The Paris AtlasCharting the writers, books, and cities worth returning to.

A Farewell to Arms

by Ernest Hemingway

An American ambulance driver, an English nurse, and the Italian front — the Great War's great love story.

Published
1929
Pages
355
Setting
Italy
Shelf rating
4.6
Where to read:Your local bookstoreYour libraryRetailer links coming soon

The story, briefly

Spoiler-free

Frederic Henry drives ambulances on the Italian front, where the war is mud, bureaucracy, and sudden randomized death; Catherine Barkley is the nurse he begins by lying to and ends by living for. Retreat, desertion, and a rowboat crossing to Switzerland follow. Drawn from Hemingway's own wounding at Fossalta at eighteen, it is the book where the famous style first carries a full-scale tragedy — rain and all.

Why we recommend it

  1. The passage everyone quotes, in context

    'Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage… were obscene beside the concrete names of villages.' The paragraph that defined the generation's disillusionment belongs to this book, and it hits differently with three hundred pages around it.

  2. The retreat from Caporetto

    Fifty pages of collapse — columns in the rain, executions at the bridge — that stand with anything ever written about armies coming apart.

  3. He rewrote the ending 39 times

    By his own count, 'to get the words right.' Read the last page and judge whether draft 39 earned it. (Bring something to hold onto.)

What this book explores

  • The war's shadowThe Great War as the wound under everything written after it.
  • DesireAppetite in all its forms, indulged and paid for.
  • MortalityDeath faced plainly — in war, at sea, in the next room.
  • DisillusionmentWhat's left when the big words — glory, honor, courage — stop working.

The real history

Hemingway was blown up by an Austrian mortar at Fossalta in July 1918, at eighteen, and fell for his Red Cross nurse in the Milan hospital — the novel's blueprint, down to the ward.

Bring it to book club

  • Frederic narrates his own desertion without ever quite defending it. Does the novel judge him? Do you?
  • Catherine is either the book's weakest writing or its most misread character — modern critics split. Where do you land?
  • Rain runs through the novel like a curse. Track where it falls; what is it doing?

A complete discussion guide is on our editorial calendar. Join the letter to hear when it ships.

Readers may also like

Cover of Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

The same war, opposite register: Céline's Bardamu decides in the first chapter that the only sane response is desertion, and says so at full volume.

Cover of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway

The after — what the survivors of this book's war did with their evenings.