or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
 
Express Checkout with PayPhrase
What's this? | Create PayPhrase
More Buying Choices
179 used & new from $2.00

Have one to sell? Sell yours here
 
   
For Whom the Bell Tolls
 
 

For Whom the Bell Tolls (Paperback)

~ (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (293 customer reviews)

List Price: $16.00
Price: $10.88 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $5.12 (32%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Want it delivered Tuesday, November 17? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details
59 new from $4.85 111 used from $2.00 9 collectible from $9.99

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
  Kindle Edition, July 25, 2002 $9.99 -- --
  Hardcover, June 9, 1996 $20.45 $16.02 $10.95
  Paperback, June 30, 1995 $10.88 $4.85 $2.00
  Mass Market Paperback, Import -- $23.38 $10.66
  Audio, CD, Audiobook, Unabridged $37.96 $12.36 $12.26
  Board book, July 31, 1977 -- -- $1.59

Frequently Bought Together

For Whom the Bell Tolls + A Farewell To Arms + The Sun Also Rises
Price For All Three: $31.96

Show availability and shipping details

  • This item: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • A Farewell To Arms by Joan Hohl

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • The Sun Also Rises by Robert Dunn

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details


Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises

by Robert Dunn
3.9 out of 5 stars (512)  $10.20
The Old Man and The Sea

The Old Man and The Sea

by Ernest Hemingway
4.0 out of 5 stars (721)  $8.64
To Have and Have Not

To Have and Have Not

by Ernest Hemingway
3.8 out of 5 stars (80)  $10.55
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition

by Ernest Hemingway
4.7 out of 5 stars (50)  $15.17
Death in the Afternoon

Death in the Afternoon

by Ernest Hemingway
4.1 out of 5 stars (37)  $12.24
Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For Whom the Bell Tolls begins and ends in a pine-scented forest, somewhere in Spain. The year is 1937 and the Spanish Civil War is in full swing. Robert Jordan, a demolitions expert attached to the International Brigades, lies "flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." The sylvan setting, however, is at sharp odds with the reason Jordan is there: he has come to blow up a bridge on behalf of the antifascist guerrilla forces. He hopes he'll be able to rely on their local leader, Pablo, to help carry out the mission, but upon meeting him, Jordan has his doubts: "I don't like that sadness, he thought. That sadness is bad. That's the sadness they get before they quit or before they betray. That is the sadness that comes before the sell-out." For Pablo, it seems, has had enough of the war. He has amassed for himself a small herd of horses and wants only to stay quietly in the hills and attract as little attention as possible. Jordan's arrival--and his mission--have seriously alarmed him.
"I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?" He turned to Robert Jordan. "What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and tell me what I must do?"
In one short chapter Hemingway lays out the blueprint for what is to come: Jordan's sense of duty versus Pablo's dangerous self-interest and weariness with the war. Complicating matters even more are two members of the guerrilla leader's small band: his "woman" Pilar, and Maria, a young woman whom Pablo rescued from a Republican prison train. Unlike her man, Pilar is still fiercely devoted to the cause and as Pablo's loyalty wanes, she becomes the moral center of the group. Soon Jordan finds himself caught between the two, even as his own resolve is tested by his growing feelings for Maria.

For Whom the Bell Tolls combines two of the author's recurring obsessions: war and personal honor. The pivotal battle scene involving El Sordo's last stand is a showcase for Hemingway's narrative powers, but the quieter, ongoing conflict within Robert Jordan as he struggles to fulfill his mission perhaps at the cost of his own life is a testament to his creator's psychological acuity. By turns brutal and compassionate, it is arguably Hemingway's most mature work and one of the best war novels of the 20th century. --Alix Wilber



Review

"'The best book Hemingway has written' New York Times" --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 480 pages
  • Publisher: Scribner (July 1, 1995)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0684803356
  • ISBN-13: 978-0684803357
  • Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (293 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #11,085 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

    #7 in  Books > Literature & Fiction > Classics > United States > Hemingway, Ernest
    #7 in  Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( H ) > Hemingway, Ernest
    #47 in  Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War

More About the Author

Ernest Hemingway
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Visit Amazon's Ernest Hemingway Page

Look Inside This Book
Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Index | Back Cover


