A Farewell to Arms
(Ernest Hemingway)

Ernest Hemingway was born in Illinois in 1899 to conventional, middle-class parents. As he got older, he resented his parents for their conventional ways and morals and began to incorporate their beliefs into his stories. He briefly worked as a newspaper write, but when he was twenty years old he joined the Italian Red Cross and served as an Italian ambulance driver in World War I. Two of the experiences that Hemingway had while in the war were the inspiration for “A Farewell to Arms”, which is one of his most well-known and successful novels.

The first experience was when Hemingway was struck by a mortar round which nearly killed him and he was sent to a hospital in Milan. In the hospital, Hemingway had his second inspirational experience: he fell in love with a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. It has been widely believed that Hemingway’s relationship with Agnes inspired the relationship between Catherine and Lieutenant Henry in “A Farewell to Arms”. While recovering Hemingway settled into his writing and married the first of four wives. He began to publish the books that would make him a household name in the 1920’s.

“A Farewell to Arms” has been praised by critics for the powerful writing style and the vivid and realistic descriptions of life during and after the war. Despite the fact that Hemingway has been seen as a tremendously skilled writer, the quality markedly deteriorated post-World War II, along with Hemingway’s mental and physical health. He earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1952 for “The Old Man and the Sea” and a Nobel Prize in 1955 before taking his own life six years later, in 1961.