A Farewell to Arms is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, set during the Italian campaign of World War I.
The film In Love and War, made in 1996, depicts Hemingway's life in Italy as an ambulance driver in events prior to his writing of A Farewell to Arms.
Frederic and his fellow drivers (Passini, Manera, Gordini and Gavuzzi) take the ambulance into war.
Miss Van Campen discovers empty liquor bottles in Frederic's room and takes alcoholism as the cause for his condition.
She files a report for the cancellation of convalescent leave, and Frederic is called back to the war front.
Frederic travels to Bainsizza, where he meets Gino, who tells him about an artillery battery of terrifying guns that the Austrians have.
He and his men quickly get lost, and their cars are stuck in the mud, Frederic orders the two engineering sergeants riding with Bonello to help.
As soon as they cross the bridge, Frederic is taken by the military police to a place on the river bank where officers are being interrogated and executed for the "treachery" that supposedly led to the Italian defeat.
He goes to visit Ralph Simmons, one of the opera singers that he encountered earlier, and asks about the procedures for traveling to Switzerland.
Emilio, a bartender, informs him that two English nurses are staying at a small hotel near the train station.
Catherine and Frederic plan to flee to Switzerland as Emilio makes all possible arrangements for their travel in a rowboat.
The novel was partly based on Hemingway's own experiences serving in the Italian campaigns during the First World War.
The inspiration for Catherine Barkley was Agnes von Kurowsky, a nurse who cared for Hemingway in a hospital in Milan after he had been wounded.
Because his previous novel, The Sun Also Rises, had been written as a roman à clef, readers assumed A Farewell to Arms to be autobiographical.
[4] A Farewell to Arms was begun during his time at Willis M. Spear's guest ranch in Wyoming's Bighorns.
[8] Some pieces of the novel were written in Piggott, Arkansas, at the home of his then-wife Pauline Pfeiffer,[9] and in Mission Hills, Kansas, while she was awaiting delivery of their baby.
[10] Pauline underwent a caesarean section as Hemingway was writing the scene about Catherine Barkley's childbirth.
The newly published edition presents an appendix with the many alternate endings Hemingway wrote for the novel in addition to pieces from early draft manuscripts.
[15] The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum Hemingway collection has two handwritten pages with possible titles for the book.
The poem Portrait of a Lady by T. S. Eliot also starts off by quoting this Marlowe work: "Thou hast committed / Fornication: but that was in another country, / And besides, the wench is dead."
[18] Hemingway's corrected text has not been incorporated into modern published editions of the novel, but there are some audiobook versions that are uncensored.
[19] Also, the novel could not be published in Italy until 1948 because the Fascist regime considered it detrimental to the honor of the Armed Forces, both in its description of the Battle of Caporetto and because of a certain anti-militarism implied in the work.
More than one biographer has suggested that, at the base of the censorship of the Fascist regime in the novel, there had also been a personal antipathy between the writer and Benito Mussolini.
[20] The Italian translation had in fact already been prepared illegally in 1943 by Fernanda Pivano, leading to her arrest in Turin.
A Farewell to Arms was met with favorable criticism and is considered one of Hemingway's best literary works.
[21] Gore Vidal wrote of the text: "... a work of ambition, in which can be seen the beginning of the careful, artful, immaculate idiocy of tone that since has marked ... [Hemingway's] prose".
Upon its flimsy publication—due to the medium of its release—through Scribner's Magazine, it was banned from Boston newsstands due to accusations of a pornographic nature, despite Hemingway's deliberate exclusion of graphic descriptions of sex, using omission as a literary device.
In December 2023, a new film adaptation was announced, with Michael Winterbottom to direct and Tom Blyth to star.
[26] The 1996 film In Love and War, directed by Richard Attenborough and starring Chris O'Donnell and Sandra Bullock, depicts Hemingway's life in Italy as an ambulance driver in the events prior to his writing of A Farewell to Arms.