For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway, Ernest - 1940

Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. 1940. Scribner's. Volume, First Edition with Scribner's "A" on publishers page. First Edition, Jacket is of second state with photographers credit underneath portrait of Hemingway on back panel. Jacket has had sympathetic repair, expertly performed.

One of the leaders of the Lost Generation, Hemingway become synonymous with tales of wartime bravery, love, loss and camaraderie, none of which is more famous than From Whom the Bell Tolls. The novel takes its name from a sermon of John Donne and chars a path across Segovia, Spain during the Spanish Civil War. This novel is the product of Hemingway's own extensive travels and military experience. Working as war-time correspondent, Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War from 1937-1938.

The story centres around protagonist Robert Jordan, an American volunteer set to join a Guerilla band, stationed behind enemy lies in the Guadarrama Mountains. This plot mirrors Hemingway's own history of volunteers in World War I and his campaigning and fundraising for the loyalists at the outset of Spain's civil war.

Following his military experience in Italy during the first World War, Hemingway left America and made a new home for himself in Europe, with a notable fondness for Paris. It is here that he began to write about war, as he knew it. A Farewell to Arms shines a light o the perceived senselessness of war, while For Whom the Bell Tolls takes focus on the relationships and camaraderie developed during deployment.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American novelist, short story writer and journalist, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature with his future-classic The Old Man and the Sea. The themes of love and loss are key in his writings, as well as in his personal life. Hemingway had a habit of incorporating real events and characters into his novels. This habit of inclusion gives readers deep insights into the author as a man, but came at the detriment of his friendships and marriages - of which there were several. The final years of Hemingway's life were plagued by paranoia and depression. In 1961, Ernest Hemingway died via self-inflicted gun shot, in Ketchum, Idaho.