Ernest hemingway was born in 1899 in
a wealthy, conservative Chicago suburb. The second of six children,
he showed an early talent in writing that he honed through work
on his high school’s literary magazine and student newspaper. Upon
graduating from high school in 1917, Hemingway
moved away from home and embarked on a professional writing career,
starting as a reporter for the Kansas City Star.
In 1918, during the height of World
War I, Hemingway volunteered to serve as an ambulance driver for
the Red Cross, which sent him to Italy. Within just a few weeks
of his arrival, Hemingway was injured by an exploding shell and
was sent to a hospital in Milan. During his recovery, he became
romantically involved with a nurse—an episode that he portrayed
years later in his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).
After the war, Hemingway worked as a newspaper correspondent
in Paris, where he moved among a circle of expatriate artists and
writers, including American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude
Stein, Irish writer James Joyce, and Spanish painter Pablo Picasso.
Stein, in particular, became Hemingway’s mentor. Some critics have
suggested that she provided the inspiration for the character Pilar
in For Whom the Bell Tolls, who serves as a mother
figure for the protagonist, Robert Jordan.
During his time as a correspondent, Hemingway traveled
extensively in Spain and developed a strong interest in Spanish
culture. He became especially interested in bullfighting, which
he viewed as a uniquely Spanish experience that accustomed Spaniards
to face death and thus enabled them to live fuller lives. Hemingway’s
interest in Spain led to literary masterpieces such as The
Sun Also Rises (1926), a chronicle
of a group of disaffected Americans in postwar France and Spain,
and Death in the Afternoon (1932),
a nonfiction work about bullfighting.
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
takes place during the Spanish Civil War, which ravaged the country
throughout the late 1930s. Tensions in Spain
began to rise as early as 1931, when a group
of left-wing Republicans overthrew the country’s monarchy in a bloodless
coup. The new Republican government then proposed controversial
religious reforms that angered right-wing Fascists, who had the
support of the army and the Catholic church.
After a strong Communist turnout in the 1936 popular
elections, the Fascist army commander Generalísimo Francisco Franco
initiated a coup in an attempt to overthrow the Republican government. Unexpectedly,
the key cities of Madrid and Barcelona remained loyal to the Republic.
This divide marked the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict
between the right-wing Fascists (Nationalists) and the left-wing
Republicans (Loyalists), a large number of whom were Communists.
Violence exploded all over Spain, and both sides committed atrocities.
Many western countries saw the Spanish Civil War as a symbolic struggle
between fascism and democracy. Eventually, the superior military
machine of the Fascist alliance prevailed, and the war ended in
the spring of 1939.
During the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway was involved in
the production of two Loyalist propaganda documentary films. Later
in the conflict, he served as a war correspondent for the North
American Newspaper Alliance. For Whom the Bell Tolls expresses
Hemingway’s strong feelings about the war, both a critique of the Republicans’
leadership and a lament over the Fascists’ destruction of the earthy
way of life of the Spanish peasantry. The novel is set in the spring
of 1937, at a time when the war had come
to a standstill, a month after German troops razed the Spanish town
of Guernica. At this point, the Republicans still held out some
hope for victory and were planning a new offensive. For
Whom the Bell Tolls explores themes of wartime individuality,
the effects of war on its combatants, and the military bureaucracy’s
impersonal indifference to human life. Most important, the novel
addresses the question of whether an idealistic view of the world
justifies violence.
Hemingway’s novels are known for portraying a particular
type of hero. Critic Philip Young famously termed this figure a
“code hero,” a man who gracefully struggles against death and obliteration.
Robert Jordan, the protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls,
is a prime example of this kind of hero. The tragedy of the code
hero is that he is mortal and knows that he will ultimately lose
the struggle. Meanwhile, he lives according to a code—hence the
term code hero—that helps him endure a life full of stress and tension
with courage and grace. He appreciates the physical pleasures of
this world—food, drink, sex, and so on—without obsessing over them.
Hemingway is particularly known for his journalistic prose
style, which was revolutionary at the time and has influenced countless writers
since. Hemingway’s writing is succinct and direct, although his
speakers tend to give the impression that they are leaving a tremendous
amount unsaid. This bold experimentation with prose earned Hemingway
the 1953 Pulitzer Prize and 1954 Nobel
Prize for Literature for his most popular work, the novella The
Old Man and the Sea (1952).
Although Hemingway wrote several more novels afterward,
he was never again able to match the success of The Old
Man and the Sea. In the late 1950s,
the combination of depression, deteriorating health, and frustration
with his writing began to weigh heavily on him. His depression
worsened, and in July 1961, he died of a
self-inflicted gunshot wound in Ketchum, Idaho. Although Hemingway’s long
career ended sadly, his novels and short stories remain as popular today
as ever before, and he maintains a reputation as one of the most innovative
and influential authors of the twentieth century.
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