A Farewell to Arms

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.

Ernest Hemingway (1889-1961) wrote in a clear, spare, deceptively simple style that made him one of the most admired and imitated authors of the twentieth century. Born in Chicago, he traveled widely throughout his life, living in Italy, France, Spain, and Cuba, and reporting from the frontlines of World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II. His best-known novels are The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. A year later Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Abraham Verghese (foreword) is the author of the multimillion-copy New York Times bestselling novels The Covenant of Water and Cutting for Stone as well as Professor and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In 2016 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama.