Hemingway in Love and War: The Lost Diary of Agnes von Kurowsky, Her Letters, and Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway.

VILLARD, Henry Serrano and James Nagel. [Ernest Hemingway].

Item Number: 124607

Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989.

First edition of Villard’s intimate account of his friendship with Hemingway and his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, the model for Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Carolyn and John Jones with best wishes Henry Serrano Villard Washington D.C. 1989.” Fine in a fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Marianne Perlak. Photograph of Hemingway by Henry S. Villard.

In 1918 the young Ernest Hemingway was recuperating in a Milan hospital from shrapnel and bullet wounds received on the Italian front. There he met a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, fell in love, and planned to be married. It was a crucial part of the Italian adventure that eventually would provide the background for ten of his early short stories and A Farewell to Arms. The youngest Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy when he was hospitalized for infectious hepatitis, Henry S. Villard occupied the hospital room next to Hemingway's and soon befriended him and von Kurowsky. In collaboration with James Nagel, he has created a revelatory work that combines his personal reminiscences with von Kurowsky's diary and personal letters to Hemingway, Hemingway's letters to his family, and Nagel's exploration of places, events, and their significance to an understanding of Hemingway and his work.