For Whom The Bell Tools By Ernest Hemingway: A Critical Essay

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS by Ernest Hemingway THE AUTHOR Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a wealthy suburb of Chicago, the second of six children of a doctor and his wife. He learned early to love hunting and fishing - a love he never lost throughout his long career. After graduation from high school he tried to enlist in World War I, but was rejected because of poor eyesight. He volunteered for service in the Red Cross instead, and served in Italy, gaining firsthand experience that later contributed to his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929). His earliest writing experiences came as a newspaper reporter, first for the Kansas City Star and then for the Toronto Daily Star. These newspapers contributed greatly to his literary style, which was spare, concise, and simple (Hemingway once said that his fiction was like an iceberg - seven-eighths of it unseen, but giving stability and direction to the part that could be seen). The latter sent him to Paris as its European correspondent. It was there he first met such literary luminaries as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. During this time, he wrote his earliest short stories. The late twenties saw his greatest literary output, including his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, and A Farewell to Arms. In 1928 he left Paris and moved to Key West, Florida, where he would live and write for the next twelve years. This era was a period of experimentation and self-promotion - he wrote a bullfighting treatise (Death in the Afternoon) and an account of his African safari (Green Hills of Africa) that did more to make him a celebrity and to create a public persona than to enhance his reputation as a writer. His best work during these years was his short stories, including The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. He traveled to Spain in 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War, and out of that experience came the material for For Whom the Bell Tolls. After the publication of this book in 1940, he published no novels for the next decade, during most of which he lived in Cuba, enjoying deep-sea fishing, and even occasionally using his fishing boat to spy on German submarines in the area (he was prepared to drop a bomb down the hatch of one if he had the opportunity, but the chance never arose). He did go to England to report on World War II in 1944, but spent most of his time after the Normandy invasion “liberating” his favorite Paris watering holes. Hemingway regained the public eye, and won both a Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1953) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1954), by publishing The Old Man and the Sea in 1952. The book not only restored his reputation, but made him wealthy. He used his wealth to travel again to Europe, take in some bullfights, and then return to Africa. It was in Africa that he barely survived two plane crashes, which left him with physical damage from which he never recovered. His health problems made it increasingly difficult for him to write effectively. In 1960, he left Cuba and bought a home in Ketchum, Idaho, where he moved with his fourth wife. A year later, battling worsening depression, he ended his life by putting a shotgun bullet in his brain. For Whom the Bell Tolls reflects Hemingway’s personal experiences in the Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939. Th