"Ernest Hemingway famously said that he rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right. This edition collects all of the alternative endings together for the first time, along with early drafts of other essential passages, offering new insight into Hemingway's craft and creative process and the evolution of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Featuring Hemingway's own 1948 introduction to an illustrated...

Presents a narrative portrait of Europe in the years leading up to World War I that illuminates the political, cultural, and economic factors and contributing personalities that shaped major events.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel features Amory Blaine, a handsome, wealthy, spoiled, and snobbish young man from the Midwest who attends Princeton University to acquire a refined sense of the proper "social" values. Lacking all sense of purpose, he interests himself primarily in literary cults, vaguely "liberal" student activities, and a series of flirtations with some rather predatory young ladies.

France, 1916: Artist Edouard Lefevre leaves his young wife, Sophie, to fight at the front. When their small town falls to the Germans in the midst of World War II, Edouard's portrait of Sophie draws the eye of the new Kommandant. As the officer's dangerous obsession deepens, Sophie will risk everything--her family, her reputation, and her life--to see her husband again. Almost a century later, Sophie's portrait is given to Liv Halston by her young...

"The heroic American contribution to World War I is one of the great stories of the twentieth century, and yet is largely overlooked by history. In Sons of Freedom, historian Geoffrey Wawro presents the dramatic narrative of the courageous American troops who took up arms in a conflict 4,000 miles across the Atlantic, and in doing so ensured the Allies' victory. Historians have long dismissed the American war effort as too little too late: a delayed...

At an aid station in France in October 1918, Bess Crawford, a nurse, encounters an injured, unidentified French lieutenant, who yells in fluent German after being attacked by a fellow patient. Though Bess's matron suggests that the Frenchman is from German-speaking Alsace-Lorraine, Bess isn't so sure. Two weeks later, Bess is shot while in the trenches and is sent to Paris to recuperate, and finds the perfect opportunity to pursue the matter, with...

"World War I, in the background of Rebecca West's first novel, was "the first war that women could imagine," writes Samuel Hynes in his eloquent introduction, "and so it was the first that a woman could write into a novel." Narrated by a woman who, like West, has never experienced war and yet for whom the war was very real, The Return of the Soldier (1918) takes place not on a battlefield, but in an isolated country house. It examines the relationships...

Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876 – September 22, 1958) was an American writer, often called the American Agatha Christie,[1] although her first mystery novel was published 14 years before Christie's first novel in 1922. Rinehart is considered the source of the phrase "The butler did it" from her novel The Door (1930), although the novel does not use the exact phrase. Rinehart is also considered to have invented the "Had-I-But-Known" school...

In the last of his World War I adventures, Richard Hannay undertakes his most dangerous assignment yet When England calls, Richard Hannay answers. Not yet forty and already a brigadier general, he has led the charge into some of the fiercest fighting of World War I: Loos, the Somme, Arras. There is no telling how far up the ranks he might climb if only the Foreign Office would stop taking him off the front lines for cloak and dagger work. Adding insult...

Independent-minded Bess Crawford's upbringing is far different from that of the usual upper-middle-class British gentlewoman. At the outbreak of WWI, she volunteers for the nursing corps, serving from the battlefields of France to the doomed hospital ship Britannic. On one voyage, she promises to a deliver a message from a dying officer to his brother. Once she's able to do so, she's disturbed at the brother's indifferent reception of the message,...