For Whom the Bell Tolls
1940
War novel
Hemingway's novel of the Spanish Civil War, following Robert Jordan, an American dynamiter attached to a Republican guerrilla band in the mountains behind enemy lines. Over four days he prepares to blow up a strategically critical bridge while reflecting on violence, loyalty, mortality, and his love affair with María, a young Spanish woman the guerrillas have rescued. Longer and more interior than Hemingway's earlier work, the book trades laconic minimalism for ruminative, multi-clausal prose, and is often regarded as his masterpiece.