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A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms

About the Book

A collectible hardcover edition of Hemingway’s beloved novel of doomed love during wartime, with a new foreword by Abraham Verghese, the multimillion-copy bestselling author of The Covenant of Water and Cutting for Stone

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

A Penguin Vitae Edition

A Farewell to Arms is one of Ernest Hemingway’s most popular books, a masterpiece that is not only among the greatest novels to come out of World War I but also one of the most profoundly moving in the American canon. Based on Hemingway’s own experience volunteering with the Red Cross in Italy during World War I, and written when he was only thirty, it tells the story of Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver, and Catherine Barkley, an English nurse. For Frederic, Catherine’s kindness and beauty shore him up against the carnage of battle; for Catherine, Frederic’s strength and devotion are a lifeboat in the sea of grief over her first love. Through injury, surgery, and the psychic fallout of war, they maintain an overwhelming desire to be together, even as forces conspire to keep them apart. Hemingway captures the intensity of both love and war with the taut immediacy and spare, understated eloquence that are his hallmarks, reminding us why this novel—his first bestseller—endures as a favorite, and why the Nobel laureate ranks among our most treasured writers.

Penguin Vitae—loosely translated as "Penguin of one's life"—is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.
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Praise for A Farewell to Arms

“I believe A Farewell to Arms is Hemingway’s finest novel. It is also the quintessential war novel. . . . When I first read A Farewell to Arms, it took only a few chapters for me to know I was reading something very different. . . . As a budding writer, I found much to admire in the way Hemingway drew on his experience with trauma, death, and chaotic medical intervention. . . . I have read A Farewell to Arms many times over the last fifty years, and I love how well it holds up with each reading.” —Abraham Verghese, from the Foreword

“A moving and beautiful book.” —The New York Times

“A towering ornament of American literature.” —The Washington Times
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Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Series

The Sound and the Fury
A Farewell to Arms
Mansfield Park
Northanger Abbey
Pride and Prejudice
The Whale Rider
Monkey King
The Wizard of Oz
Orlando
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing
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About the Author

Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was born in Illinois and began his career as a reporter before enlisting as an ambulance driver at the Italian front in World War I. Hemingway and his first (of four) wives lived in Paris in the 1920s, as part of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community, before moving to Key West, Florida, and later to Cuba. Known first for short stories, he sealed his literary reputation with his novels, including The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea. More by Ernest Hemingway
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About the Author

Abraham Verghese
Abraham Verghese is Professor and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The founding director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, he is the author of My Own Country, a 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a Time Best Book of the Year; The Tennis Partner, a New York Times Notable Book; and, most recently, the critically acclaimed novel Cutting for Stone, which was a national bestseller. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his essays and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. In 2016 Verghese received a National Humanities Medal from President Obama. He lives in Palo Alto, California. More by Abraham Verghese
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