Background Info for Bells Tolling

Okay, here is the skinny on our new book. I will try and throw in some Ernest Hemingway tidbits as I can. Hemingway is a favorite of mine and this is his longest novel.

As a brief background, Hemingway was born in a Chicago suburb and spent a lot of time fishing and hunting during the summers in Michigan. He started his writing career as a reporter for the Kansas City Star and kept getting different writing gigs throughout his life. He spent time in Europe hanging out with the Paris literary elite such as Ezra Pound. When he visited Spain, he absolutely fell in love with it. He continued to write about Spain and follow bull fighting for the rest of his life. One of his jobs was to cover the Spanish Civil War for an American magazine. He "embeded" himself with the Republicans and was able to report from there. This gave his a first-hand view of the war which is our setting for the book. More on Hemingway later.

The Spanish Civil War

In just going to throw in enough so that you have the backdrop. It is actually fairly complicated and more info can easily be found on Wikipedia. The Spanish civil war was fought between the Republicans (reformers who were the legitimate government at the time) and the Nationalists (the right wingers or fascists). To break that out a little more, Spain had been going through a lot of reforms and changes in govenment in converting from a monarchy to a republic (republicans, get it?). In the elections leading up to the civil war (1930s) the government was increasingly being controlled by left wing coalitions that ran the gamut from moderates to socialists and even communists. Obviously it was much more complex than this, but they started making big changes like changing land ownership laws and redistributing land to the huge poor class. Spain, like many latin-american countries today, had a lot of poor peasant class people and then a few wealthy land-owners. The new government had been working to level the field. All of these social reforms naturally worried the wealthy and the conservative institutions like the Catholic church, factions of the military, and those that still wished there was a king. So they mounted a coup attempt led by military types. The most significant of those being Franco. Together they were the Nationalists. The civil war was marked by its brutality and cruelness on both sides and as is usually the case, the peasants were the ones that suffered greatly.

The Nationalists were backed by Italy and Germany who recognized that Franco was quite a bit like them and thought he would be a good ally. Spain ended up being almost a testing ground for many of the tactics and weapons used by the German army in WWII (blitzkrieg, airplanes, etc.). Interestingly enough, once WWII broke out and Franco was safely in control of Spain, he stayed out of the war.

The Republicans were backed by the Soviet Union and anti-fascists from all over including America. Many people went to Spain to fight fascism in the war.

Our novel is about one of these people - the American Robert Jordan who loves Spain and hates fascism - so basically how Hemingway saw himself there. RJ is with a group of Republican supporters who are behind the enemy lines. The novel's events take place in the mountains outside of Madrid. They mention several times Escorial which was the traditional palace and burying place of the Spanish kings.

So that's the background. Ask questions if you like. I will post more on the actual story soon.