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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
As a youth of 18, Ernest Hemingway was eager to fight in the Great War. Poor vision kept him out of the army, so he joined the ambulance corps instead and was sent to France. Then he transferred to Italy where he became the first American wounded in that country during World War I. Hemingway came out of the European battlefields with a medal for valor and a wealth of experience that he would, 10 years later, spin into literary gold with A Farewell to Arms. This is the story of Lieutenant Henry, an American, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The two meet in Italy, and almost immediately Hemingway sets up the central tension of the novel: the tenuous nature of love in a time of war. During their first encounter, Catherine tells Henry about her fiancé of eight years who had been killed the year before in the Somme. Explaining why she hadn't married him, she says she was afraid marriage would be bad for him, then admits: 

I wanted to do something for him. You see, I didn't care about the other thing and he could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn't know. 

The two begin an affair, with Henry quite convinced that he "did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards." Soon enough, however, the game turns serious for both of them and ultimately Henry ends up deserting to be with Catherine. 

Hemingway was not known for either unbridled optimism or happy endings, and A Farewell to Arms, like his other novels (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, and To Have and Have Not), offers neither. What it does provide is an unblinking portrayal of men and women behaving with grace under pressure, both physical and psychological, and somehow finding the courage to go on in the face of certain loss. --Alix Wilber - Amazon.com
(Paperback - June 1995)

The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway
(Paperback - June 1999)

The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
(Paperback - March 1995)

For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls begins and ends in a pine-scented forest, somewhere in Spain. The year is 1937 and the Spanish Civil War is in full swing. Robert Jordan, a demolitions expert attached to the International Brigades, lies "flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." The sylvan setting, however, is at sharp odds with the reason Jordan is there: he has come to blow up a bridge on behalf of the antifascist guerrilla forces. He hopes he'll be able to rely on their local leader, Pablo, to help carry out the mission, but upon meeting him, Jordan has his doubts: "I don't like that sadness, he thought. That sadness is bad. That's the sadness they get before they quit or before they betray. That is the sadness that comes before the sell-out." For Pablo, it seems, has had enough of the war. He has amassed for himself a small herd of horses and wants only to stay quietly in the hills and attract as little attention as possible. Jordan's arrival--and his mission--have seriously alarmed him. 

"I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?" He turned to Robert Jordan. "What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and tell me what I must do?"

In one short chapter Hemingway lays out the blueprint for what is to come: Jordan's sense of duty versus Pablo's dangerous self-interest and weariness with the war. Complicating matters even more are two members of the guerrilla leader's small band: his "woman" Pilar, and Maria, a young woman whom Pablo rescued from a Republican prison train. Unlike her man, Pilar is still fiercely devoted to the cause and as Pablo's loyalty wanes, she becomes the moral center of the group. Soon Jordan finds himself caught between the two, even as his own resolve is tested by his growing feelings for Maria. 

For Whom the Bell Tolls combines two of the author's recurring obsessions: war and personal honor. The pivotal battle scene involving El Sordo's last stand is a showcase for Hemingway's narrative powers, but the quieter, ongoing conflict within Robert Jordan as he struggles to fulfill his mission perhaps at the cost of his own life is a testament to his creator's psychological acuity. By turns brutal and compassionate, it is arguably Hemingway's most mature work and one of the best war novels of the 20th century. --Alix Wilber - Amazon.com
(Paperback - July 1995)
 

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway : The Finca Vigia Edition by Ernest Hemingway (Preface), Charles, Jr. Scribner (Preface) (Paperback - August 1998)

 

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (Preface) (Paperback - May 1996)

Hemingway on Fishing
by Ernest Hemingway, et al
(Hardcover)
 

Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway (Paperback - February 1996)

 

Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway (Paperback - December 1997)

 

Hemingway on Hunting by Ernest Hemingway, Sean Hemingway (Editor) (Hardcover)

 

Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway (Paperback - April 1999)

Ernest Hemingway A to Z
by Charles M. Oliver
(Paperback - June 1999)

In Our Time
by Ernest Hemingway
(Paperback - January 1996)
 

The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemingway (Paperback - March 1981)

 

Ernest Hemingway : Seven Decades of Criticism by Linda Wagner-Martin (Editor) (Paperback - November 1998)

 

The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway, James A. Michener (Introduction) (Paperback - December 1997)

 

The Snows of Kilimanjaro : And Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway (Paperback - October 1995)

To Have and Have Not
by Ernest Hemingway
(Paperback - March 1996)

The Garden of Eden
by Ernest Hemingway
(Paperback - September 1995)

Walks in Hemingway's Paris: A Guide to Paris for the Literary Traveler
by Noel Riley Fitch
(Paperback - April 1992)
 

Ernest Hemingway Audio Collection [ABRIDGED] by Ernest Hemingway (Performer), et al (Audio CD - May 2001)

 

The Short Stories/the First Forty-Nine Stories With a Brief Preface by the Author : The First Forty-Nine Stories With a Brief Introduction by the Auth by Ernest Hemingway (Preface) (Paperback - August 1995)

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties
by Ronald Berman
(Hardcover - January 2001)
Out of Print

A Hemingway Odyssey : Special Places in His Life
by H. Lea Lawrence, Ernest Big Two-Hearted River Hemingway
(Paperback - May 1999)

El Viejo Y El Mar
by Ernest Hemingway, et al
(Paperback - April 1999)
Out of Print - Try Used Books