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.