The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War

Description

The Fifth Column is Hemingway's only full length play and is based on his personal experiences in Civil War Madrid. Inspired by Hemingway's adventures as a newspaper correspondent in Spain in the 1930s, The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War magnificently evokes life in a besieged city over a tumultuous decade. Featuring the author's only full-length play, the works recount decadent parties and doomed love affairs amid the rubble, and effortlessly capture the devastating effects of the war on the inhabitants of the city.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899, the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield - this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war - in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his craft. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.

This is immediate, unmistakable Hemingway. -- Philip Young * The New York Times Book Review *