching view of the world and people, by the winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.

show more Product details 110 x 178 x 22mm | 160g Publication date First World War Review quote "Hard, almost metallic, glittering, blinding by the reflections of its hard surface, utterly free of sentimentality- a strange and original book, it will convince you of its honesty and veracity" -- Arnold Bennett "A most beautiful, moving and humane book" -- Vita Sackville-West "A novel of great power." TLS show more About Ernest Hemingway Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield - this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war - in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his craft.

He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961. show more Review Text Hemingway's classic novel of World War I draws on his own experiences as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front. American Frederick Henry is a dutiful soldier until an unexpected series of events changes his life. The hard surface of the prose conceals unexpected depths of emotion. (Kirkus UK) show more Follow us A Farewell to Arms A Farewell to Arms or browse other Shmoopers' Questions In A Nutshell A Farewell to Arms was published in 1929 by Ernest Hemingway , a Nobel Prize -winning American author. This novel is semi-autobiographical. Like the protagonist, Hemingway served in the Italian Army as a Red Cross ambulance driver during World War I , got wounded, and spent time in an American Army in Milan , where he met a nurse. But unlike Hemingway, the novel's protagonist starts a love affair with the nurse. Similar to characters in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway was deeply influenced by his experiences at war.

In fact, Hemingway is considered to be part of the "The Lost Generation." The phrase was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to Modernist artists who felt "lost" after witnessing the horrors of World War I . Hemingway certainly relied on his own experiences in WWI Italy to write this novel, but he did use other sources as well. Though A Farewell to Arms begins in 1916, Hemingway didn’t get to Italy until the summer of 1918. The Italian retreat from Caporetto , described in such detailed in the novel, began in October 1917. So how did Hemingway describe it so well? The novel is meticulously researched. Hemingway was a journalist and worked for the Kansas City Star newspaper when the retreat was on, read details of it, and was extremely concerned over the war in general. (For a discussion of the importance of newspapers to the novel, see "Symbols, Imagery, and Allegory.") It’s likely that such concern inspired him to enlist with the Red Cross in the first place. A Farewell to Arms caused a lot of fuss when its first installment was published by Scribner’s Magazine.

The Boston superintendent of police kept Scribner’s off newsstands, though not for long. He claimed it was pornography. (Check out "Sex" for more.) Luckily, the ban only boosted sales and gave the novel free publicity. Nowadays, it’s hardly considered pornographic and is instead known for its sensitive depiction of the war. The novel is even taught at U.S. military academies. Love, exciting and new. Come aboard, we've been expecting you! Okay, okay. Love isn't always a pleasure cruise. And boy did Ernest Hemingway know it. This guy knew his love stuff, and he was able to capture the heartbreaking circumstances that can result from even the most sweeping love stories. Sure, a lot of folks might see Papa H. as a Debbie Downer , but we don't. Nope. Instead, we see him as a realist—a guy who recognized that, even in the midst of love, we might also be in the company of pain and sadness. Think about it: can you name one person who met someone, fell in love instantly, and lived happily ever after? (You can? Then please go throw a tomato at them.) Relationships are difficult.

Especially when you have to deal with more than just the other person. There might be distance, jobs, family, or in the case of A Farewell to Arms, this little thing called a World War. And you know what? No matter how intense love might be, sometimes it simply can't conquer all. Maybe you've never shot a guy, deserted an army, and rowed to Switzerland (although, hey, you're still young), but you know what it's like when the whole world seems to be working against you. When all you want to do is run away with your loved one, life can just be so… complicated. Life is like that, though. Hemingway gets that. And, in that way, he gets you, too. About A Farewell to Arms About A Farewell to Arms Bookmark this page Manage My Reading List A Farewell to Arms is not a complicated book. Rather, it is a simple story well told, the plot of which could be summarized as follows: boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. Ernest Hemingway conveyed this story chronologically, in a strictly linear fashion, with no flashback scenes whatsoever. In fact, the novel contains very little exposition at all.

