Ernest Hemingway Trivia
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This Ernest Hemingway trivia quiz has 96 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 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Chicago suburb was Ernest Hemingway born in 1899?
Oak Park
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.
Q 02For which newspaper did Hemingway work as a cub reporter right after high school?
The Kansas City Star
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.
Q 03In what role did Hemingway serve on the Italian front in World War I?
Red Cross ambulance driver
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.
Q 04Which Red Cross nurse, seven years his senior, did the wounded Hemingway fall for?
Agnes von Kurowsky
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.
Q 05Hemingway moved to Paris in 1921 as a foreign correspondent for which newspaper?
The Toronto Star
The Toronto Star also sent its young correspondent far beyond Paris, including to report on the upheaval in Greece and Turkey in 1922.
Q 06Who was Hemingway's first wife, eight years his senior, whom he married in 1921?
Hadley Richardson
Hadley Richardson divorced him in 1927 after his affair with her best friend, Pauline Pfeiffer, and she received the royalties from his first novel.
Q 07In 1922, Hemingway's first wife lost a suitcase of almost all his manuscripts at which Paris station?
Gare de Lyon
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.
Q 08The Sun Also Rises' narrator Jake Barnes carries what lasting war injury?
Impotence
Impotence from his war wound keeps Jake from the woman he loves, Lady Brett Ashley, who is unwilling to give up sex.
Q 09Under what title was The Sun Also Rises published in London a year later?
Fiesta
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.
Q 10The Sun Also Rises' characters travel from Paris to the San Fermín festival in which city?
Pamplona
Pamplona drew Hemingway and a group of friends in 1925, and several of them became models for the novel's characters.
Q 11How does A Farewell to Arms end for its heroine?
She dies in childbirth
She dies in childbirth, and the baby dies too, leaving Frederic Henry desolate at the loss of the great love of his life.
Q 12In A Farewell to Arms, Frederic Henry falls for which English nurse?
Catherine Barkley
Catherine Barkley flees the war with Frederic after he deserts the Italian army, and the couple escape into neutral Switzerland.
Q 13For Whom the Bell Tolls takes its title from a meditation by which poet?
John Donne
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'.
Q 21What name did Hemingway give to his pared-down method of leaving the deeper meaning unstated?
The iceberg theory
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.
Q 22In which Florida town did Hemingway settle in 1928 on the advice of John Dos Passos?
Key West
Key West became home in April 1928, and in 1931 Pauline's wealthy Uncle Gus bought the couple their house on Whitehead Street.
Q 23Which coin is said to be set beside Hemingway's costly Florida pool?
A penny
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.
Q 14What is Robert Jordan's mission in For Whom the Bell Tolls?
To blow up a bridge
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.
Q 15Which war did Hemingway cover in 1937, providing the material for For Whom the Bell Tolls?
The Spanish Civil War
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.
Q 16What happens to the marlin Hemingway's Santiago catches?
Sharks eat it
Sharks eat it on the long voyage home, so Santiago reaches shore with only the marlin's skeleton tied to his skiff.
Q 17Which magazine printed all of Hemingway's novella about the fisherman Santiago in one September 1952 issue?
Life
Life ran it a week before Scribner's hardcover came out, yet the book still became an immediate bestseller.
Q 18Which of Hemingway's works won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953?
The Old Man and the Sea
The Old Man and the Sea was praised as enthusiastically as his previous novel, Across the River and into the Trees, had been damned.
Q 19Who read Hemingway's 1954 Nobel speech for him?
The US ambassador
The US ambassador to Sweden, John Cabot, read it, because ill health kept Hemingway from travelling to Stockholm.
Q 20What injured Hemingway in Africa in 1954?
Plane crashes
Plane crashes in quick succession in January 1954 left him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life.
Q 24What was the name of the 38-foot fishing boat Hemingway bought in 1934?
Pilar
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.
Q 25What did Hemingway hunt for off Cuba in World War II?
German U-boats
German U-boats were the quarry, and those patrols later fed the final act of his posthumous novel Islands in the Stream.
Q 26What is the name of Hemingway's house near Havana, now a museum, where he lived from 1939 to 1960?
Finca Vigía
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.
Q 27Which celebrated war correspondent was Hemingway's third wife?
Martha Gellhorn
Martha Gellhorn reported on wars across some six decades, and Hemingway dedicated For Whom the Bell Tolls to her.
Q 28Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary Welsh, was a correspondent for which magazine when they met in London?
Time
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.
Q 29Hemingway's 1932 non-fiction book Death in the Afternoon is a treatise on what?
Bullfighting
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.
Q 30In Hemingway's story 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro', what is the writer Harry dying of on safari?
Gangrene
Gangrene has set in on safari, and facing death, Harry regrets squandering his talent on easy living with a wealthy woman.