For Whom the Bell Tolls

Set during the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway's 1940 novel follows Robert Jordan, a former professor of Spanish at the University of Montana who fights for the Republic as a demolitions expert. Ordered to destroy a bridge behind enemy lines ahead of an offensive, he joins a band of anti-fascist guerrillas in the mountains between Madrid and Segovia. There he meets María, a young woman whose life the war has shattered, and the band's leader Pablo, who resists a mission that would endanger his men. Hemingway covered the war in 1937 as a correspondent, and the novel was filmed in 1943 with Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.

Josh Waitzkin called it an exquisite novel in a podcast interview.