# of Words: 315

A Farewell to Arms was printed in 1929 by Ernest Hemingway, a Nobel Prize-winning American writer. Like the protagonist, Hemingway served at the Italian Army as a Red Crossambulance driver during World War I, got wounded, also spent time in an American Army in Milan, where he fulfilled with a nurse. Similar to characters in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway was profoundly influenced by his own experiences at war.

Actually, Hemingway is considered to be part of the "The Lost Generation." The phrase was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to Modernist artists that felt "lost" after seeing the horrors of World War I.

Hemingway certainly relied on his own experiences in WWI Italy to write this novel, but he did use other sources as well. Though A Farewell to Armsbegins in 1916, Hemingway did not get to Italy until the summer of 1918. The Italian escape from Caporetto, described in these detailed in the novel, began in October 1917. So how did Hemingway describe it so well? The novel is meticulously researched. Hemingway was a journalist and worked for the Kansas City Star paper when the retreat was on, read details of it, and was very concerned over the war generally. (For a discussion of the importance of newspapers to the novel, see "Symbols, Imagery, and Allegory.") It is very likely that such concern motivated him to enlist with the Red Cross at the first location.

A Farewell to Arms caused a great deal of fuss when its very first installment was released by Scribner's Magazine. The Boston superintendent of police kept Scribner's away newsstands, though not for long. He maintained that it was pornography. (Check out "Sex" for more.) Fortunately, the ban only boosted earnings and gave the novel free publicity. Nowadays, it's hardly considered pornographic and is instead known for its sensitive depiction of the war. The novel is even educated at U.S. military academies.

Related Papers

Beowulf Unknown

It's composed in Old English, the language spoken in Britain before the Norman Conquest in 1066--which is, before the extensive influence of French on the English we speak today. Still, Beowulf has come to be known as the foundational epic of English and British culture, in much the same way in which the Iliad is a foundational epic for historical Greece. Beowulf is a tough mixture of Big crucial Ideas that, like Old English language, might be unknown to you initially. The idea is that your......Read More

For Whom The Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's 1940 novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, is a classic warfare romance (that is a war play and a love, in one). Set in the hills of Spain in 1937, it tells the story of Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the Republicans (that is one facet of the Spanish Civil War, not the American political party) who is ordered to blow up a bridge as part of a bigger offensive. A good deal of sweat, blood, and tears went into this book, and we mean actually. It is really wrapped in, and......Read More

Catch-22 Joseph Heller

Let us face it: there's a whole lot about this crazy merry-go-round that we call life which may give us the impression that we've taken a couple too many mad pills. So here is the real question: what do you do about that atmosphere? Well, if you're Joseph Heller, you compose Catch-22, one of the most influential books of all time and a powerful indictment of humankind's most mad practice: warfare. The book--Heller's most famous by far--was printed in 1961, at a time when America was between 2......Read More

Related Topics