For Whom the Bell Tolls (Scribner Classics)

Name: For Whom the Bell Tolls (Scribner Classics)
Rating: 3.64 (25 reviews)
Author: Ernest Hemingway
ISBN: 9780684830483

by Ernest Hemingway

3.6

(25 ratings)

496 pages1996ScribnerISBN 9780684830483

AMERICAN FICTION (FICTIONAL WORKS BY ONE AUTHOR)SPAIN_HISTORY_CIVIL WAR, 1936-1939_FICTION

About this book

Ernest Hemingway's masterpiece on war, love, loyalty, and honor tells the story of Robert Jordan, an antifascist American fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from “the good fight,” and one of the foremost classics of war literature in history. Published in 1940, For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain. In his portrayal of Jordan’s love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo’s last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.” Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author’s previous works, For Whom the Bell Tolls tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. When it was first published, The New York Times called it “a tremendous piece of work,” and it still stands today as one of the best war novels of all time.

Publication Details

Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1996
Pages: 496
ISBN: 9780684830483
Language: en

About Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American writer and journalist. During his lifetime he wrote and had published seven novels; six collections of short stories; and two works of non-fiction. Since his death three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction autobiographical works have been published. Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school he worked as a reporter but within months he left for the Italian front to be an ambulance driver in World War I. He was seriously injured and returned home within the year. He married his first wife Hadley Richardson in 1922 and moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent. During this time Hemingway met, and was influenced by, writers and artists of the 1920s expatriate community known as the "Lost Generation". In 1924 Hemingway wrote his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. In the late 1920s, Hemingway divorced Hadley, married his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer, and moved to Key West, Florida. In 1937 Hemingway went to Spain as a war correspondent to cover the Spanish Civil War. After the war he divorced Pauline, married his third wife Martha Gellhorn, wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, and moved to Cuba. Hemingway covered World War II in Europe and he was present at Operation Overlord. Later he was in Paris during the liberation of Paris. After the war, he divorced again, married his fourth wife Mary Welsh Hemingway, and wrote Across the River and Into the Trees. Two years later, The Old Man and the Sea was published in 1952. Nine years later, after moving from Cuba to Idaho, he committed suicide in the summer of 1961. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid 1920s and the mid 1950s, though a number of unfinished works were published posthumously. Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, and had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-cent