We never learn exactly where its narrator and protagonist, the American ambulance driver Frederic Henry, came from, or why he enlisted in the Italian army to begin with. (For that matter, we read chapter after chapter before even learning his name.) Nor do we discover much about his lover Catherine Barkley's past, other than the fact that her fiancé was killed in battle, in France. There are no subplots, and the minor characters in A Farewell to Arms are minor indeed — for the simple fact that they are not needed. The power of this perennially popular book comes from the intensity of Frederic and Catherine's love for one another and from the power of the antagonistic forces that ultimately tear these two apart. A Farewell to Arms is set against the historical and geographical background of World War I. Thus it contains numerous references to people and places, governments and fronts that Hemingway could safely assume his audience would recognize. In fact, certain basic information isn't alluded to in the book at all, as it was once common knowledge.

(The book was published in 1929, only eleven years after the armistice of November 11, 1918, that ended the war.) For a contemporary audience, however, making sense of these references can be difficult. The continuing popularity of A Farewell to Arms attests to the fact that enjoyment of the novel does not depend upon understanding its particular setting. Here, however, are some basics: World War I, or the Great War as it was then known, began in August 1914 with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand. The war pitted the Central Powers (Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) against the allied forces of Great Britain, France, Russia, and Italy, who were joined in 1917 by the United States.

The action of A Farewell to Arms takes place from 1916-18 in four locations, for the most part: 1) the Julian Alps, along what was then the border between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; 2) the city of Milan, which lies in the plains of northern Italy, far from the front; 3) the Italian resort town of Stresa on Lake Maggiore, which straddles the border between Italy and Switzerland; and 4) various towns and villages of the Swiss Alps. At the start of the book, the Italian army is busy keeping the Austro-Hungarian forces occupied so that the latter cannot assist the Germans on the war's western and eastern fronts. Later, Russia will withdraw due to the communist Revolution of 1917, and near the book's climax German troops will join the Austro-Hungarian forces, necessitating Italy's humiliating retreat from Caporetto. (This event, which the book's first readers would have recognized, provided the author with the opportunity for some of his most dramatic and effective writing ever.) Keep in mind as you read that Switzerland shares a border with Italy — and that Switzerland was neutral during World War I.

The context of A Farewell to Arms is not simply the First World War, however, but all the wars that preceded it, as well — or rather, the general notion of war as an opportunity for heroism. Hemingway writes here in the tradition of the greatest war stories ever told: Homer's Iliad and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. And certain techniques of Homer and Tolstoy (for instance, juxtaposing what we might call a "wide-screen" view of battle with "close-ups") were put to extremely effective use in A Farewell to Arms, starting in the book's very first chapter. But like The Red Badge of Courage, the famous novel of the Civil War written by Stephen Crane (one of Hemingway's favorite American authors), A Farewell to Arms also reacts against the Iliad and War and Peace and many lesser stories of battlefield bravery. It tries to tell the often-ugly truth about war — to honestly depict life during wartime rather than glorifying it. Thus this book contains not just deserters (Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley themselves), but illness and injury and incompetent leadership; it contains profanity (or at least implies it) and prostitution at the front.

Frederic Henry's injury is incurred not in valorous combat but while he is eating spaghetti. The retreat from Caporetto disintegrates into sheer anarchy. A Farewell to Arms is probably the best novel written about World War I (with Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front a strong runner-up), and it bears comparison to the best American books about World War II (Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller among them), Korea (James Salter's The Hunters), and Vietnam (The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien). And yet, A Farewell to Arms is at the same time a tender love story — one of the most tender and affecting ever written. It has been compared to William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and the reference is an apt one. Both stories concern young lovers antagonized by their societies. (In Shakespeare's play, the Montague-Capulet blood feud is the problem; in Hemingway's novel, the Great War is to blame.) Both stories seem to vibrate with a sickening sense of doom that only increases as the stories near their respective conclusions. And both end in heartbreaking tragedy.

If not one of the greatest love stories ever told, A Farewell to Arms is certainly among the greatest of the twentieth century. Actually, it is the very combination of love and war that makes this book so potent and memorable. Regarding the woman he loves, the hero of Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls tells himself "You had better love her very hard, and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and continuity." Frederic Henry of A Farewell to Arms could say the same thing of his affair with Catherine Barkley. Because they meet in a time and place in which every day could be their last together, Frederic and Catherine must wring every drop of intimacy and passion from their relationship. (Notice how soon Catherine begins to speak of love, and how soon — especially considering the conservative mores of the time in which the book is set — they sleep together.) The result is an affair — and a story — almost unbearable in its intensity. A Farewell to Arms is certainly one of Hemingway's finest novels. In fact, some critics have called it his best.

