Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, 
Illinois. His father was the owner of a prosperous real estate 
business. His father, Dr. Hemingway, imparted to Ernest the 
importance of appearances, especially in public. Dr. Hemingway 
invented surgical forceps for which he would not accept money. He 
believed that one should not profit from something important for the 
good of mankind. Ernest's father, a man of high ideals, was very 
strict and censored the books he allowed his children to read. He 
forbad Ernest's sister from studying ballet for it was coeducational, 
and dancing together led to "hell and damnation". Grace Hall 
Hemingway, Ernest's mother, considered herself pure and proper. She 
was a dreamer who was upset at anything which disturbed her 
perception of the world as beautiful. She hated dirty diapers, upset 
stomachs, and cleaning house; they were not fit for a lady. She 
taught her children to always act with decorum. She adored the 
singing of the birds and the smell of flowers. Her children were 
expected to behave properly and to please her, always. Mrs. Hemingway 
treated Ernest, when he was a small boy, as if he were a female baby 
doll and she dressed him accordingly. This arrangement was alright 
until Ernest got to the age when he wanted to be a "gun-toting Pawnee 
Bill". He began, at that time, to pull away from his mother, and 
never forgave her for his humiliation. The town of Oak Park, where 
Ernest grew up, was very old fashioned and quite religious. The 
townspeople forbad the word "virgin" from appearing in school books, 
and the word "breast" was questioned, though it appeared in the 
Bible. Ernest loved to fish, canoe and explore the woods. When he 
couldn't get outside, he escaped to his room and read books. He loved 
to tell stories to his classmates, often insisting that a friend 
listen to one of his stories. In spite of his mother's desire, he 
played on the football team at Oak Park High School. As a student, 
Ernest was a perfectionist about his grammar and studied English with 
a fervor. He contributed articles to the weekly school newspaper. It 
seems that the principal did not approve of Ernest's writings and he 
complained, often, about the content of Ernest's articles. Ernest was 
clear about his writing; he wanted people to "see and feel" and he 
wanted to enjoy himself while writing. Ernest loved having fun. If 
nothing was happening, mischievous Ernest made something happen. He 
would sometimes use forbidden words just to create a ruckus. Ernest, 
though wild and crazy, was a warm, caring individual. He loved the 
sea, mountains and the stars and hated anyone who he saw as a phoney. 
During World War I, Ernest, rejected from service because of a bad 
left eye, was an ambulance driver, in Italy, for the Red Cross.

Very much like the hero of A Farewell to Arms, Ernest is shot in his 
knee and recuperates in a hospital, tended by a caring nurse named 
Agnes. Like Frederick Henry, in the book, he fell in love with the 
nurse and was given a medal for his heroism. Ernest returned home 
after the war, rejected by the nurse with whom he fell in love. He 
would party late into the night and invite, to his house, people his 
parents disapproved of. Ernest's mother rejected him and he felt that 
he had to move from home. He moved in with a friend living in Chicago 
and he wrote articles for The Toronto Star. In Chicago he met and 
then married Hadley Richardson. She believed that he should spend all 
his time in writing, and bought him a typewriter for his birthday. 
They decided that the best place for a writer to live was Paris, 
where he could devote himself to his writing. He said, at the time, 
that the most difficult thing to write about was being a man. They 
could not live on income from his stories and so Ernest, again, wrote 
for The Toronto Star. Ernest took Hadley to Italy to show her where 
he had been during the war. He was devastated, everything had 
changed, everything was destroyed. Hadley became pregnant and was 
sick all the time. She and Ernest decided to move to Canada. He had, 
by then written three stories and ten poems. Hadley gave birth to a 
boy who they named John Hadley Nicano Hemingway. Even though he had 
his family Ernest was unhappy and decided to return to Paris. It was 
in Paris that Ernest got word that a publisher wanted to print his 
book, In Our Time, but with some changes. The publisher felt that the 
sex was to blatant, but Ernest refused to change one word. Around 
1925, Ernest started writing a novel about a young man in World War 
I, but had to stop after a few pages, and proceeded to write another 
novel, instead. This novel was based on his experiences while living 
in Pamplona, Spain. He planned on calling this book Fiesta, but 
changed the name to The Sun Also Rises, a saying from the Bible. This 
book, as in his other books, shows Hemingway obsessed with death. In 
1927, Ernest found himself unhappy with his wife and son. They 
decided to divorce and he married Pauline, a woman he had been 
involved with while he was married to Hadley. A year later, Ernest 
was able to complete his war novel which he called A Farewell to 
Arms. The novel was about the pain of war, of finding love in this 
time of pain. It portrayed the battles, the retreats, the fears, the 
gore and the terrible waste of war. This novel was well-received by 
his publisher, Max Perkins,but Ernest had to substitute dashes for 
the "dirty" language. Ernest used his life when he wrote; using 
everything he did and everything that ever happened to him. He 
nevertheless remained a private person; wanting his stories to be 
read but wanting to be left alone. He once said, "Don't look at me. 
Look at my words." A common theme throughout Hemingway's stories is 
that no matter how hard we fight to live, we end up defeated, but we 
are here and we must go on. At age 31 he wrote Death in the 
Afternoon, about bullfighting in his beloved Spain. Ernest was a 
restless man; he traveled all over the United States, Europe, Cuba 
and Africa. At the age of 37 Ernest met the woman who would be his 
third wife; Martha Gellhorn, a writer like himself. He went to Spain, 
he said, to become an "antiwar correspondent", and found that war was 
like a club where everyone was playing the same game, and he was 
never lonely. Martha went to Spain as a war correspondent and they 
lived together. He knew that he was hurting Pauline, but like his 
need to travel and have new experiences, he could not stop himself 
from getting involved with women. In 1940 he wrote For Whom the Bell 
Tolls and dedicated it to Martha, whom he married at the end of that 
year. He found himself traveling between Havana, Cuba and Ketchum, 
Idaho, which he did for the rest of his life. During World War II, 
Ernest became a secret agent for the United States. He suggested that 
he use his boat, the "Pillar", to surprise German submarines and 
attack them with hidden machine guns. It was at this time that 
Ernest, always a drinker, started drinking most of his days away. He 
would host wild, fancy parties and did not write at all during the 
next three years. At war's end, Ernest went to England and met an 
American foreign correspondent named Mary Welsh. He divorced Martha 
and married Mary in Havana, in 1946. Ernest was a man of extremes; 
living either in luxury or happy to do without material things. 
Ernest, always haunted by memories of his mother, would not go to her 
funeral when she died in 1951. He admitted that he hated his mother's 
guts. Ernest wrote The Old Man and the Sea in only two months. He was 
on top of the world, the book was printed by Life Magazine and 
thousands of copies were sold in the United States. This novel and A 
Farewell to Arms were both made into movies. In 1953 he went on a 
safari with Mary, and he was in heaven hunting big game. Though 
Ernest had a serious accident, and later became ill, he could never 
admit that he had any weaknesses; nothing would stop him, certainly 
not pain. In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Toward the 
end, Ernest started to travel again, but almost the way that someone 
does who knows that he will soon die. He suddenly started becoming 
paranoid and to forget things. He became obsessed with sin; his 
upbringing was showing, but still was inconsistent in his behavior. 
He never got over feeling like a bad person, as his father, mother 
and grandfather had taught him. In the last year of his life, he 
lived inside of his dreams, similar to his mother, who he hated with 
all his heart. He was suicidal and had electric shock treatments for 
his depression and strange behavior. On a Sunday morning, July 2, 
1961, Ernest Miller Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun.

