A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway (1929)
“Hemingway's most devastating love story — where war and biology conspire to destroy everything men pretend to control.”
At a Glance
American ambulance driver Frederic Henry serves in the Italian army during WWI, falls in love with British nurse Catherine Barkley, and deserts after the catastrophic Italian retreat at Caporetto. He and Catherine flee to Switzerland, where she dies in childbirth along with their stillborn son. The novel ends mid-sentence in grief.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published in 1929, it sold 80,000 copies in the first four months despite the stock market crash — one of the first mass-market serious novels. Established Hemingway's prose style as the defining American literary voice of the 20th century and permanently altered what war writing could be: not heroic and patriotic, but clinical, specific, and grief-soaked.
Diction Profile
Informal to neutral — short words, few adjectives, dialogue-heavy, technical vocabulary for military and medical contexts
Very low