Though not as inventive — as extreme, really — in subject and style as The Sun Also Rises (published three years earlier), this book actually benefits from its comparatively conventional approach to storytelling; it seems more sincere, more heartfelt. (Of course, The Sun Also Rises is about World War I, too. It merely focuses on the war's tragic aftermath.) And like William Faulkner's Light in August, A Farewell to Arms proves that its author was not merely a Modern master. He could also produce a big book in the grand tradition of the nineteenth century novel. In retrospect, it is no surprise that A Farewell to Arms is the book that made Ernest Hemingway famous. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in his Introduction to a later edition of the novel, "A Farewell to Arms more than justified the early enthusiasm of the connoisseurs of Hemingway and extended this reputation from them to the public at large." A Farewell to Arms feels less propagandistic than Hemingway's other great war story, For Whom the Bell Tolls — which relies partly on flashback for its effect and also descends at times into the stylistic mannerism that marred the author's later work.

A Farewell to Arms is vastly superior to the remaining Hemingway novels (To Have and Have Not and Across the River and Into the Trees, and the posthumously published Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden) as well as the novellas The Torrents of Spring and The Old Man and the Sea. In fact, the only other volume in the Hemingway oeuvre that stands up to a comparison with A Farewell to Arms is the writer's debut story collection, In Our Time. That book's postwar tales, "Soldier's Home" and "Big Two-Hearted River," can almost be read as sequels to A Farewell to Arms, or at least to the events that inspired the novel.

‘A Farewell to Arms’ With Hemingway’s Alternate Endings - The New York Times The New York Times Books |To Use and Use Not Search Continue reading the main story In an interview in The Paris Review in 1958 Ernest Hemingway made an admission that has inspired frustrated novelists ever since: The final words of “A Farewell to Arms,” his wartime masterpiece, were rewritten “39 times before I was satisfied.” Those endings have become part of literary lore, but they have never been published together in their entirety, according to his longtime publisher, Scribner. A new edition of “A Farewell to Arms,” which was originally published in 1929, will be released next week, including all the alternate endings, along with early drafts of other passages in the book. The new edition is the result of an agreement between Hemingway’s estate and Scribner, now an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Photo Ernest Hemingway in 1947. Credit John F.

Kennedy Library and Museum It is also an attempt to redirect some of the attention paid in recent years to Hemingway’s swashbuckling, hard-drinking image — through fictional depictions in the best-selling novel “The Paris Wife” and the Woody Allen film “Midnight in Paris,” for instance — back to his sizable body of work. Continue reading the main story “I think people who are interested in writing and trying to write themselves will find it interesting to look at a great work and have some insight to how it was done,” Seán Hemingway, a grandson of Ernest Hemingway who is also a curator of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said in an interview. “But he is a writer who has captured the imagination of the American public, and these editions are interesting because they really focus on his work. Ultimately that’s his lasting contribution.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story The new edition concludes that the 39 endings that Hemingway referred to are really more like 47. They have been preserved in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston since 1979, where Seán Hemingway studied them carefully.

(Bernard S. Oldsey, a Hemingway scholar, listed 41 endings in his book “Hemingway’s Hidden Craft,” but Seán Hemingway found 47 variations in manuscripts preserved at the Kennedy Library.) The alternate endings are labeled and gathered in an appendix in the new edition, a 330-page book whose cover bears the novel’s original artwork, an illustration of a reclining man and woman, both topless. For close readers of Hemingway the endings are a fascinating glimpse into how the novel could have concluded on a different note, sometimes more blunt and sometimes more optimistic. And since modern authors tend to produce their work on computers, the new edition also 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. (When asked in the 1958 Paris Review interview with George Plimpton what had stumped him, Hemingway said, “Getting the words right.”) Photo The new edition, with the original cover art. The endings range from a short sentence or two to several paragraphs. In No.

