For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940, after the Spanish Civil War had ended and before the United States had entered the Second World War. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer serving with a Republican guerrilla unit as a demolitions expert, across the few days before an attack at Segovia.

The book takes place mostly in the pine forests and mountains above a bridge that has to be destroyed at an exact moment. Jordan's task depends on a small group of fighters he does not fully trust and on a plan that enemies in the nearby town may already suspect, and much of the narrative is the slow passage of time around those constraints.

Hemingway wrote the novel from a position of sympathy with the Republican side, and critics have always read it as a book about commitment and about what an outsider owes the people he is fighting beside. Its distinctive texture comes from the Spanish speech rendered directly into English and from a compressed frame of three days holding a great deal of memory and argument.