A Farewell to Arms
1929
War novel
Hemingway's semi-autobiographical novel of the First World War, set on the Italian front. Frederick Henry, an American ambulance driver in the Italian army, is wounded by a mortar blast and falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. Against the backdrop of the disastrous Battle of Caporetto and the chaotic Italian retreat, the lovers desert the war and flee to neutral Switzerland, where the novel's idyllic third act gives way to one of literature's bleakest endings. The book established Hemingway's terse, understated style as a defining voice of modernist fiction.