'The best fictional report of the Spanish Civil War that we possess' Anthony Burgess
High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge.
His passionately committed, flawed masterpiece
A sparse, masculine, world-weary meditation on death, ideology and the savagery of war in general, and the Spanish civil war in particular
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
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.
The best book Hemingway has written
Ernest Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899, the second of six children. In 1917, he joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921. In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris, associating with other expatriates like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing. Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.