Ernest Hemingway takes much of the storyline of his novel, A Farewell 
to Arms, from his personal experiences. The main character of the 
book, Frederick Henry, often referred to as Tenete, experiences many 
of the same situations which Hemingway, himself, lived. Some of these 
similarities are exact while some are less similar, and some events 
have a completely different outcome. Hemingway, like Henry, enjoyed 
drinking large amounts of alcohol. Both of them were involved in 
World War I, in a medical capacity, but neither of them were regular 
army personnel. Like Hemingway, Henry was shot in his right knee, 
during a battle. Both men were Americans, but a difference worth 
noting was that Hemingway was a driver for the American Red Cross, 
while Henry was a medic for the Italian Army. In real life, Hemingway 
met his love, Agnes, a nurse, in the hospital after being shot; Henry 
met his love, Catherine Barkley, also a nurse, before he was shot and 
hospitalized. In both cases, the relationships with these women were 
strengthened while the men were hospitalized. Another difference is 
that Hemingway's romance was short-lived, while, the book seemed to 
indicate that, Henry's romance, though they never married, was strong 
and would have lasted. In A Farewell to Arms, Catherine and her child 
died while she was giving birth, this was not the case with Agnes who 
left Henry for an Italian Army officer. It seems to me that the 
differences between the two men were only surface differences. They 
allowed Hemingway to call the novel a work of fiction. Had he written 
an autobiography the book would probably not have been well-received 
because Hemingway was not, at that time, a well known author. 
Although Hemingway denied critics' views that A Farewell to Arms was 
symbolic, had he not made any changes they would not have been as 
impressed with the war atmosphere and with the naivete of a young man 
who experiences war for the first time. Hemingway, because he was so 
private, probably did not want to expose his life to everyone, and so 
the slight changes would prove that it was not himself and his own 
experiences which he was writing about. I believe that Hemingway had 
Catherine and her child die, not to look different from his own life, 
but because he had a sick and morbid personality. There is great 
power in being an author, you can make things happen which do not 
necessarily occur in real life. It is obvious that Hemingway felt, as 
a young child and throughout his life, powerless, and so he created 
lives by writing stories. Hemingway acted out his feelings of 
inadequacy and powerlessness by hunting, drinking, spending lots of 
money and having many girlfriends. I think that Hemingway was 
obsessed with death and not too sane. His obsession shows itself in 
the morbid death of Miss Barkley and her child. Hemingway was 
probably very confused about religion and sin and somehow felt or 
feared that people would or should be punished for enjoying life's 
pleasures.

