Hemingway had been following developments in Spain since early in his career[81] and from 1931 it became clear that there would be another European war. Hemingway predicted war would happen in the late 1930s. Baker writes that Hemingway did not expect Spain to "become a sort of international testing-ground for Germany, Italy, and Russia before the Spanish Civil War was over".[82] Despite Pauline's reluctance, he signed with North American Newspaper Alliance to cover the Spanish Civil War,[83] and sailed from New York on February 27.[84] Journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn accompanied Hemingway. He had met her in Key West a year earlier. Like Hadley, Martha was a St. Louis native and, like Pauline, had worked for Vogue in Paris. According to Kert, Martha "never catered to him the way other women did".[85]
He arrived in Spain in March with Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens.[86] Ivens, who was filming The Spanish Earth, intended to replace John Dos Passos with Hemingway as screenwriter. Dos Passos had left the project when his friend and Spanish translatorJosé Robles was arrested and later executed.[87] The incident changed Dos Passos' opinion of the leftist republicans, and caused a rift with Hemingway.[88] Back in the US that summer, Hemingway prepared the soundtrack for the film. It was screened at the White House in July.[89]
In late August he returned to France and flew from Paris to Barcelona and then to Valencia.[90] In September he visited the front in Belchite and then on to Teruel.[91] On his return to Madrid Hemingway wrote his only play, The Fifth Column, as the city was being bombarded by the Francoist army.[92] He went back to Key West for a few months in January 1938. It was a frustrating time: he found it hard to write, fretted over poor reviews for To Have or Have Not, bickered with Pauline, followed the news from Spain avidly and planned the next trip.[93] He took two trips to Spain in 1938. In November he visited the location of the Battle of the Ebro, the last republican stand, along with other British and American journalists.[94] They arrived to find the last bridge destroyed and had to retreat across the turbulent Ebro in a rowboat, Hemingway at the oars, "pulling for dear life".[95][96]
In early 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 began when Hemingway met Martha Gellhorn.[97] Martha soon joined him in Cuba, and they rented "Finca Vigía" ("Lookout Farm"), a 15-acre (61,000 m2) property 15 miles (24 km) from Havana. That summer while visiting with Pauline and the children in Wyoming, she took the children and left him. When his divorce from Pauline was finalized, he and Martha were married on November 20, 1940, in Cheyenne, Wyoming.[98]
Ernest Hemingway and children with cats at Finca Vigia.Hemingway followed the pattern established after his divorce from Hadley and moved again. Cuba became his winter residence and the summer home was in Ketchum, Idaho, just outside the newly built resort of Sun Valley.[99] He was at work on For Whom the Bell Tolls, which he began in March 1939 and finished in July 1940.[99] His pattern was to move around while working on a manuscript, and he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Cuba, Wyoming, and Sun Valley.[97] Published that October,[99] it became a book-of-the-month choice, sold half a million copies within months, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and as Meyers describes, "triumphantly re-established Hemingway's literary reputation".[100]
In January 1941, Martha was sent to China on assignment for Collier's magazine.[101] Hemingway went with her, sending in dispatches for the newspaper PM. Meyers writes that Hemingway had little enthusiasm for the trip or for China;[101] although his dispatches for PM provided incivisive insights of the Sino-Japanese War according to Reynolds, with analysis of Japanese incursions into the Philippines sparking an "American war in the Pacific".[102] Hemingway returned to Finca Vigia in August and left for Sun Valley a month later.[103] That December, after the Attack on Pearl Harbor the United States declared war on Japan.[104]
