About The Book

Description

“I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain.” Frederic Henry is an American serving as a lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps — in a war he did not have to join and does not believe in. Catherine Barkley is an English nurse who has already lost one man to it. What begins between them as a game, something to do, and they both admit it, becomes the only thing either of them has. A trench mortar puts him in a Milan hospital for one long summer. Then the Italian line breaks at Caporetto and the retreat carries him into rain and mud and a river he has to swim to stay alive. “I had made a separate peace,” he says, and goes to find her. Published on 27 September 1929, A Farewell to Arms was the novel that made Hemingway’s reputation. Its first printing of 31,050 copies sold past fifty thousand within a month, through the Wall Street crash. It entered the United States public domain on 1 January 2025. About this edition. The complete, unabridged text of the 1929 Charles Scribner’s Sons first edition — five Books, forty-one chapters — newly typeset, with forty-one original etchings, one facing the opening of every chapter, plus a frontispiece. Nothing from the 2012 edition’s discarded endings or its modern introductions appears here: this is the novel as its first readers had it, ending where Hemingway ended it. The plates are worked in the manner of the printmakers who recorded this war while it was still being fought — Otto Dix, Kerr Eby, Percy Smith. And they draw the right war: the Italian front, the Isonzo and the Bainsizza and the retreat from Caporetto in the rain, not the Flanders mud that stands in for the First World War in most people’s minds.