In the late 1930's, Hemingway ventured to Spain to give his encouragement to the Loyalists fighting in the Spanish Civil War. His experiences as a war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance would inspire his other great war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Exactly one month after the 1940 publication of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway married fellow writer and war correspondent Martha Ellis Gellhorn. It was a marriage that would last only five years. He married fourth and final wife Mary Welsh Monks on March 14, 1946. For the next fourteen years, the couple would live in Hemingway's Finca VigĂa (Lookout Farm) in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba.
After a disappointing reception of his 1950 novel, Across the River and into the Trees, Hemingway rallied producing The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a short work that earned him a 1953 Pulitzer Prize and ultimately the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature. Physically unnerved from two plane crashes earlier that year, Hemingway was unable to attend the prize ceremonies. He would live another seven years.