A Farewell to Arms

6 Pages 1420 Words

A Farewell To Arms
All fiction is autobiographical, no matter how obscure from the author's
experience it may be, marks of their life can be detected in any of their
tales. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is based largely on Hemingway's
own personal experiences. The main character of the novel, Frederic Henry,
experiences many of the same situations that Hemingway lived. Some of these
similarities are exact, while some are less similar, and some events have a
completely different outcome.
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. Hemingway
worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star after graduating from high
school in 1917. During World War I, he served as an ambulance driver in the
Italian infantry and was wounded just before his 19th birthday. Hospitalized,
Hemingway fell in love with an older nurse. Later, while working in Paris as
a correspondent for the Toronto Star, he became involved with the expatriate
literary and artistic circle surrounding Gertrude Stein. During the Spanish
Civil War, Hemingway served as a correspondent on the loyalist side. He fought
in World War II and then settled in Cuba in 1945. In 1954, Hemingway was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. After his expulsion from Cuba by the
Castro regime, he moved to Idaho. In his life, Hemingway married four times
and wrote numerous essays, short stories and novels. The effects of
Hemingway's lifelong depressions, illnesses and accidents caught up with him.
In July 1961, he committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho. What remains, are his
works, the product of a talented author.
A Farewell to Arms is the story of Frederic Henry, an American, driving an
ambulance for the Italian Army during World War I. The novel takes us through
Frederic's experiences in war and his love affair with Catherine Barkley, an
American nurse in Italy. The novel starts in the northern mountains of Italy
at the beginning of World War I....