Presented by Hemingway's grandson Seán Hemingway, with a personal
foreword by the author's son Patrick Hemingway, this new enhanced
Library Edition of Ernest Hemingway's masterpiece about an American in
the Spanish Civil War features early drafts and supplementary material,
including three previously uncollected short stories on war by one of
the greatest writers on the subject in history.
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.
