ABSTRACT
Ernest Hemingway began work on his Spanish Civil War novel in March 1939, virtually at the moment of the Republic's final collapse, having sent some thirty syndicated news despatches from Spain for the North American News Agency (nana). It is certainly the case that Hemingway's nana dispatches convey none of the ambivalence revealed eventually in For Whom the Bell Tolls. By the time he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, it was all over. Franco had destroyed the Republic. Fascism ruled. The Civil War was already a tragic history. Hemingway chose as his focal point a group of partisans living under primitive conditions in a cave on the high forested slopes of the Sierra de Guadarramas, sixty miles northwest of besieged Madrid and therefore behind the Nationalist lines. Hemingway was a decorated veteran of the First World War and subsequently a member of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris.
