For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
Summary
American dynamiter Robert Jordan joins a small band of Republican guerrilla fighters in the mountains of Spain during the Spanish Civil War, tasked with blowing up a strategic bridge to support an offensive he privately suspects is already doomed. Hemingway compresses the entire novel into three days, during which Jordan falls in love with Maria, a young woman still traumatized after Falangist soldiers murdered her parents and assaulted her, and clashes with Pablo, the band's drunken, increasingly unreliable leader, and Pilar, Pablo's far more formidable wife, who effectively runs the group in his place. Pablo sabotages the mission by stealing the detonators and then, in a final reversal, returns to help complete it anyway. The bridge goes down as planned, but as the guerrillas retreat a tank shoots Jordan's horse out from under him, crushing his leg and leaving him unable to travel. Knowing he will only slow the others and cost them their escape, Jordan sends Maria on ahead with the group, positions himself alone with a machine gun to hold off the pursuing cavalry, and the novel ends with him waiting, wounded and clear headed, for one last shot before the soldiers reach him.
The book packs years of Spanish Civil War history into a single mission and a handful of days, and the novel reads with real urgency for something this long, its short bursts of action separated by long stretches of talk, memory and Jordan's own private reckoning with what the war has cost the people fighting it. The ending refuses Hemingway's usual clean resolution; Jordan is not shown dying, only waiting, which is exactly why readers still debate what his death actually accomplishes.
Hemingway drew directly on his own reporting from the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance, and the execution scene early in the novel echoes real events he had learned of near Ronda in 1936, embellished with details of his own invention. The title comes from a line of John Donne, no man is an island, a passage Hemingway printed in full as the book's epigraph to make its meaning to the novel explicit from the first page.
Historical Context & Significance
Charles Scribner's Sons published For Whom the Bell Tolls on October 21, 1940, in a first printing of seventy five thousand copies, and the 1941 Pulitzer board set aside its fiction jury's preference for Conrad Richter's The Trees and Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident to choose it for the award. Nicholas Murray Butler, the Columbia University president who chaired the Pulitzer board, deemed the novel offensive and persuaded the board to reverse itself rather than let it stand; no Pulitzer for the novel was given at all that year, one of the years in the prize's history when the fiction category went entirely empty.
The novel became a genuine commercial triumph regardless, selling half a million copies within months as a Book of the Month Club selection. Edmund Wilson's contemporary review was comparatively tepid, faulting a strain of literary medievalism in Jordan and Maria's romance, but the book has held up better than that early complaint suggests; Hemingway would not win his own Pulitzer until 1953, for The Old Man and the Sea, and a 1943 film version starring Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman kept the story in front of wartime American audiences within three years of its publication.