Below, where the road turns out of sight in the trees, it drops suddenly and there is a steep gorge-” “This is the easy country of the pass where the stream flows gently. “Then you cannot see the bridge from here.” He was breathing heavily from the climb and his hand rested on one of the two heavy packs they had been carrying. He was a short and solid old man in a black peasant’s smock and gray iron-stiff trousers and he wore rope-soled shoes. He spread the photostated military map out on the forest floor and looked at it carefully. The old mill is farther down much below the pass.”

There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.” Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author’s previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.įeaturing early drafts and manuscript notes, some of Hemingway’s writings during the Spanish Civil War, and three previously collected stories of his on the subject of war, as well as a personal foreword by the author’s son Patrick Hemingway, and a new introduction by the author’s grandson Seán Hemingway, this edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls brings new life to a literary master’s epic like never before. In his portrayal of Jordan’s love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo’s last stand, Hemingway creates a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. Robert Jordan is a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain. Published in 1940, For Whom the Bell Tolls tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from “the good fight,” and one of the foremost classics of war literature in history. In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Introduced by Hemingway’s grandson Seán Hemingway, this newly annotated edition and literary masterpiece about an American in the Spanish Civil War features early drafts and supplementary material-including three previously uncollected short stories on war by one the greatest writers on the subject in history.

For whom the bell tolls editions