A Farewell to Arms is certainly one of Hemingway's finest novels. In fact, some critics have called it his best. Though not as inventive — as extreme, really — in subject and style as The Sun Also Rises (published three years earlier), this book actually benefits from its comparatively conventional approach to storytelling; it seems more sincere, more heartfelt. (Of course, The Sun Also Rises is about World War I, too. It merely focuses on the war's tragic aftermath.)
And like William Faulkner's Light in August, A Farewell to Arms proves that its author was not merely a Modern master. He could also produce a big book in the grand tradition of the nineteenth century novel. In retrospect, it is no surprise that A Farewell to Arms is the book that made Ernest Hemingway famous. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in his Introduction to a later edition of the novel, "A Farewell to Arms more than justified the early enthusiasm of the connoisseurs of Hemingway and extended this reputation from them to the public at large."
A Farewell to Arms feels less propagandistic than Hemingway's other great war story, For Whom the Bell Tolls — which relies partly on flashback for its effect and also descends at times into the stylistic mannerism that marred the author's later work. A Farewell to Arms is vastly superior to the remaining Hemingway novels (To Have and Have Not and Across the River and Into the Trees, and the posthumously published Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden) as well as the novellas The Torrents of Spring and The Old Man and the Sea. In fact, the only other volume in the Hemingway oeuvre that stands up to a comparison with A Farewell to Arms is the writer's debut story collection, In Our Time. That book's postwar tales, "Soldier's Home" and "Big Two-Hearted River," can almost be read as sequels to A Farewell to Arms, or at least to the events that inspired the novel.
