In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war; three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from the good fight, For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. Surpassing his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway creates a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving and wise. If the function of a writer is to reveal reality, Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, no one ever so completely performed it. For Whom the Bell Tolls stands as one of the best war novels of all time