1, “The Nada Ending,” Hemingway wrote, “That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and I will die and that is all I can promise you.” The “Live-Baby Ending,” listed as No. 7, concludes, “There is no end except death and birth is the only beginning.” And in No. 34, the “Fitzgerald ending,” suggested by Hemingway’s friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway wrote that the world “breaks everyone,” and those “it does not break it kills.” “It kills the very good and very gentle and the very brave impartially,” he wrote. “If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” Hemingway also left behind a list of alternate titles, which are reprinted in the new edition. They include “Love in War,” “World Enough and Time,” “Every Night and All” and “Of Wounds and Other Causes.” One title, “The Enchantment,” was crossed out by Hemingway. Photo Ernest Hemingway's first-page draft for “A Farewell to Arms.” Credit John F.

Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum Patrick Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s only surviving son, said in an interview from his home in Montana that when Scribner suggested the raw material be published, he agreed. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “They do give insight to how Hemingway was thinking,” said Patrick Hemingway, who is 84. “But it is absolutely true that no matter how much you analyze a classic bit of writing, you can never really figure out what makes talent work.” Susan Moldow, the publisher of Scribner, said that while Hemingway is a perennial strong seller, especially for schools and libraries, “the estate is constantly wanting to present the work afresh.” “This is one of the most important authors in American history,” she said. “And fortunately or unfortunately you need to keep refreshing or people lose interest.” After reading the various endings, Ms. Moldow added, she didn’t question the author’s decision; the actual ending — cool and passionless after an epic tale of war and love, with the protagonist leaving a hospital in the rain — has stood the test of time.

“Ultimately,” she said, “I think we have to be glad that he went with the ending that he went with.” A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2012, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: To Use and Use Not. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe New Edition Includes 39 Different Farewells To 'Arms' : NPR New Edition Includes 39 Different Farewells To 'Arms' Embed Embed New Edition Includes 39 Different Farewells To 'Arms' New Edition Includes 39 Different Farewells To 'Arms' Embed Embed Ernest Hemingway first published A Farewell to Arms in 1929. Courtesy of AP hide caption toggle caption Ernest Hemingway first published A Farewell to Arms in 1929. Courtesy of AP Ernest Hemingway began his second novel, A Farewell to Arms, in 1928. He says, in an introduction to a later edition, that while he was writing the first draft his second son was born, and while he was rewriting the book, his father committed suicide.

He goes on to say, with his famous economy, "I was not quite thirty years old when I finished the book and the day it was published was the day the stock market crashed." Independent Booksellers Now we have a new edition of A Farewell to Arms, the great novel of World War I. And for the first time in print, it includes all the endings to the story that that Hemingway considered — and there were a lot of them. In 1958, Hemingway told The Paris Review that he rewrote the ending 39 times before he was satisfied. The new edition also comes with an introduction by the writer's grandson, Sean Hemingway, who tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer that he found a whopping 47 alternative endings hidden away in his grandfather's papers. "Which pretty much bears out — depending on your definition of an ending, since some of them are fragments — his statement," he says. Spoilers ahead if you're one of the people who have not read it yet: Arms tells the story of an American man who volunteers as an ambulance driver in Italy during the war and falls in love with a beautiful English nurse who dies, tragically, in childbirth after the couple escape to Switzerland together.

The ending, famously, leaves readers in tears — but what alternatives did Hemingway consider? Article continues after sponsorship "I like the live-baby ending, the ending in which you consider that the baby lives," Hemingway says. "And it's interesting that my uncle Patrick's birth was the grist for the creation of the novel, because he was born exactly at the time my grandfather was writing the book. And of course, he did live, but my grandmother had a very difficult birth." The alternative endings help readers see Ernest Hemingway's thought processes — but they were never going to be real. Hemingway himself wrote, in a 1948 introduction to the book, that he always knew it would be tragic. "To my mind, in looking at all the different endings, the one that he did settle on is the most powerful," his grandson says. Sean Hemingway, grandson of the famous novelist, authored an introduction to the new edition of Ernest Hemingway's classic A Farewell to Arms.

