Description
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. Their romance is captured through a diary that Agnes kept over the summer of 1918, in which she referred to Hemingway as "the kid." Their relationship grew, and in September the head nurse found one of Agnes's hairpins under Hemingway's pillow, suggesting that they may have had more than just a flirta- tion. But after Hemingway left the hospital, everything came to a crashing halt with a devastating "Dear John" letter that Agnes sent in March 1919: "I am still very fond of you, but it is more as a mother than a sweetheart... I can't get away from the fact that you are just a boy-a kid." Hemingway never saw Agnes von Kurowsky again, but he didn't forget his first love, and many have said that she was the inspiration for Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.
Henry S.Villard occupied the hospital room next to Hemingway's during their stay at the Milan hospital, and he was friends with both Hemingway and Agnes. Now he and James Nagel, an internationally recognized scholar of American literature, have created Hemingway in Love and War, a book that com- bines Villard's memory of World War I, Agnes's diary and letters to Hemingway, Hemingway's letters home to his family, and Nagel's exploration of places, events, and their significance to Hemingway and his work.
Henry S. Villard took time off from Harvard in 1918 to serve with the Red Cross ambulance corps in Italy. In 1928, after post-graduate work at Oxford, he entered the American Foreign Service, eventually serving at the level of ambas sador. Mr. Villard died in February 1996 at the age of 96.
ISBN:9780786882144
