This Ernest Hemingway trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and follows Papa from Oak Park and the Kansas City Star to the Italian front, the cafés of 1920s Paris and Pamplona's fiesta, Key West and its six-toed cats, Finca Vigía in Cuba, the African plane crashes and the last house in Ketchum, Idaho. The books get their due: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and its 39 endings, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea that sold 5.3 million copies of Life in two days, and the posthumous A Moveable Feast. So do the four wives, the lost suitcase of manuscripts, the boat Pilar, the iceberg theory, the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, and the look-alike contest held in his honour. Book clubs and literature students will find the early questions easy; the later ones on dates and details will test devoted readers. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Chicago suburb was Ernest Hemingway born in 1899?
Oak Park
He was the second of six children of a physician father and a musician mother.
Q 02For which newspaper did Hemingway work as a cub reporter for six months after high school?
The Kansas City Star
Its style sheet, with its short sentences and vigorous English, shaped his prose for life.
Q 03In what role did Hemingway serve on the Italian front in World War I?
Red Cross ambulance driver
He was seriously wounded by shrapnel in 1918 and decorated by Italy for helping soldiers to safety despite his injuries.
Q 04Which Red Cross nurse, seven years his senior, did the wounded Hemingway fall for?
Agnes von Kurowsky
The romance fed into A Farewell to Arms.
Q 05Hemingway moved to Paris in 1921 as a foreign correspondent for which newspaper?
The Toronto Star
There Gertrude Stein became his mentor and godmother to his son, and introduced him to the 'Lost Generation'.
Q 06Who was Hemingway's first wife, eight years his senior, whom he married in 1921?
Hadley Richardson
He married four times in all; Pauline, Martha and Mary followed.
Q 07In 1922, Hemingway's first wife lost a suitcase of almost all his manuscripts at which Paris station?
Gare de Lyon
She was travelling to join him in Geneva; only two stories survived.
Q 08In which year was Hemingway's debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, published by Scribner's?
1926
He began the draft on his birthday, right after the Pamplona fiesta, and finished it in eight weeks.
Q 09Under what title was The Sun Also Rises published in London a year later?
Fiesta
That had been Hemingway's own working title; the final one comes from Ecclesiastes.
Q 10The Sun Also Rises' characters travel from Paris to the San Fermín festival in which city?
Pamplona
Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley and friends watch the running of the bulls; the book is a roman à clef about Hemingway's real 1925 trip.
Q 11By his own count, how many versions of the ending of A Farewell to Arms did Hemingway write?
39
A 2012 edition printed no fewer than 47 alternate endings.
Q 12In A Farewell to Arms, ambulance officer Frederic Henry falls for which English nurse?
Catherine Barkley
The novel was banned in the Irish Free State.
Q 13For Whom the Bell Tolls takes its title from a meditation by which poet?
John Donne
Meditation XVII of his 1624 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions; the 1943 film starred Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.
Q 21What did Hemingway call his writing style, in which the facts float above water and the meaning stays out of sight?
The iceberg theory
It is also known as the theory of omission.
Q 22In which Florida town did Hemingway settle in 1928 on the advice of John Dos Passos?
Key West
Pauline's rich Uncle Gus bought the couple the Whitehead Street house for $8,000 as a wedding present.
Q 23The Hemingway House in Key West is famous for cats with what unusual feature?
Extra toes
Legend says they descend from Snow White, a six-toed cat given to Hemingway by a sea captain; about 50 live there today.
Q 14What is Robert Jordan's mission in For Whom the Bell Tolls?
To blow up a bridge
He is a demolitions expert and former Spanish professor from Montana attached to Republican guerrillas.
Q 15Which war did Hemingway cover in 1937, providing the material for For Whom the Bell Tolls?
The Spanish Civil War
He wrote the novel in Havana between March 1939 and July 1940.
Q 16How many days has Santiago gone without a fish at the start of The Old Man and the Sea?
84
He is 'salao', the worst kind of unlucky, and rows far into the Gulf Stream on day 85.
Q 17Which magazine printed the whole of The Old Man and the Sea in a single issue in September 1952?
Life
It sold a record 5.3 million copies in two days.
Q 18Which of Hemingway's works won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953?
The Old Man and the Sea
He wrote its draft in eight weeks, furious at reviews of his previous novel.
Q 19In which year did Hemingway receive the Nobel Prize in Literature?
1954
Earlier that year he had been nearly killed in two successive plane crashes in Africa.
Q 20How many plane crashes did Hemingway survive on his 1954 trip to Africa?
Two
They left him in pain and ill health for the rest of his life, and drinking harder to cope.
Q 24How much did the swimming pool Pauline installed at the Key West house in 1937 cost?
$20,000
It was the first pool in the Florida Keys and cost two and a half times what the whole property had.
Q 25What was the name of the 38-foot fishing boat Hemingway bought in 1934?
Pilar
It was a nickname for his second wife Pauline, and the name of the partisan leader in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Q 26How much did Hemingway pay Wheeler Shipbuilding of Brooklyn for his boat in 1934?
$7,495
He bought it right after returning from his first African safari.
Q 27What is the name of Hemingway's house near Havana, now a museum, where he lived from 1939 to 1960?
Finca Vigía
The name means 'Lookout Farm'; Martha Gellhorn found it and he bought it for $12,500 in 1940.
Q 28Which of Hemingway's wives was a celebrated war correspondent in her own right?
Martha Gellhorn
She accompanied him to the Spanish Civil War; they married in Cheyenne in November 1940.
Q 29Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary Welsh, was a correspondent for which magazine when they met in London?
Time
He proposed on their third meeting.
Q 30A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's memoir of 1920s Paris, was published in which year?
1964
He began it after recovering two trunks of old notebooks from the basement of the Paris Ritz in 1956; his widow saw it into print.