A Farewell to Arms

As a youth of 18, Ernest Hemingway was eager to fight in the Great War. Poor vision kept him out of the army, so he joined the ambulance corps instead and was sent to France. Then he transferred to Italy where he became the first American wounded in that country during World War I. Hemingway came out of the European battlefields with a medal for valor and a wealth of experience that he would, 10 years later, spin into literary gold with A Farewell to Arms. This is the story of Lieutenant Henry, an American, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The two meet in Italy, and almost immediately Hemingway sets up the central tension of the novel: the tenuous nature of love in a time of war. During their first encounter, Catherine tells Henry about her fiancé of eight years who had been killed the year before in the Somme. Explaining why she hadn't married him, she says she was afraid marriage would be bad for him, then admits:

 I wanted to do something for him. You see, I didn't care about the other thing and he could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn't know. 

The two begin an affair, with Henry quite convinced that he "did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards." Soon enough, however, the game turns serious for both of them and ultimately Henry ends up deserting to be with Catherine.

FAREWELL TO ARMS

Literature & Fiction

Ernest, Hemingway

Literary

Charles scribner' Sons

The hours of this novel tell a love story, tender and moving, but dark under the inexorable shadow of what must come. The story is a thing of mood, flawlessly projected. Venice is part of it, a Venice whose canals, bars, and cosmopolitan hotel life are at first less familiar under a winter sky, but a Venice that has never been made so real. There is the incomparable Hemingway magic---a duck blind with a thin skim of morning ice over its waters; the Venetian countryside seen from a moving car, every mile alive with memories of two wars. And over it all is the brooding awareness of the tragic which invests all the great Hemingway novels, an awareness into which he has always admitted his readers from the start. (From the dustjacket)

Across the River and Through the Trees

United States

Tender Is The Night

Owner name stamp on first end page. Some shelf and edge wear. Foxing to page edges. . Pages are clean and binding is tight. Solid Book.

Tender Is the Night

Fitzgerald,F.Scott

Classics

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Melvin I. Urofsky

Contemporary History, Biography, British History & Studies, Pol. Studies

Marlborough, His Life and Times, Volume 3 (of 4)

History

Commager, Henry Steele (editor)

Churchill, Winston, S.

Europe

"One Monday morning the king, the queen, and the little prince came to visit me. But i wasn't home . . . "

One Monday Morning

Children's Books

uri-shulevitz

Geography & Cultures

This collection of critical and biographical articles covers hundreds of notable authors from the 17th century to the present day. Signed essays, 12-15 pages in length by noted scholars, provide thought-provoking insights into the lives, careers and works of American writers. Each Supplement covers approximately 20 additional authors.

American Writers I (American Writers, 1)

Biographies & Memoirs

UNGER, LEONARD

Arts & Literature

This collection of critical and biographical articles covers hundreds of notable authors from the 17th century to the present day. Signed essays, 12-15 pages in length by noted scholars, provide thought-provoking insights into the lives, careers and works of American writers. Each Supplement covers approximately 20 additional authors.

American Writers, Vol. 2 (American Writers, 2)

American Writers III (American Writers, 3)

American Writers IV (American Writers, 4)

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