For Whom the Bell Tolls

Description

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of A Farewell to Arms comes perhaps his finest novel, a passionate evocation of the pride and the tragedy of the Civil War that tore Spain apart. One of the greatest novels of the 20th century by one of the greatest writers in American history 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 on the republican side of the Spanish Civil War, 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. It is in these desperate days that his fate will be set.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as 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 crat. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, 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 * The best fictional report on the Spanish Civil War that we possess -- Anthony Burgess