Style, Politics, and Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Dispatches

Authors

  • Alex Vernon Hendrix College Author

Keywords:

Ernest Hemingway, Spanish Civil War, war correspondence, journalism and propaganda, narrative journalism, eyewitness reporting, twentieth-century war reporting

Abstract

The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 as a rebellion of generals against the Republic’s electorally-restored left-leaning government. Hemingway held a deep love for Spain dating from his trips to the bullfights in the early 1920s. He finally made it to the war-torn country in March of 1937 to report on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), to assess the situation in his role as chairman of the ambulance corps committee of the pro-Republican American Friends of Spanish Democracy. By war’s end in April 1939, Hemingway would make four trips to Spain and write thirty-one dispatches.

Author Biography

  • Alex Vernon, Hendrix College

    Alex Vernon is an Associate Professor of English at Hendrix College in Arkansas. He is the author of two memoirs, most succinctly bred and The Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf War; two books of literary criticism/history, Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O’Brien and Hemingway’s Second War: Bearing Witness to the Spanish Civil War; the cultural study On Tarzan; and two edited collections, Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Tim O’Brien.

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Published

2026-03-25

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2010): Literary Warriors

Section

Articles