Bruce Schwarz/Simon and Schuster hide caption toggle caption Bruce Schwarz/Simon and Schuster Sean Hemingway, grandson of the famous novelist, authored an introduction to the new edition of Ernest Hemingway's classic A Farewell to Arms. Bruce Schwarz/Simon and Schuster Hemingway was famous for his spare, declarative style. Sean Hemingway says his grandfather operated on the principle of the iceberg: "for the part that shows, there's seven-eighths more underwater," he says. "In many ways, I think this example of the ending of A Farewell to Arms is really perhaps the best and the finest example of this in his writing, where you can really see all the endings and how he worked towards this final ending, which although it's really short ... you see all the emotion that he put into it, and that he left out in the end, but it's still there, sort of under the surface." Hemingway says he first read his grandfather's book as an exchange student in Italy. And while he can't remember his initial reaction to it, he says subsequent rereadings packed a powerful punch. "It gets me every time I read it," he says.

"It's that moment of realization, which doesn't hit, you're almost in shock, when a person actually dies, but when it hits you, and that's the moment he ends with, and I think it's so powerful, and it does bring me to tears when I read it." Ernest Hemingway Biography Ernest Hemingway Biography Bookmark this page Manage My Reading List Formative Years Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, a prosperous suburb of Chicago that was also home to the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. His father, Clarence E. Hemingway, was a doctor; his mother, who was very religious, had given up a promising career as a singer in order to rear six children, of whom Ernest was the third and the oldest boy. Hemingway attended public school in Oak Park, and the family vacationed in the north woods of Michigan, where Clarence taught Ernest hunting and fishing and a general love of the outdoor life.

Later Hemingway would portray Oak Park's bourgeois values in an unflattering light in stories like "Soldier's Home," and his parents' marriage was the subject of the bitterly resentful tale "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife." On the other hand, Hemingway wrote with nothing short of adoration about life "Up in Michigan," in the story of that name and many others featuring his fictional alter ego Nick Adams. Clarence Hemingway would commit suicide in 1928. Upon graduation from high school, Hemingway left Oak Park for a stint as a reporter at the highly respected daily newspaper the Kansas City Star. Shortly afterward, he enlisted in a Red Cross ambulance corps stationed on the Austrian front in Italy during the last year of the First World War. Hemingway was wounded almost immediately (he was delivering cigarettes and chocolate to Italian soldiers beyond the front lines) and sent to an American hospital in Milan, where he fell in love with an American nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky; these events would inspire A Farewell to Arms. After the war, Hemingway returned to the States in hopes of beginning a career of one kind or another that would support him and Agnes, whom he planned to marry.

That plan was shattered when she wrote from Europe to say that she'd fallen in love with another man. Instead, Hemingway married Hadley Richardson in 1921; shortly thereafter, the couple moved to Paris, where the first of the writer's three sons was born. All the while, Hemingway was reading as much as he could, writing stories and poems, and trying to find his voice as a writer — a process that suffered a devastating setback when a suitcase containing all the copies of all the stories he had written to date (four years' work) was stolen from Hadley on a train to Switzerland. Education Hemingway's formal education did not extend beyond high school in Oak Park, where he edited the school paper. His training as a writer continued, however, during his time as a reporter in Kansas City and as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. He covered the Greek-Turkish War of 1920, and the experience would inspire some of the most striking and effective of the inter-chapter vignettes in Hemingway's groundbreaking debut story collection, In Our Time.

Even more influential, perhaps, were the writers Hemingway met while living in Paris during the 1920s: the Irishman James Joyce and the American expatriates Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and especially Gertrude Stein. Hemingway liked to claim that he learned about writing from the post-Impressionist paintings of Cezanne — an intriguing notion, though he never made it clear exactly what Cezanne taught him. Any discussion of Hemingway's education would be incomplete without a mention of the attention and energy he devoted to the subject matter of his books. Just as he learned to write from the most talented contemporary practitioners of the craft, he apprenticed himself to acknowledged experts in warfare and the "blood sports" with which his work is so often concerned. He learned about military tactics from career soldiers met in World War I, bullfighting from Spanish matadors, big-game hunting from a British guide in East Africa, and deep-sea fishing from a native of the Bahamas. Hemingway loved mastering the abstruse terminology and complex procedures of each of these activities.

