For Whom the Bell Tolls

Description

'The best fictional report of the Spanish Civil War that we possess' Anthony Burgess Hemingway's great novel of the Spanish Civil War 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it' High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco's rebels... 'A sparse, masculine, world-weary meditation on death, ideology and the savagery of war in general' Sunday Telegraph 'One of the greatest novels which our troubled age will produce' Observer **One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Ernest Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899, the second of six children. In 1917, he joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921. In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris, associating with other expatriates like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing. Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.

His passionately committed, flawed masterpiece * Observer * For Whom the Bell Tolls allowed us to actually see the experience of an irregular struggle, from the political and military point of view...That book became a familiar part of my life. And we always went back to it, consulted it, to find inspiration * Observer * I read as a kid, of course, but it didn't get me like that till I read For Whom the Bell Tolls. I was very taken with that book. I still reread sections, though I'm now reading it not for the thrill of the story but for the technique and craft of it. * Daily Mail * The best book Hemingway has written * New York Times *