SOURCE: “A Farewell to Arms: Pseudoautobiography and Personal Metaphor,” in Ernest Hemingway: The Writer in Context, edited by James Nagel, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984, pp. 107-28.

In the following essay, Bell uses drafts and revisions of the novel to show that, while not autobiographical in every detail, A Farewell to Arms is highly realistic as a reflection of Hemingway's state of mind.

Autobiographic novels are, of course, fictions, constructs of the imagination, even when they seem to incorporate authenticating bits and pieces of personal history. But all fiction is autobiography, no matter how remote from the author's experience the tale seems to be; he leaves his mark, expresses his being, his life, in any tale. A Farewell to Arms can illustrate both of these statements.

Ernest Hemingway's novel is not the autobiography some readers have thought it. It was not memory but printed source material that supplied...