A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Summary
American ambulance officer Frederic Henry serves on the Italian front during the First World War and falls in love with English nurse Catherine Barkley, their fragile happiness set against the chaos of retreat, desertion, and eventual personal tragedy. Hemingway strips his prose to declarative sentences that let the brutality of war and the fragility of love speak for themselves without authorial commentary. The novel is widely regarded as one of the finest works of fiction to emerge from the First World War.
Historical Context & Significance
The 1930 Pulitzer for fiction went to Oliver La Farge's Laughing Boy, a novel of Navajo life that has since faded from wide readership. Hemingway would not win the Pulitzer until more than two decades later, for The Old Man and the Sea.