Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

A Farewell to Arms

Encyclopedia : A : AF : AFA : A Farewell to Arms


A Farewell to Arms is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Ernest Hemingway in 1929. Much of the novel was written at the home of Hemingway's in-laws in Piggott, Arkansas.

The novel, a love story, draws heavily on Hemingway's experiences as a young soldier in Italy. It tells the story of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, a young American ambulance driver serving in the Italian army during World War I. Henry falls in love with the English nurse Catherine Barkley. After he is wounded at the front by a trench mortar shell, she tends to him in the hospital during his recuperation, and their relationship develops. His recuperation and romance with the now pregnant Catherine ends abruptly when Henry must return to the front. Henry narrowly escapes death at the hands of fanatical Italian soldiers, who are executing officers separated from their troops during the Italians' disastrous retreat following the Battle of Caporetto. He finds Catherine, and after a sojourn in an Italian resort, the couple flees to Switzerland on the eve of Henry's arrest for deserting. In Switzerland, their child is born dead, and Catherine dies shortly after due to hemorrhages. A Farewell to Arms is an excellent example of the simple, terse prose style that made Hemingway famous.

A film adaptation of the same name was made in 1932, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was written by Oliver H.P. Garrett and Benjamin Glazer, from the Hemingway novel, and was directed by Frank Borzage. The movie stars Helen Hayes, Gary Cooper and Adolphe Menjou.

The film was remade with the same title in 1957, starring Jennifer Jones, Rock Hudson and Vittorio De Sica and was directed by Charles Vidor and John Huston. De Sica was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role in this version.

The 1996 movie In Love and War, directed by Richard Attenborough, is a more biographical work, based on the same background as A Farewell to Arms.

External links


Ernest Hemingway Books
Novels: The Torrents of Spring | The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) | A Farewell to Arms | To Have and Have Not | For Whom the Bell Tolls | Across the River and Into the Trees | The Old Man and the Sea | Adventures of a Young Man | Islands in the Stream | The Garden of Eden
Non Fiction: Death in the Afternoon | Green Hills of Africa | The Dangerous Summer | A Moveable Feast | Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961 | Under Kilimanjaro
Short Story Books: Three Stories and Ten Poems | In Our Time | Men Without Women | The Snows of Kilimanjaro | Winner Take Nothing | The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories | The Essential Hemingway | The Hemingway Reader | The Nick Adams Stories | The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway | Collected Stories

 


From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: