The definitive edition of the classic novel of love during wartime, featuring all of the alternate endings: âFascinatingâŚserves as an artifact of a bygone craft, with handwritten notes and long passages crossed out, giving readers a sense of an authorâs processâ (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 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 battlefieldâweary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertionâthis 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 of the alternative endings together for the first time, along with early drafts of other essential passages, offering new insight into Hemingwayâs craft and creative process and the evolution of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Featuring Hemingwayâs own 1948 introduction to an illustrated reissue of the novel, a personal foreword by the authorâs son Patrick Hemingway, and a new introduction by the authorâs grandson SeĂĄn Hemingway, this edition of A Farewell to Arms is truly a celebration.