What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

For Whom the Bell Tolls
78% buy the item featured on this page:
For Whom the Bell Tolls 4.3 out of 5 stars (293)
$10.88
A Farewell To Arms
7% buy
A Farewell To Arms 4.0 out of 5 stars (392)
$10.88
The Old Man and The Sea
6% buy
The Old Man and The Sea 4.0 out of 5 stars (721)
$8.64
The Sun Also Rises
6% buy
The Sun Also Rises 3.9 out of 5 stars (512)
$10.20

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

 

Customer Reviews

293 Reviews
5 star:
 (182)
4 star:
 (63)
3 star:
 (20)
2 star:
 (18)
1 star:
 (10)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.3 out of 5 stars (293 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
253 of 266 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Still haunted by Hemingway, June 2, 2000
"For Whom the Bell Tolls" was the first Hemingway I ever read. I was a high school kid in the early 1970s, working on my campus newspaper, newly graduated from Jack London but not yet ready for Jack Kerouac.

To my young eyes, it was a good action story: Robert Jordan, the passionate American teacher joins a band of armed gypsies in the Spanish Civil War. He believes one man can make a difference. The whole novel covers just 68 hours, during which Jordan must find a way to blow up a key bridge behind enemy lines. In that short time, Jordan also falls in love with Maria, a beautiful Spanish woman who has been raped by enemy soldiers. The whole spectrum of literature was refracted through the prism of my youth: Good guys and bad guys, sex and blood, life and death. For me, just a boy, the journey from abstraction to clarity was only just beginning.

Re-reading "For Whom the Bell Tolls" at 42 (roughly the age Hemingway was when he published it), I have lost my ability to see things clearly in black and white. My vision is blurred by irony, as I note that two enemies, the moral killer Anselmo and the sympathetic fascist Lieutenant Berrendo, utter the very same prayer. For the first time, I see that the book opens with Robert Jordan lying on the "pine-needled floor of the forest" and closes as he feels his heart pounding against the "pine needle floor of the forest"; Jordan ends as he begins, perhaps having never really moved. I certainly could never have seen at 16 how dying well might be more consequential than living well. And somehow the light has changed in the past 26 years, so that I now truly understand how the earth can move.

As a teen, I missed another crucial element, even though Vietnam was still a seeping wound. Three pivotal days in Jordan's life force him to question his own role in a futile war. He wonders if dying for a political cause might be too wasteful, but he ultimately believes that dying to save another individual is a man's most heroic act.

The book's title is taken from John Donne's celebrated poem: "No man is an Iland ... and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee." It was not about loneliness and aloneness, as I once had thought, but about the seamless fabric of all life: What happens to one happens to all.

I am not blind to Hemingway's flaws. He was a good short writer, and what was short was almost always better. Pilar's tale on the mountainside has been widely acclaimed as the most powerful of Hemingway's prose. Her story within a story is nothing less than a contemporary myth.

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" has also been regarded as Hemingway's capitulation to critics who barked that his innovative style was too lean, and as a consciously commercial exercise for which Hollywood might (and did) pay handsomely. Robert Jordan, in so many respects, was a tragic mythical hero in the vein of Achilles, Gawain and Samson. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" ranks as one of the great American war novels in a country that has always struggled with the concept of good and bad wars.

Comment Comments (3) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
67 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A book for all people and all ages, March 4, 2000
By D. Roberts "Hadrian12" (Battle Creek, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)      
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
Usually, even with the best books, I would say that "this book is not for everyone." Not so with this novel. I truly believe that this book IS for everyone. Unlike so much other 20th century literature, one need not be well read to get something out of it.

The story is of two of man's most cherished and hated traditions: Love and War. The tragedy is that we have had so much of the latter and so little of the former. We see much of both in "For Whom The Bell Tolls." It is a tender story of two young people who just want to live a "normal" life together during the Spainish civil war, but who are prevented from doing thus due to their being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is incredulous to me that there were other reviewers who found this book "boring." I can only surmise that anyone who would find a novel such as this boring will not find anything "exciting" unless it has Arnold Scharzenegger swinging around a machine gun. But that, I believe, is the fault of the reader's lack of attention span and cannot be blamed on Hemingway.

The author writes that "The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it." I would agree. Anyone else who agrees, and anyone who has a passion and zest for life should read this book. One of the best examples of American literature in the 20th century.

Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)



 
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A Gripping, Sad, Interesting, and Worthwhile Story!, June 11, 2001
By Brad Hartman (Westchester, NY) - See all my reviews
This novel certainly deserves its billing as a "classic." The action takes place during the Spanish Civil War (of the 1930's), and the story follows a group of guerilla loyalists, who are fighting against Franco's fascist forces in the name of the Republic.

The entire novel only covers a span of three days, so the reader truly gets a sense of the time passing. Because of this, it feels as if the events are actually occurring as one is reading. Each moment is important, and there are few discontinuities in the story. Also, the novel is written in an interesting format where the climax doesn't occur until the final pages-this adds quite a bit of suspense. What really makes this book so excellent is the delicate combination of action and lull, and love and hate, which Hemingway builds into the story. There is a very beautiful (if only slightly unrealistic) love story carefully interwoven with murder, conspiracy, and disaster.

It is impossible not to deeply care for each individual in the story because there are few characters, and they are all extremely well developed. The reader can find a piece of somebody that he/she knows in every character. Hemingway also deals effectively with emotion. It is always easy to understand exactly what each person is feeling. With Robert Jordan, specifically, Hemingway uses a unique series of monologue-type passages so that the reader really can "get inside" Jordan's head. Somehow, Hemingway manages to do this while keeping out that uneasiness one gets when reading a play monologue. The novel has an anti-war feel to it, but it still contains several enthralling battle scenes. If only the love story were a bit more believable, this book could be truly fantastic. "For Whom The Bell Tolls" is definitely a worthwhile read right from the opening quote by John Donne all the way to the very last page.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)


Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A historical fiction masterpiece. And a look at the Individuals behind the war.
FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS is a masterpiece. This historical fiction from Hemingway is in my opinion far better than the other two Hemingway novels that I have read (The Sun Also... Read more
Published 6 days ago by C. T. Hunter

5.0 out of 5 stars the best american novel about the spanish civil war
For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of Hemingway's masterpieces.The novel is set during the Spanish Civil War and at the center of it is Robert Jordan an American who has joined the... Read more
Published 1 month ago by woodrow locksley

5.0 out of 5 stars Tuning in to Hemingway
Covering a period of just under four days,this riveting story tells of a doomed offensive against the facists in the Spanish civil war. Read more
Published 1 month ago by An admirer of Saul

2.0 out of 5 stars Horrible Love Story
I read the first 100 pages and the plot of blowing up a bridge was fine, although the plot is exceedingly slow. Read more
Published 1 month ago by abysinth

4.0 out of 5 stars A classic with broad appeal
This is the first Hemingway book I've read, and I recommend it. For Whom the Bell Tolls covers a period of three full days during the Spanish Civil War, following (primarily) a... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Emma Smiley

4.0 out of 5 stars Feeling the earth move
I don't think I have ever taken so long to read a book and still finished it. This was my first major Hemingway and, so far from finding it direct and pithy, as the author is... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Roger Brunyate

5.0 out of 5 stars This of the Mountains and Trees
This beautifully written book is often compelling and occasionally trying. At nearly 500 densely written pages, I found my edition of the book perhaps overly long, but nonetheless... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Charles Calvert

3.0 out of 5 stars Abridged version, anyone?
I disagree with the reviewers that bash the literal Spanish translation (I actually kind of enjoyed it for the most part), but I also agree fully with those who say that parts... Read more
Published 5 months ago by D. Robison

5.0 out of 5 stars Superior novel about idealism, treachery, and guerilla warfare
Hemingway published FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS in 1940, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Surely, one of Hem's goals in writing this novel was to capture in fiction the... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Ethan Cooper

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Hemingway
It took me a couple hundred pages to get through the opening slump of reading this book. It didn't become interesting to me until about half way through, at which point the... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Meg House

Only search this product's reviews



Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
Better Read With Political Background 0 April 2006
See all discussions...  
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
   




Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Beta (What's this?)


Look for Similar Items by Category


Look for Similar Items by Subject

 

Feedback

If you need help or have a question for Customer Service, contact us.
 Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Is there any other feedback you would like to provide?

Your comments can help make our site better for everyone.


Your Recent History

 (What's this?)

After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in.