Probably, the strongest reason for writing about Catherine Barkley's 
death and the death of her child was Hemingway's belief that death 
comes to everyone; it was inevitable. Death ends life before you have 
a chance to learn and live. He writes, in A Farewell to Arms, "They 
threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught 
you off base they killed you. ... they killed you in the end. You 
could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you." Hemingway, 
even in high school, wrote stories which showed that people should 
expect the unexpected. His stories offended and angered the principal 
of his school. I think that Hemingway liked shocking and annoying 
people; he was certainly rebellious. If he would have written an 
ending where Miss Barkley and her child had lived, it would have been 
too easy and common; Hemingway was certainly not like everyone else, 
and he seemed to be proud of that fact. Even the fact that Hemingway 
wrote curses and had a lot of sex in his books shows that he liked to 
shock people. When his publisher asked that he change some words and 
make his books more acceptable to people, Hemingway refused, then was 
forced to compromise. I think that the major difference between 
Hemingway and Henry was that Henry was a likable and normal person 
while Hemingway was strange and very difficult. Hemingway liked doing 
things his way and either people had to accept him the way he was or 
too bad for them. I think that Hemingway probably did not even like 
himself and that was one reason that he couldn't really like other 
people. Hemingway seemed to use people only for his own pleasure, and 
maybe he wanted to think that he was like Henry who was a nicer 
person. In the book, Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Farewell 
to Arms, Malcolm Cowley focuses on the symbolism of rain. He sees 
rain, a frequent occurrence in the book, as symbolizing disaster. He 
points out that, at the beginning of A Farewell to Arms, Henry talks 
about how "things went very badly" and how this is connected to "At 
the start of the winter came permanent rain". Later on in the book we 
see Miss Barkley afraid of rain. She says, "Sometimes I see me dead 
in it", referring to the rain. It is raining the entire time Miss 
Barkley is in childbirth and when both she and her baby die. Wyndham 
Lewis, in the same book of critical essays, points out that Hemingway 
is obsessed with war, the setting for much of A Farewell to Arms. He 
feels that the author sees war as an alternative to baseball, a sport 
of kings. He says that the war years "were a democratic, a levelling, 
school". For Hemingway, raised in a strict home environment, war is a 
release; an opportunity to show that he is a real man.

The essayist, Edgar Johnson says that for the loner "it is society as 
a whole that is rejected, social responsibility, social concern" 
abandoned. Lieutenant Henry, like Hemingway, leads a private life as 
an isolated individual. He socializes with the officers, talks with 
the priest and visits the officer's brothel, but those relationships 
are superficial. This avoidance of real relationships and involvement 
do not show an insensitive person, but rather someone who is 
protecting himself from getting involved and hurt. It is clear that 
in all of Hemingway's books and from his own life that he sees the 
world as his enemy. Johnson says, "He will solve the problem of 
dealing with the world by taking refuge in individualism and isolated 
personal relationships and sensations". John Killinger says that it 
was inevitable that Catherine and her baby would die. The theme, that 
a person is trapped in relationships, is shown in all Hemingway's 
stories. In A Farewell to Arms Catherine asks Henry if he feels 
trapped, now that she is pregnant. He admits that he does, "maybe a 
little". This idea, points out Killinger, is ingrained in Hemingway's 
thinking and that he was not too happy about fatherhood. In Cross 
Country Snow, Nick regrets that he has to give up skiing in the Alps 
with a male friend to return to his wife who is having a baby. In 
Hemingway's story Hills Like White Elephants the man wants his 
sweetheart to have an abortion so that they can continue as they once 
lived. In To Have and Have Not, Richard Gordon took his wife to "that 
dirty aborting horror". Catherine's death, in A Farewell to Arms, 
saves the author's hero from the hell of a complicated life.

ENDNOTES 

Peter Buckley, Ernest, The Dial Press: 1978, p.96 . Peter Buckley, 
p.97 . Peter Buckley, p.98 . Peter Buckley, p.104 . Peter Buckley, 
p.104 . Peter Buckley, p.112 . Peter Buckley, p.114 . Peter Buckley, 
p.117 . Peter Buckley, p.123 . Peter Buckley, p.127 . Peter Buckley, 
p.129 . Peter Buckley, p.135 . Peter Buckley, p.138 . Peter Buckley, 
p.144 . Peter Buckley, p.152 . Peter Buckley, p.152 . Peter Buckley, 
p.154 . Peter Buckley, p.160 . Malcolm Cowley, "Rain as Disaster", 
Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms, Jay Gellens, 
Prentice-Hall, Inc.:1970, pp.54-55 . Wyndham Lewis, "The Dumb Ox in 
Love and War", Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Farewell to 
Arms, Jay Gellens, Prentice-Hall, Inc.:1970, p.76 . Edgar 
Johnson, "Farewell the Separate Peace", Twentieth Century 
Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms, Jay Gellens, Prentice-Hall, 
Inc.:1970, pp.112-113 . John Killinger, "The Existential Hero", 
Twentieth Century Interpretations of A Farewell to Arms, Jay Gellens, 
Prentice-Hall, Inc.:1970, pp.103-105