Wellington, January 13 (JY&A Media) A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 classic about an American volunteering in the ambulance service falling in love with a British nurse during World War I, has now been republished in the form the author intended: with his strong language intact.
   When Hemingway wrote his seminal novel, he expressed his feelings about the war in no uncertain terms. However, when the story was first serialized, the strongest words were censored, and parts of the story were removed for brevity. He had been promised that things would be restored for the novel version, and while the 1929 publication puts back the passages that were removed, the adult language remained missing, replaced by em dashes.
   With the work entering the US public domain in 2025, JY&A Media chose to create a version of A Farewell to Arms that realizes Hemingway’s vision, but reset with typography for modern readers.
   Normally a non-fiction publisher, the company felt that A Farewell to Arms fitted with the company’s motto, ‘The joy of knowledge’, due to the excellence of Hemingway’s expression and the enjoyment that readers would derive from it.
   Publisher Jack Yan says, ‘I was very drawn to A Farewell to Arms, far more than any title that entered the public domain this decade, in no small part because I wanted to honour Mr Hemingway’s vision.’
   The fairly innocent balls had to be replaced by scrotum in the 1929 edit, but stronger words—which can be found in the book—still might have to appear in a general release in edited form: f***, s***, and c*********.
   ‘You hear far worse language on television in the 2020s,’ says Mr Yan, ‘and two of those words I have heard before the watershed.’
   He has one regret: having made the commitment to publish A Farewell to Arms ‘uncensored and unabridged’, a racist word that had been fine with the white editors of the 1920s was left in there. An apology for its inclusion appears in the foreword, as well as a discussion about anti-racism theory and lived experience.
   ‘This will no doubt be one of many new editions of A Farewell to Arms, if the numerous (and, in many cases, poor) versions of The Great Gatsby were anything to go by when that title entered the public domain in 2021,’ he writes. ‘If there are to be many of A Farewell to Arms, then maybe this one should exist, asking some of the tougher questions directly.’
   The uncensored and unabridged edition of A Farewell to Arms is available at Libriz.

Images

A Farewell to Arms cover Artwork, Isola Bella In Lago Maggiore, by Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823–80) Medium-resolution JPEG, 870 kbyte

 

About Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was born in Cicero, Illinois, in 1899. After graduating from high school, he went to work for the Star newspaper in Kansas City as a reporter. In World War I, he served as an American Red Cross ambulance driver and was severely wounded in 1918 on the Austro–Italian front. Hospitalized in Milano, he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, who eventually declined his marriage proposal. In 1921, he moved to France as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. In Paris, he mixed with Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to publish his non-journalistic work. A number of books were released before his seminal A Farewell to Arms in 1929. He continued his writing as well as his journalism in the ensuing years. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) was set during the Spanish Civil War, and some regard this as his finest novel, surpassing A Farewell to Arms. He won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He died in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961.

About JY&A Media
JY&A Media (jya.media) is the independent publishing house behind Lucire and Autocade, founded in 1987 as Jack Yan & Associates in Wellington, New Zealand. Its main titles began online, Lucire in 1997 and Autocade in 2008, before their brands were extended into print editions, Lucire having taken what was an unprecedented path in 2004. It is also responsible for licensing these editions, with Lucire’s first internationally licensed print edition appearing in 2005. Its publishing activities are grouped under Lucire Ltd.

Contacts
Jack Yan, CEO
Jack Yan & Associates
T 64 4 387-3213
E information@jyanet.com

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