96 Fun Facts About Ernest Hemingway

In which Chicago suburb was Ernest Hemingway born in 1899?

Oak Park was still part of the town of Cicero when he was born there, and it only broke away to become a village of its own in 1902.

For which newspaper did Hemingway work as a cub reporter right after high school?

The Kansas City Star's style guide demanded short sentences and vigorous English, and Hemingway said the paper forced him to learn to write a simple declarative sentence.

In what role did Hemingway serve on the Italian front in World War I?

Red Cross ambulance driver was his role, and on July 8, 1918, not yet 19, he was badly wounded at Fossalta di Piave and decorated by Italy for heroism.

Which Red Cross nurse, seven years his senior, did the wounded Hemingway fall for?

Agnes von Kurowsky nursed him at the American Red Cross hospital in Milan in 1918; she ended the romance by letter in 1919, and the episode fed A Farewell to Arms.

Hemingway moved to Paris in 1921 as a foreign correspondent for which newspaper?

The Toronto Star also sent its young correspondent far beyond Paris, including to report on the upheaval in Greece and Turkey in 1922.

Who was Hemingway's first wife, eight years his senior, whom he married in 1921?

Hadley Richardson divorced him in 1927 after his affair with her best friend, Pauline Pfeiffer, and she received the royalties from his first novel.

In 1922, Hemingway's first wife lost a suitcase of almost all his manuscripts at which Paris station?

Gare de Lyon is where the suitcase vanished as she set off to join him in Switzerland; only 'Up in Michigan', left in a drawer, and 'My Old Man', in the post, survived.

The Sun Also Rises' narrator Jake Barnes carries what lasting war injury?

Impotence from his war wound keeps Jake from the woman he loves, Lady Brett Ashley, who is unwilling to give up sex.

Under what title was The Sun Also Rises published in London a year later?

Fiesta was the title Jonathan Cape used for the 1927 London edition, and it had been Hemingway's own working title; the American title comes from Ecclesiastes.

The Sun Also Rises' characters travel from Paris to the San Fermín festival in which city?

Pamplona drew Hemingway and a group of friends in 1925, and several of them became models for the novel's characters.

How does A Farewell to Arms end for its heroine?

She dies in childbirth, and the baby dies too, leaving Frederic Henry desolate at the loss of the great love of his life.

In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry falls for which English nurse?

Catherine Barkley flees the war with Frederic after he deserts the Italian army, and the couple escape into neutral Switzerland.

For Whom the Bell Tolls takes its title from a meditation by which poet?

John Donne wrote it in 1623 while recovering from a near-fatal illness, and the same meditation gave the world 'No man is an island'.

What is Robert Jordan's mission in For Whom the Bell Tolls?

To blow up a bridge is his order, for an offensive he comes to see is doomed, and after the blast he stays behind, wounded, to hold off the enemy.

Which war did Hemingway cover in 1937, providing the material for For Whom the Bell Tolls?

The Spanish Civil War also drew him into film: he helped write The Spanish Earth, a documentary backing the Republic, and narrated its English version.

What happens to the marlin Hemingway's Santiago catches?

Sharks eat it on the long voyage home, so Santiago reaches shore with only the marlin's skeleton tied to his skiff.

Which magazine printed all of Hemingway's novella about the fisherman Santiago in one September 1952 issue?

Life ran it a week before Scribner's hardcover came out, yet the book still became an immediate bestseller.

Which of Hemingway's works won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953?

The Old Man and the Sea was praised as enthusiastically as his previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees, had been damned.

Who read Hemingway's 1954 Nobel speech for him?

The US ambassador to Sweden, John Cabot, read it, because ill health kept Hemingway from travelling to Stockholm.

What injured Hemingway in Africa in 1954?

Plane crashes in quick succession in January 1954 left him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life.

What name did Hemingway give to his pared-down method of leaving the deeper meaning unstated?

The iceberg theory held that a writer could omit anything he truly knew, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make readers feel more.

