A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms is a novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway, first published in 1929. It is set during the Italian campaign of the First World War.

Frederic Henry is an American lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian army, and Catherine Barkley is the English nurse he meets there. The book is a first-person account of their affair, and of the soldiers and the fighting and the movement of populations around it.

Its publication established Hemingway as a modern American writer of considerable standing, and it became his first bestseller. It has since been called the finest American war novel to come out of the First World War, and it is a love story and a war story at the same time.

The title is thought to have been taken from a sixteenth-century poem of the same name by the English dramatist George Peele. The book has been adapted for the stage and for film more than once, and it entered the public domain in 2025.