Hemingway at his peak

Smile Please: Hemingway having fun with the camera

I love this photo. Here is Hemingway at his peak, mentally and physically; it's my favorite time period for him. He's somewhere in Spain in the late 1930s. He was there covering the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance. But what he was really doing (whether he knew it or not) was filling his mind with what he needed to write For Whom the Bell Tolls, my favorite novel and I think the very best ever written.