The Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War

The Spanish Civil War--the most momentous political and cultural flashpoint of the 1930s--struck deep into the conscience and conciousness of the West. This anthology offers a vivid, moving, and often surprising cross-section of the writing it generated--prose and poetry, public and private, documentary and fictional, convinced and skeptical, left-wing and right-wing. It includes contributions from a number of lesser-known authors, as well as the famous names, and the distinctive participation of women is ehre recognized and represented for the first time. The book shows writers taking sides; reflecting on the war's progress in essays, diaries, letters, journalism, poems, stories, and novels; reporting their visits to the fighting zones; and expressing their responses ranging from hope to despair, from satisfaction to horror. Included are selections from Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Randall Jarrell, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Leon Trotsky, Vita Sackville-West, Claude Simon, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, George Orwell, John Dos Passos, Helen Waddell, David Gascoyne, Antonia White, Ford Madox Ford, and many more. The publication of this book is timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.