Reading Order
For Whom the Bell TollsErnest Hemingway Novels Reading Order
Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is widely regarded as his finest novel — the story of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, who is sent behind enemy lines to blow up a bridge, and the three days he spends with a guerrilla band in the mountains before the operation. The novel is simultaneously an action thriller, a love story, and a meditation on courage, death, and the causes worth dying for.
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
Complete For Whom the Bell Tolls Book List
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway·1940·The novel — Hemingway's most ambitious and politically engaged; the epigraph ('No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent') is from John Donne's Meditation XVII, which gives the title; best read with some knowledge of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) context. - 2Buy
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway·1929·Hemingway's WWI novel — an American ambulance driver and a British nurse fall in love during the Italian campaign; considered by many the most beautiful of the early novels, and the essential companion to For Whom the Bell Tolls in its portrait of an American in a European war who comes to understand the limits of heroism. - 3Buy
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway·1926·Hemingway's first novel — a group of expatriates in Paris and Pamplona in the 1920s, most of them emotionally or physically wounded by WWI; the most immediate demonstration of Hemingway's style at its most concentrated, and the defining portrait of the Lost Generation. - 4Buy
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway·1952·Hemingway's final major work — a Cuban fisherman's three-day struggle with a giant marlin; the simplest and most mythic of the novels, and the one that most directly expresses the Hemingway code of grace under pressure; it won him the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and contributed to his Nobel Prize (1954). - 5Buy
Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell·1938·Orwell's memoir of fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War — the essential non-fiction companion to For Whom the Bell Tolls; Orwell and Hemingway were both in Spain during the same period, and reading them together gives a complete picture of what the war actually felt like to the foreign volunteers who went to fight fascism. - 6Buy
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque·1929·The definitive WWI novel — a young German soldier's experience in the trenches; the most direct European parallel to Hemingway's portrait of war as destroying the young men who fight it, from the perspective of the other side. - 7Buy
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien·1990·O'Brien's linked story collection about Vietnam War soldiers — the most Hemingwayesque American war book since WWII in its spare prose and its meditation on courage, truth, and the stories we tell about combat; O'Brien explicitly acknowledges Hemingway as a primary influence.
For Whom the Bell Tolls — Frequently Asked Questions
In what order should I read Ernest Hemingway?
The standard recommendation is to start with The Sun Also Rises (1926) — the most immediately accessible and the defining statement of Hemingway's style; then A Farewell to Arms (1929) for his most romantic novel; then For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) for his most ambitious; then The Old Man and the Sea (1952) for his most mythic and final major statement. The Nick Adams stories (collected posthumously) are recommended alongside or after the novels; A Moveable Feast (1964, posthumous memoir about Paris in the 1920s) is recommended last as a key to understanding the autobiographical dimension of the fiction.
Who was the Spanish Civil War against?
The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) was fought between the elected Republican government of Spain and a Nationalist insurgency led by General Francisco Franco, who was backed by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Republicans were supported by the Soviet Union and by a broad coalition of international volunteers (the International Brigades) who came from across Europe and the Americas to fight fascism. Hemingway covered the war as a journalist for the North American Newspaper Alliance and was deeply sympathetic to the Republican cause; Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls is an American volunteer of the same kind. Franco won the war in 1939 and ruled Spain as a dictator until 1975. The civil war was widely understood at the time as a dress rehearsal for WWII, and many of the weapons and tactics used by Germany and Italy in Spain were developed further in the subsequent world war.
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