num_pages: 503
description: From the cover of the first edition:Into this great new novel--nearly twice as long as "A Farewell to Arms"--Ernest Hemingway has poured the fullness of his experience, the perfection of his art. A novel of wartime Spain, in which a young American and a Spanish girl live a lifetime of love and courage in four momentous days, it speaks with final and unforgettable power for the truth--the truth of war and life in our time.With Robert Jordan already behind the enemy lines on his dangerous mission--to join forces with a band of Spanish men and women hidden in the mountains, and blow up a bridge that is essential to the great attack--the story begins in the midst of the action. It moves forward with rushing swiftness and a compelling sense of reality to the moment when he must blow up the bridge--the bridge on which the whole future of the human race can turn.Before this crucial action Robert Jordan enters into the life of the men and women whose destiny he shares, who living at the edge of danger, come vibrantly alive, intimately known. There is Pilar, a great woman who has lived long and fully, brave, barbarously outspoken, yet warmhearted; and Pablo, her husband, a strong man at the start of the movement but now dangerously undependable. And there is Maria, a tawny, lovely Spanish girl who escaped the tortures of the fascists to find healing in her love for Robert Jordan. Their story becomes one of the most tender, passionately moving love stories ever written.In these superbly real men and women--sharing days of heightened excitement, deeper and richer experiences than most lifetimes hold--Hemingway seems to have embraced all human experience, the conflict of life itself, not only martial but spiritual and emotional. All that he has written before--including some of the greatest novels of our generation--points toward the achievement of this work of art, a novel that carries the rare, perfected shine of enduring greatness.
language: English
title: For Whom the Bell Tolls
titlecomplete: For Whom the Bell Tolls
characters: El Sordo, Robert Jordan, Pilar, Anselmo, Pablo Saler, Maria
genres: American, Spain, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Classic Literature, Classics, War, Fiction
ratings_count: 286135
places: Spain
publisher: P. F. Collier and Sons