In which Florida town did Hemingway settle in 1928 on the advice of John Dos Passos?

Key West became home in April 1928, and in 1931 Pauline's wealthy Uncle Gus bought the couple their house on Whitehead Street.

Which coin is said to be set beside Hemingway's costly Florida pool?

A penny: faced with the bill, Hemingway reportedly joked that Pauline might as well take his last cent, and the coin ended up set in concrete.

What was the name of the 38-foot fishing boat Hemingway bought in 1934?

Pilar was also the name he gave the courageous guerrilla woman in For Whom the Bell Tolls, the wife of the band's leader, Pablo.

What did Hemingway hunt for off Cuba in World War II?

German U-boats were the quarry, and those patrols later fed the final act of his posthumous novel Islands in the Stream.

What is the name of Hemingway's house near Havana, now a museum, where he lived from 1939 to 1960?

Finca Vigía, 'Lookout Farm', is where he wrote much of For Whom the Bell Tolls, and it stayed his home for some two decades until he left Cuba.

Which celebrated war correspondent was Hemingway's third wife?

Martha Gellhorn reported on wars across some six decades, and Hemingway dedicated For Whom the Bell Tolls to her.

Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary Welsh, was a correspondent for which magazine when they met in London?

Time magazine's Mary Welsh met Hemingway in London in 1944 while both covered the war, and after his death she edited A Moveable Feast for publication.

Hemingway's 1932 non-fiction book Death in the Afternoon is a treatise on what?

Bullfighting, to Hemingway, was more tragic ceremony than sport, a ritual of life and death he likened to the writer's own search for meaning.

In Hemingway's story 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro', what is the writer Harry dying of on safari?

Gangrene has set in on safari, and facing death, Harry regrets squandering his talent on easy living with a wealthy woman.

For what did Hemingway receive a Bronze Star in 1947?

Journalism under fire in World War II earned it, after he saw action in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge and joined the liberation of Paris.

What is the title of Hemingway's only full-length play?

The Fifth Column, his only full-length play, was written while the city he was reporting from lay under bombardment.

In which Idaho town did Hemingway die by suicide in 1961?

Ketchum sits beside Sun Valley, the resort where he had worked on For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1939, and he hunted and fished in the area for years.

Where was Hemingway treated with electroconvulsive therapy in December 1960?

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, gave him electroshock treatments, and he went back for a second stay in spring 1961, shortly before his death.

Hemingway Days and its look-alike contest began in 1981 as a promotion for which bar?

Sloppy Joe's, a bar Hemingway often drank at, launched the festival in 1981, decades after a one-dollar rent rise made its owner and customers carry the whole bar to a new site.

Which Hemingway granddaughter earned an Oscar nomination for Woody Allen's Manhattan?

Mariel Hemingway played Tracy, Woody Allen's teenage girlfriend, and later made the documentary Running from Crazy about her family's struggles with mental illness.

Hemingway's 1927 story Hills Like White Elephants centres on a couple obliquely discussing what?

An abortion is never named: the American and 'the girl' call it 'an awfully simple operation' as they wait for a train in Spain.

Which pen name did teenage Hemingway use in his school paper, after a Chicago Tribune columnist?

Ring Lardner Jr. was a borrowed byline, yet Lardner really did have a son of that name, who grew up to win two screenwriting Oscars.

What was the profession of Hemingway's father, Clarence?

Physician Clarence Hemingway was often depressed, and he died by suicide in 1928, as Ernest himself later would.

Hemingway's musician mother made her reluctant son learn which instrument?

Cello was his assigned instrument, since Grace Hemingway, an opera-trained singer, insisted that all her children learn one, and he played in the school orchestra.

Which novelist talked the newlywed Hemingways out of Rome and into Paris in 1921?

Sherwood Anderson wrote them letters of introduction for Paris, yet Hemingway soon mocked Anderson's style in a cruel parody, The Torrents of Spring.

Which modernist writer was godmother to Hemingway's first son, Jack?

