A Farewell to Arms

Critical reception

A Farewell to Arms was met with favorable criticism and is considered one of Hemingway's best literary works.[20]

Gore Vidal wrote of the text: "... a work of ambition, in which can be seen the beginning of the careful, artful, immaculate idiocy of tone that since has marked ... [Hemingway's] prose".[21] The last line of the 1929 New York Times review reads: "It is a moving and beautiful book."[22]

Baker remarks on the theme of A Farewell to Arms: "After ten years of meditation and digestive of his experience, Hemingway lays before his readers a work which is far from a mere war experience, nor a store of love and death during the war."

However, since publication, A Farewell to Arms has also been the target of various controversy. Upon its flimsy publication—due to the medium of its release—through Scribner's Magazine, it was banned from Boston newsstands due to accusations of a pornographic nature, despite Hemingway's deliberate exclusion of graphic descriptions of sex, using omission as a literary device.[23]


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