" ... [B]oy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. Ernest Hemingway conveyed this story chronologically, in a strictly linear fashion, with no flashback scenes whatsoever. In fact, the novel contains very little exposition at all. We never learn exactly where its narrator and protagonist, the American ambulance driver Frederic Henry, came from, or why he enlisted in the Italian army to begin with. (For that matter, we read chapter after chapter...

The three-act play and the hitherto uncollected stories contained in this book represent the first literary fruits of the active months (1937-1939) Ernest Hemingway spent in Spain covering the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance and helping to film battle scenes for the motion picture The Spanish Earth. He conveys the feverish life in Madrid under siege: the daily horrors of the Rebel bombardment, the incongruous...