A Farewell to Arms

Drawn from Hemingway's own experience as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I, this is a love story and a war novel that refuses either genre's usual consolations. Lieutenant Henry's affair with Catherine Barkley unfolds against a backdrop of retreat, defeat, and the grinding futility of industrialized slaughter — and Hemingway refuses to let love redeem the horror, or the horror negate the love. The famous prose style is here at full power: declarative sentences of almost biblical plainness that accumulate into something devastating. The Caporetto retreat is one of the great set pieces in American fiction. The final pages are among the most honest endings in the literature.

For those captivated by Hemingway's spare brilliance, The Sun Also Rises offers an equally devastating portrait of the Lost Generation, while The Complete Short Stories showcases his mastery of the form that first made his name.