At this point in his career, Hemingway seems to have become distracted by his own celebrity. Eight years passed between A Farewell to Arms and his 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, where Hemingway bought houses) 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. For instance, Hemingway claimed to have fought in the Italian infantry during World War I when he did no such thing.
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.
