A Comparison of Hemingway and Frederic in A Farewell to Arms

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Parallels Between Hemingway and Frederic in 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"(Bell, 17). 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 stor...

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...est Hemingway: The Writer in Context. Ed. James Nagel. Madison: U of Wisconsin, 1984.

Bloom, Harold. Introduction. Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1987.

Donaldson, Scott. "Frederic Henry's Escape and the Pose of Passivity." Hemingway: A Revaluation. Ed. Donald R. Noble. Troy: Whitson, 1983.

Lewis, Wyndham. Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms. Ed. Jay Gellens. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1970. 56-64.

Schneider, Daniel. "Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: The Novel as Pure Poetry." Modern Fiction Studies, 14 (Autumn 1968): 283-96.

Spanier, Sandra Whipple. "Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War." New Essays on A Farewell to Arms.

Ed. Scott Donaldson. New York: Cambridge U, 1990.

Young, Philip. Ernest Hemingway. New York: Rinehart, 1952.

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