Ernest Hemingway: 47 Farewell to Arms endings published

Just under 50 alternative endings for Ernest Hemingway's classic novel A Farewell to Arms are to be published for the first time in the US.

A new edition of the book will be published on Tuesday by Scriber.

Hemingway famously revealed that he re-wrote the ending 39 times to get the words right, although the actual figure was 47.

His semi-autobiographical work is a love story set against the backdrop of the Italian campaigns of World War I.

The latest American edition of the book will also include early drafts of other passages and Hemingway's own 1948 introduction to an illustrated re-issue of the novel.

There is also a personal foreword by the author's son, Patrick Hemingway, and a new introduction by the writer's grandson, Sean Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway was a Nobel Prize winner, whose other works include The Old Man and The Sea and For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Born in Illinois in 1899, he began his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City when he was 17.

After the US entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army.

He was wounded and returned to the States, where he became a reporter.

Hemingway was soon sent back to Europe to cover events such as the Greek revolution, and later, the Spanish Civil War.

He began writing in earnest in his 20s while based in Paris.

Hemingway spent the later years of his life in Florida and Cuba before taking up residence in Idaho in 1960. He killed himself in 1961, aged 61.