October 21, 1940: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway is published. It is a tale of the International Brigades, aiding the leftist Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. The novel was far more successful than those to whom it paid tribute.
The title is taken from a 1624 poem by Englishman John Donne, which has put 3 famous sayings into our lexicon. Hemingway left the original spelling in his epigraph, but I'll render it in modern English:
No man is an island, entire of itself.
Every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.
If a Cloud be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less
as well as if a Promontory were,
as well as if a Manor of thy friends or thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me
because I am involved in Mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls.
It tolls for thee.
The International Brigades -- Brigadas Internacionales in Spanish -- were soldiers recruited and organized by the Communist International to assist the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic. It is estimated that, during the entire war, there were some 32,000 Brigaders, yet at no single moment were there more than 18,000 actually deployed. among them were Americans who named their group the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
The novel tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerilla unit. As a demolitions expert, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia.
The novel was made into a film in 1943, directed by Sam Wood, starring Gary Cooper as Jordan, and Ingrid Bergman as María, a guerilla he falls in love with. The film was nominated for 9 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Cooper, and Best Actress for Bergman. But the only winner was Greek actress Katina Paxinou, for Best Supporting Actress.
Both Cooper and Bergman tended to have affairs with their co-stars, and this film was no exception. Hemingway, who had recently made journalist Martha Gellhorn the 3rd of his 4 wives, would have approved.
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October 21, 1940 was a Monday. Jimmy Beaumont, the lead singer of the Pittsburgh-based doo-wop group The Skyliners, was born.
The baseball season ended 13 days earlier, when the Cincinnati Reds won Game 7 of the World Series over the Detroit Tigers. The NFL was 30 years away from Monday Night Football. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season was 30 days away from starting. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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