Gertrude Stein, his Paris mentor, is credited with dubbing his circle the 'Lost Generation', but their friendship later soured into a long literary quarrel.

Who was Hemingway's long-time editor at Scribner's, who died in 1947?

Max Perkins persuaded Scribner's to publish Hemingway's first novel, and he also championed F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe.

The Hemingways' summer cottage Windemere stood beside which Michigan body of water?

Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, is where he spent boyhood summers learning to hunt and fish, and northern Michigan became the setting for many Nick Adams stories.

Hemingway's 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees is set mostly in which city?

Venice is where the dying Colonel Cantwell spends his leave, and the young countess he loves was modelled on Adriana Ivancich, whom Hemingway met there.

Which US agency did Hemingway, late in life, believe was watching him, and had in fact kept a file on him?

The FBI kept a file on him from 1942, much of it about his wartime intelligence work for the US Embassy in Havana.

Which New York Yankees great does the old fisherman Santiago idolise in Hemingway's 1952 novella?

Joe DiMaggio, himself a fisherman's son, comes up whenever Santiago and the boy talk baseball, and the old man measures his own endurance against the slugger's.

Which screen couple fell in love while filming the 1944 movie of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not?

Bogart and Bacall began their romance on set, where she was a teenage model in her first film; director Howard Hawks had told Hemingway he could make a great movie from his worst book.

Which leader won Hemingway's own fishing tournament off Havana in 1960, the one occasion they met?

Fidel Castro won the tournament that carried the writer's name, and Hemingway handed him the trophy in person, shortly before leaving Cuba for good.

What did Hemingway pull down on his head in a Paris bathroom, mistaking its cord for a toilet chain?

A skylight came crashing down weeks before he quit Paris in March 1928 with his pregnant second wife, and he never again lived in a big city.

A six-word story long credited to Hemingway, on no real evidence, offers which item for sale?

Baby shoes are the whole plot, but versions of the tiny tale were in print by 1906, when Hemingway was seven, and no one linked it to him until a 1989 play.

Which rum cocktail made Havana's El Floridita, a favourite Hemingway haunt, famous around the world?

The daiquiri is the house legend: the bar calls itself the drink's cradle, and a sugarless version with grapefruit juice carries Hemingway's name.

Which Mark Twain novel did Hemingway call the starting point of all modern American writing?

Huckleberry Finn earned that praise in Hemingway's 1935 safari memoir, with one catch: he told readers to stop before the final chapters, which he dismissed as cheating.

In what position did Hemingway write, a habit shared with Charles Dickens and Winston Churchill?

Standing up was a working habit Hemingway shared with Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Nabokov, who also composed on their feet at tall desks.

Which Jazz Age novelist did Hemingway befriend in Paris in 1925 and depict in A Moveable Feast?

F. Scott Fitzgerald had just published The Great Gatsby, and reading it convinced Hemingway that his own next book had to be a novel: The Sun Also Rises followed a year later.

Which Swedish actress did Hemingway want as María in the 1943 film of For Whom the Bell Tolls?

Ingrid Bergman got the part only after Paramount's first choice, Vera Zorina, had been filmed with her hair cropped short and then replaced.

Which Hemingway hunting friend starred in films of A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls?

Gary Cooper was so much Hemingway's idea of a hero that the writer drew on his image for Robert Jordan, and their friendship, built on duck and pheasant shoots, lasted twenty years.

Which actor was Oscar-nominated for a 1958 film as Hemingway's old Cuban fisherman Santiago?

Spencer Tracy called it the toughest part he ever played, while Hemingway fretted that the actor's weight made him a liability to the picture.

Which Paris hotel with a bar named after Hemingway kept his forgotten notebooks for decades?

The Ritz handed back two trunks in 1956, and the notebooks inside grew into A Moveable Feast; legend also has Hemingway liberating the hotel in 1944, which he did not.

In which 2011 film does a screenwriter slip back to the 1920s and discuss his novel with Hemingway?

Midnight in Paris whisks Owen Wilson's character to the cafés of the Jazz Age, where Hemingway offers to pass his manuscript to a famous friend; the scenes echo A Moveable Feast.