As any reader of his work knows, he also was fascinated by food and drink; the pages of Hemingway's fiction and nonfiction are filled to overflowing with references to foreign dishes and obscure wines and liqueurs. Finally, he was a quick study at languages and was relatively fluent in quite a few. Literary Writing Hemingway's first book published in the United States, In Our Time (1925), was a collection of stories (like "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River") linked by the character of Nick Adams, who appears in many of them; by the short vignettes between the stories that tell a story of their own; by the theme of behavior in the face of life-threatening violence; and by the now-famous Hemingway style. The book was acclaimed upon its publication, and it remains a classic. The Torrents of Spring, a novella that attempts in a rather belabored fashion to satirize the work of the American writer Sherwood Anderson, followed in 1926, as did Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, a novel about expatriate life in Paris and Spain after World War I.

In both subject and style, the latter book is a genuinely radical work of Modern art. (The specifics of its central conflict are never explicitly stated, for instance.) The Sun Also Rises is probably the most-admired of all the writer's books. Men Without Women (1927) comprises stories of boxers and bullfighters, including "The Undefeated," "The Killers," and "Fifty Grand." Men Without Women also contains "Hills Like White Elephants," a story told almost entirely in dialogue. Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms toned down Hemingway's revolutionary style to yield a more conventional — and a more moving — book than the writer had produced up to that time. The result was the novel's widespread popular success as well as worldwide fame for the author himself. The story collection Winner Take Nothing followed in 1933. Less consistently satisfying than the two collections that preceded it, Winner Take Nothing nevertheless contained more formal experimentation, like the verbatim foreign dialogue in "Wine of Wyoming." At this point in his career, Hemingway seems to have become distracted by his own celebrity.

Eight years would pass between A Farewell to Arms and the writer's next novel, the slight and poorly received To Have and Have Not (1937) — which is really a collection of linked short stories that share a setting (Cuba and Key West) rather than a true novel. In the interim, Hemingway wrote two books of nonfiction: a loose, baggy treatise on bullfighting called Death in the Afternoon (1932) and The Green Hills of Africa (1935), which was about big-game hunting. All the while, the Hemingway legend was growing, thanks in no small part to the author's own embellishments (and sometimes out-and-out lies) about his past. Finally, in 1940, For Whom the Bell Tolls appeared. The book is a big novel about the Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway had covered as a correspondent and documentary filmmaker. Critics accused it, and him, of self-parody — and indeed, the novel's style is often unbearably mannered. Still, the best-selling For Whom the Bell Tolls stands among the early stories and his first two novels as Hemingway's main storytelling achievements.

During the Second World War, Hemingway occupied himself by reporting from Europe. In 1950, he published another book, the critically lambasted Across the River and Into the Trees. He recovered somewhat with The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a novella about a Cuban fisherman's struggle with a great marlin, which might be Hemingway's answer to Moby-Dick. His most popular work, The Old Man and the Sea was the last Ernest Hemingway book to be published before the author's suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961. A Moveable Feast, his charming memoir of the years spent with other expatriates in Paris during the 1920s, appeared three years later. Hemingway's fame, and the public's desire for more of his work, continues to be so formidable that his executors have brought out a number of books since his death that the writer himself had not considered fit for publication. Islands in the Stream (1970) reprises To Have and Have Not's Caribbean setting.

The Garden of Eden (1986), about a menage a trois, dramatizes the author's fascination with androgyny hinted at in The Sun Also Rises and near the end of A Farewell to Arms, as well as in stories like "The Sea Change." The Complete Short Stories: The Finca Vigia Edition (1987) contains some of the author's unpublished short fiction. And 1999's True at First Light either reports on or imagines an affair between a Hemingway-like hero and an African girl. Honors and Awards The most influential American writer of the twentieth century, Ernest Hemingway was rewarded throughout his life for his achievements. Upon the appearance of his first published stories, he received the kudos of his literary peers, giants like James Joyce and Ezra Pound. With the publication of A Farewell to Arms, he achieved bestsellerdom. By the time For Whom the Bell Tolls appeared, "Papa" Hemingway was recognized worldwide by millions who had never read a word of his prose; he had achieved a degree of celebrity that had never been approached by a literary writer and has not been matched since.

Near the end of his life, the adulation was made explicit, as The Old Man and the Sea was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. The following year, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of narration." Though his popularity has diminished somewhat in the past quarter-century due to charges of sexism and brutality in his life and work, Ernest Hemingway's influence lives on. Whether consciously or not, any writing teacher who advises students to "show, don't tell" is paying Hemingway tribute.

Question: Who wrote the book A Farewell to Arms?
Answer: Ernest Hemmingway