A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway American novelist and well-known journalist was born on July 21, 1899, in Chicago and lived there until he was 18 years old. Hemingway worked as a news reporter after graduating from high school before leaving the nation to serve as an ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I. It was here that Ernest Hemingway got the idea for his novel “A Farewell to Arms. Ernest Hemingway traveled widely after joining the war effort and married many times before attempting suicide in 1961. Hemingway's works were mostly written between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Ernest Hemingway's reputation as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century was strengthened by A Farewell to Arms, one of the greatest American novels of World War I. Mainly based on Hemingway's own experiences, this is the story of a volunteer ambulance driver who is wounded ...