Ernest Hemingway

Biography

Ernest Hemingway had already won literary fame with The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms — both drawing on his WWI experience — when the Spanish Civil War began. He made four trips to Spain between 1937 and 1938 as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance, and the war became his great passion: he helped fund the Republic's cause, organized ambulances, co-produced the documentary The Spanish Earth with Joris Ivens, and raised money from Hollywood at a crucial screening. He had a complicated relationship with the Communist organizers of the Republic's military effort, whom he both admired and distrusted. For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940, was Hemingway's novelization of the war: the story of Robert Jordan, an American demolitions expert assigned to blow a bridge behind Nationalist lines, set during the Battle of the Ebro. The novel was a massive bestseller and cemented the war's romantic legacy in the English-speaking world. But Hemingway also suppressed his knowledge of Stalinist atrocities in Spain — including the murder of his friend José Robles, a translator executed by the NKVD — to protect the Republican cause. His biographer argued this self-censorship marked the beginning of his artistic decline.

Key Battles