For Whom the Bell Tolls became a Book of the Month Club choice, sold half a million copies within months, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and became a literary triumph for Hemingway. Set in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range between Madrid and Segovia, the action takes place during four days and three nights. The characters in the novel include those who are purely fictional, those based on real people but fictionalized, and those who were actual figures in the war. The novel graphically describes the brutality of the war and is told primarily through the thoughts and experiences of the protagonist, Robert Jordan.

The story is based on Hemingway's experiences during the Spanish Civil War as a reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance and features an American who fights alongside Spanish guerillas for the Republicans. The novel was finished in July 1940 at the InterContinental New York Barclay Hotel in New York City and published in October. In Cuba, he lived in the Hotel Ambos Mundos, where he worked on the manuscript. Background Įrnest Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Havana, Cuba Key West, Florida and Sun Valley, Idaho, in 1939. The novel is regarded as one of Hemingway's best works, along with The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea. In 1940, the year the book was published, the United States had not yet entered the Second World War, which had begun on September 1, 1939, with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. It assumes the reader knows that the war was between the government of the Second Spanish Republic, which many foreigners went to Spain to help and which was supported by the Communist Soviet Union, and the Nationalist faction, which was supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It was published just after the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), whose general lines were well known at the time. As a dynamiter, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia.

It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940.

For whom the bell tolls hemingway