In the years between A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway matured as a writer against the backdrop of Cuban revolutions, African game trails, Key West impoverishment, and the Spanish Civil War. He experimented in fiction and nonfiction, pushing his limits as a writer, in such works as Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, and To Have and Have Not. In this "masterpiece in the making," Reynolds brings us so close to Hemingway that "you can all but smell Hemingway's whisky breath coming off the pages" (Library Journal).