On D-Day, Hemingway's landing craft came under fire within sight of which Normandy beach?

Omaha was as close as he got: his head bandaged over a wound that had taken 57 stitches, he was treated as precious cargo and never allowed ashore.

Which twice-married aristocrat do Jake Barnes and his friends all pursue in The Sun Also Rises?

Brett Ashley stood for the liberated New Woman of the 1920s: she seduces a 19-year-old matador, then summons Jake by telegram to come and rescue her.

The Sun Also Rises takes its title and a long epigraph from which book of the Old Testament?

Ecclesiastes supplied the passage about the earth enduring while people come and go, which Hemingway told his editor was the real point of the book.

To which country do Frederic Henry and his lover flee after he deserts in A Farewell to Arms?

Switzerland is reached in a rowboat arranged by a friendly barman in Stresa, and the border guards there grant the two fugitives provisional visas.

Which label for postwar expatriates did Hemingway popularise in an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises?

The Lost Generation began as a French garage owner's rebuke to a slow young mechanic; a friend passed the remark on, and Hemingway's 1926 novel made it famous.

Which Hemingway nickname titles a 2015 biopic, the first Hollywood film shot in Cuba since 1959?

Papa is how he signed even the cables he sent his wife, and the makers of Papa: Hemingway in Cuba were allowed to film inside his own house near Havana.

Which fellow Nobel laureate worked on the screenplay of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not?

William Faulkner was the script's main contributor and reportedly suggested moving the action from Cuba to Martinique, a setting he knew from an unproduced story about Charles de Gaulle.

Which documentary maker teamed with Lynn Novick on the three-part 2021 PBS series Hemingway?

Ken Burns traced both the public legend and the private man across three episodes, the first of them titled simply A Writer.

Hemingway's cocktail Death in the Afternoon adds champagne to a jigger of which potent spirit?

Absinthe goes into the glass first, and the recipe appeared in a 1935 book of cocktails by famous authors, where his instructions cheerfully recommended several in a row.

Which animals does old Santiago dream of on an African beach in Hemingway's 1952 novella?

Lions are the novella's closing image: exhausted after his ordeal at sea, Santiago goes back to sleep and dreams of them once more.

Which Vogue journalist from a wealthy Catholic family became Hemingway's second wife in 1927?

Pauline Pfeiffer met the Hemingways in Paris while working for the magazine, and before the wedding he converted to her faith.

What toddler nickname stuck to Hemingway's first son Jack, coined for his plump, teddy-bear look?

Bumby grew up to parachute into occupied France as an OSS officer with his fly rod in his kit, and was almost captured by an enemy patrol while fishing.

What is the name of the boy who looks after the old fisherman Santiago in Hemingway's novella?

Manolin has been ordered by his parents onto a luckier boat, yet he keeps carrying the old man's gear each morning and evening.

In Hemingway's The Killers, what was the trade of Ole Andreson, the man two hitmen come to kill?

A boxer, once a heavyweight, Andreson refuses to run when warned; shortly before Hemingway wrote the story, the Chicago mob had ordered the killing of a popular pugilist of the day.

In Hemingway's Indian Camp, which tool does Nick Adams's father use for an emergency caesarean?

A jackknife does the job while young Nick holds the basin; afterwards the woman's husband is found dead in the bunk above.

Which animal's frozen carcass lies near the summit at the start of The Snows of Kilimanjaro?

A leopard lies there in the story's opening paragraph, on the western summit that the Masai call the House of God.

Which posthumous Hemingway novel lent its title to a hit duet by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton?

Islands in the Stream, found by his widow among the works he left behind, gave its name to a song the Bee Gees wrote as an R&B number before reworking it for the duet.

Which US president let Hemingway's widow collect his papers from Cuba despite a travel ban?

Kennedy arranged the trip in 1961, and his presidential library went on to hold about ninety percent of Hemingway's surviving manuscripts.

