SOURCE: An introduction to A Farewell to Arms, in Hemingway: The Critical Heritage, edited by Jeffrey Meyers, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, pp. 151-59.

In this introduction, originally published in the 1932 edition of A Farewell to Arms, Ford, a novelist himself and a friend and colleague of Hemingway's from his days in Paris in the 1920s, dwells on Hemingway's literary discipline, clarity of language, and economy of form.

I experienced a singular sensation on reading the first sentence of A Farewell to Arms. There are sensations you cannot describe. You may know what causes them but you cannot tell what portions of your mind they affect nor yet, possibly, what parts of your physical entity. I can only say that it was as if I had found at last again something shining after a long delving amongst dust. I daresay prospectors after gold or diamonds feel something like that. But...