“All good books have one thing in common: they are truer than if they had actually happened,” Hemingway wrote just five years after publishing L 'A Farewell to Arms, a novel about the war in Italy, which is ironic because A Farewell to Arms can be considered a semi-autobiographical novel, as some of the events that occur in the novel are based on A Farewell to Arms' own life. 'Hemingway. The parallels between the novel and Hemingway's life are obvious: the protagonist, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, is an ambulance driver in the Italian army, just as Hemingway himself was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross, serving in Italy. Hemingway also fell in love with a nurse, but her name was not Catherine Barkley, as it is in the novel, but Agnes von Kurowsky. Hemingway and Kurowsky's love has been described as both "a passionate love story" and "a simple romantic interlude". Hemingway appears to have based his protagonist's love interest on Agnes, as well as one of his wives (Mellow, 47-68). Although Hemingway appears to have based his characters on real people, some argue that his female characters are one-dimensional and flat, and that male characters other than the protagonist are stereotypical and base. Ernest Hemingway, in his novel A Farewell to Arms, characterizes men and women in several ways, generally sticking to the stereotypes he is known for, the strong, virile man and the passive, weak woman; the main female character, Catherine Barkley, seems to adhere to this stereotype throughout the novel, but the protagonist, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, evolves, sometimes playing this role, but in other cases opening up in a way that the characters Hemingway's males generally do not.Hemingway was often criticized for being sexist and...... middle of paper...... New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Print.BookTagsEditDeleteHemingway, Ernest. The Old Man and the Sea. London: Arrow, 1993. Print.BookTagsEditDeleteHemingway, Ernest. The short happy life of Francis Macomber. New York, 1936. Print.BookTagsEditDeleteMellow, James R. Hemingway: A life without consequences. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. Print.BookTagsEditDelete “The Representation of Women in Hemingway's Short Stories – Jennifer Harris. » THE QUATRAIN. February 8, 2009. Web. November 8, 2011. .WebsiteTagsEditDeleteRecla, Amy K. The Development of Hemingway's Female Characters: Catherine from A Farewell to Arms in the Garden of Eden. Diss. University of South Florida, 2008. Print.DissertationTagsEditDeleteTraber, Daniel S. “Interpreting the Feminine in A Farewell to Arms.” The Hemingway Review 24.2 (2005): 28-40. Print.