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


Amid the horrors of the Italian front in World War I, American ambulance driver Frederic Henry and English nurse Catherine Barkley fall hopelessly in love. For Frederic, the nurse’s kindness and beauty are an anchor against the carnage; for Catherine, the ambulance driver is a lifeboat in the sea of grief for her first love. But even their passion is not enough to forestall the battle lines that creep ever closer with each Italian loss, and as the chaos and tragedy of war threaten their love, Frederic and Catherine must face the fragile nature of their humanity head-on.

In his signature spare prose, Hemingway draws from his own experience as an ambulance driver in World War I to evoke the horrors of war with brutal precision. A Farewell to Arms, his first bestseller, is a masterful portrayal of humanity in all its highs and lows that secures Hemingway’s place among the foremost authors of American literature.
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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

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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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