The closing pages of The Sun Also Rises mention Botín, a restaurant in which European capital?

Madrid's Botín, whose roast suckling pig gets a mention in the novel, is listed by Guinness as the oldest restaurant in the world, said to date from 1725.

At which newly opened ski resort did Hemingway work on For Whom the Bell Tolls in autumn 1939?

Sun Valley lodged him in suite 206 that season: the railroad boss behind the resort, Averell Harriman, had invited him and a string of Hollywood stars to help promote it.

Hemingway's first book, 300 copies printed in Paris in 1923, was titled Three Stories and Ten what?

Poems, ten of them, sat beside the three stories in a slim volume from Robert McAlmon's Contact Publishing, under titles such as Oklahoma and Roosevelt.

Which 1927 Hemingway story collection shares its title with a later book by Haruki Murakami?

Men Without Women gathered fourteen stories of matadors, prizefighters, infidelity and death, among them The Killers and Hills Like White Elephants.

What became of the 1941 Pulitzer novel prize after its jury picked For Whom the Bell Tolls?

Nobody received it: Columbia University's president, Nicholas Murray Butler, found the novel offensive and talked the board into reversing its decision.

Which men's magazine, a regular 1930s outlet for Hemingway, first printed The Snows of Kilimanjaro?

Esquire began in 1933 as an offshoot of a menswear trade journal, and Hemingway was writing for it within months; the Kilimanjaro story ran in August 1936.

In which Alpine country did the Hemingways winter at Schruns while he revised The Sun Also Rises?

Austria was where he finished the revisions in March 1926, after breaking off for a quick trip to New York to meet his publishers.

Which actor made his film debut as the hunted Swede in the 1946 movie of Hemingway's The Killers?

Burt Lancaster was not the first choice for the part, but it launched him; only the film's opening twelve minutes closely follow Hemingway's story.

Which young soldier and future novelist sought out Hemingway in liberated Paris and won his praise?

J. D. Salinger found him friendlier and gentler than his gruff public image, and later wrote that their talks were among his few good memories of the war.

Where in Cuba did Hemingway leave his Nobel medal, which was stolen and swiftly recovered in 1986?

At a shrine: he gave the medal to the image of Our Lady of Charity at El Cobre, and after the 1986 theft it was back within days and locked away in the church treasury.

Which Hemingway novel about newlyweds on the French Riviera was first published in 1986?

The Garden of Eden occupied him on and off from 1946 until his death, running to 800 pages; in it the bride talks her husband into dyeing his hair to match hers.

Which magazine, already employing his wife, made Hemingway its front-line correspondent in 1944?

Collier's had been sending his third wife to war zones for years; Hemingway signed on in 1944 and filed his account of the Normandy landings for it.

In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry deserts during the Italian retreat from which 1917 battle?

Caporetto was the 1917 rout whose bloody aftermath the novel describes; among the attackers was a junior officer named Erwin Rommel, who won the Pour le Mérite there.

Which French painter did Hemingway try to emulate in the prose of Big Two-Hearted River?

Paul Cézanne was, he said, his painter: Hemingway gave the story a detailed foreground against a vaguely described background, as in the canvases he had studied in Paris.

Why did Hemingway face formal charges under the Geneva Convention as a war correspondent in 1944?

He led armed fighters, a band of village militia at Rambouillet outside Paris, which correspondents may not do; he beat the charge by claiming he had only offered advice.

Which insurance-executive poet broke his hand punching Hemingway at a Florida party in 1936?

Wallace Stevens was knocked to the street again and again by the younger man, and later apologised.

Which satirical novella, Hemingway's first long work, did he write in only ten days?

The Torrents of Spring parodied a novel by an older writer who had befriended him; when his publisher rejected it, his contract lapsed and he moved to Scribner's.

Hemingway's younger brother Leicester founded which micronation on a raft off the coast of Jamaica?

New Atlantis measured 8 feet by 30 and was meant to fund ocean research by selling coins and stamps, until a tropical storm destroyed it in 1966.