For Whom the Bell Tolls

In 1937 Hemingway arrived in Spain to cover the Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He filed his dispatches, but the real fruit of those years was FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS.

The story of Robert Jordan, an American fighting with anti-fascist guerillas in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, the tragic death of an ideal. It lives for us because of the great disillusionment that grew out of WW II, a war fought with such high hopes and concluded so cynically with a former ally gobbling up half of the Europe we hoped to liberate.

"If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Great in power, broad in scope, intensely emotional, it stands as one of the best war novels of all times.