Spanish Civil War
In 1937, Hemingway agreed to report on the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA),[82] arriving in Spain in March with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens.[83] Ivens, who was filming The Spanish Earth, wanted Hemingway to replace John Dos Passos as screenwriter, since Dos Passos had left the project when his friendJosé Robles was arrested and later executed.[84] The incident changed Dos Passos' opinion of the leftist republicans, creating a rift between him and Hemingway, who later spread a rumor that Dos Passos left Spain out of cowardice.[85]
Journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn, whom Hemingway had met in Key West the previous Christmas (1936), joined him in Spain. Like Hadley, Martha was a St. Louis native, and like Pauline, she had worked for Vogue in Paris. Of Martha, Kert explains, "she never catered to him the way other women did".[86] Late in 1937, while in Madrid with Martha, Hemingway wrote his only play, The Fifth Column, as the city was being bombarded.[87] He returned to Key West for a few months, then back to Spain twice in 1938, where he was present at the Battle of the Ebro, the last republican stand, and he was among the British and American journalists who were some of the last to leave the battle as they crossed the river.[88][89]
Cuba
In the spring of 1939, Hemingway crossed to Cuba in his boat to live in the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana. This was the separation phase of a slow and painful split from Pauline, which had begun when Hemingway met Martha.[90] Martha soon joined him in Cuba, and they almost immediately rented "Finca Vigia" ("Lookout Farm"), a 15-acre (61,000 m2) property 15 miles (24 km) from Havana. Pauline and the children left Hemingway that summer, after the family was reunited during a visit to Wyoming. After Hemingway's divorce from Pauline was finalized, he and Martha were married November 20, 1940, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.[91] As he had after his divorce from Hadley, he changed locations, moving his primary summer residence to Ketchum, Idaho, just outside the newly built resort of Sun Valley, and his winter residence to Cuba.[92] Hemingway, who had been disgusted when a Parisian friend allowed his cats to eat from the table, became enamored of cats in Cuba, keeping dozens of them on the property.[93]
Gellhorn inspired him to write his most famous novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he started in March 1939 and finished in July 1940. It was published in October 1940.[94] Consistent with his pattern of moving around while working on a manuscript, he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Cuba, Wyoming, and Sun Valley.[90] For Whom the Bell Tolls became a Book-of-the-Month Club choice, sold half a million copies within months, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and as Meyers describes it, "triumphantly re-established Hemingway's literary reputation".[95]
In August 1939 Hemingway was one of 400 US intellectuals who signed open letter "To All Active Supporters of Democracy and Peace" which stated that "the reactionaries" had "encouraged the fantastic falsehood that the USSR and the totalitarian states are basically alike" and claimed that the USSR had "shown a steadily expanding democracy in every sphere".[96]
In January 1941, Martha was sent to China on assignment for Collier's magazine.[97] Hemingway went with her, sending in dispatches for the newspaper PM, but in general he disliked China.[97] A 2009 book suggests during that period he may have been recruited to work for Soviet intelligence agents under the name "Agent Argo".[98] They returned to Cuba before the declaration of war by the United States that December, when he convinced the Cuban government to help him refit the Pilar, which he intended to use to ambush German submarines off the coast of Cuba.[18]
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