SOURCE: Lutz Zivley, Sherry. “The Conclusion of Azuela's The Underdogs and Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The Hemingway Review 17, no. 2 (spring 1998): 118-23.

In the following essay, Zively discusses similarities in the final scenes of Los de Abajo and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Internal evidence suggests that when Ernest Hemingway wrote the final chapter of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), he was influenced by the final scene of Los de Abajo, a novel by Mexican writer Mariano Azuela first published in 1916 and translated into English in 1929 as The Underdogs. Although neither the standard biographies¹ nor Michael Reynolds's inventory of Hemingway's library indicate that he read Azuela, it would be surprising if he had not. The Underdogs was widely read both by a Spanish-speaking audience when it was first published and by an English-speaking audience when it was translated. As Angel Capellán documents, Hemingway read...