A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
1929
A love story set in Italy during World War I, A Farewell to Arms was American author Ernest Hemingway’s first major success as a novelist. It was based on his wartime experiences as a volunteer ambulance driver on the Italian front.
The novel’s depictions of sex and its salacious language caused consternation when it was published in the US in 1929. Two issues of Scribner’s Magazine, where it was serialized, were banned in Boston, although the chief effect of this was to boost sales elsewhere. In Italy, Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, outraged by the book’s account of Italian military incompetence, imposed a national ban, though he may also have been partly motivated by Hemingway’s description of him as “the biggest bluff in Europe” in an article published by the Toronto Doily Star several years earlier.
In the novel, the hero, Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver serving in the Italian army, falls in love with an English nurse named Catherine Barkley, who goes on to care for him when he is wounded. Eventually forced back to the front, Henry joins the ignominious Italian retreat from Caporetto in October 1917. For Italians, Caporetto was a national humiliation, in which more than 600,000 soldiers deserted or surrendered to the Austro-German forces. Hemingway described the chaos during the retreat in unsparing detail.
The novel’s ban in Italy lasted until the late stages of World War II, by which time Mussolini was little more than a Nazi puppet. In 1944, when Nazi officials discovered that a Turin publisher had contracted the writer and translator Fernanda Pivano to produce an.
