At this point in his career, Hemingway seems to have become distracted by his own celebrity. Eight years would pass between A Farewell to Arms and the writer's next novel, the slight and poorly received To Have and Have Not (1937) — which is really a collection of linked short stories that share a setting (Cuba and Key West) rather than a true novel. In the interim, Hemingway wrote two books of nonfiction: a loose, baggy treatise on bullfighting called Death in the Afternoon (1932) and The Green Hills of Africa (1935), which was about big-game hunting. All the while, the Hemingway legend was growing, thanks in no small part to the author's own embellishments (and sometimes out-and-out lies) about his past.
Finally, in 1940, For Whom the Bell Tolls appeared. The book is a big novel about the Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway had covered as a correspondent and documentary filmmaker. Critics accused it, and him, of self-parody — and indeed, the novel's style is often unbearably mannered. Still, the best-selling For Whom the Bell Tolls stands among the early stories and his first two novels as Hemingway's main storytelling achievements.
