The Sun Also Rises
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50 free The Sun Also Rises trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Sun Also Rises made Ernest Hemingway's name in 1926 and still sets the pattern for spare, plain-spoken prose. On the surface little happens: a group of expatriates drink in Paris, travel down to Spain for the bullfights, quarrel over one woman and drift apart. Underneath, it is a book about damage, about what a generation carried home from the war and could not say out loud. This quiz covers the whole book. There are questions on Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn and Pedro Romero, on the Paris chapters, the fishing trip in the Pyrenees and the week in Pamplona, and on the closing scenes. Others look at how the novel was written and published, the real people Hemingway turned into characters, the arguments critics have had about it, and the film and television versions. It works as a reading check for a class or book club, as revision before an exam or essay, or as a challenge for anyone who knows their Hemingway. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01An epigraph to The Sun Also Rises credits which American writer in Paris with the Lost Generation label?
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein said she picked the phrase up from a French garage owner scolding a young mechanic. Hemingway set her remark beside a Bible passage and later said his characters were battered, not lost.
Q 02Ernest Hemingway took the title The Sun Also Rises from a passage in which Old Testament book?
Ecclesiastes
Ecclesiastes supplied the second epigraph, on generations passing while the earth endures. Hemingway told his editor that this endurance was the real point of the book.
Q 03Jake Barnes's war wound has left him with which condition, the unspoken barrier between him and Brett Ashley?
Impotence
Impotence is never named outright in the book: Jake says only that he got hurt in the war. He and Brett love each other, and both know the injury rules out a settled life together.
Q 04After his last bullfight of the festival, Pedro Romero presents Brett Ashley with which part of the bull?
An ear
An ear is the trophy, cut from the very bull that had killed a man during the run through the streets. Brett wraps it in one of Jake's handkerchiefs and leaves it shoved in a hotel drawer.
Q 05Which star played Lady Brett Ashley in the 1957 film of The Sun Also Rises, at Hemingway's own insistence?
Ava Gardner
Ava Gardner had dropped out and been replaced by Susan Hayward before Hemingway stepped in. She later called Lady Brett the most interesting character she had ever played.
Q 06In which Spanish city does The Sun Also Rises end, with Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley riding in a taxi?
Madrid
Madrid is where Brett ends up after leaving Pamplona with Romero. Jake arrives by night train, finds her alone in a cheap hotel, and the book closes on the two of them in a cab.
Q 07Which Star Trek actor played Count Mippipopolous in NBC's 1984 miniseries of The Sun Also Rises?
Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Nimoy took the role of the champagne-loving count, with Jane Seymour as Brett and Hart Bochner as Jake. The two-part version aired on consecutive nights in December 1984.
Q 08Which relative wrote to Ernest Hemingway in disgust at The Sun Also Rises, deploring its language and characters?
His mother
His mother, Grace, told him that every page filled her with loathing, after her book study class had torn into her son's work. The family's dismay did nothing to slow the sales.
Q 09With Pamplona out of season, the makers of the 1957 film The Sun Also Rises restaged its festival in which country?
Mexico
Mexico stood in for Spain, with filming starting in the city of Morelia. Hemingway walked out of the picture, complaining that the setting looked wrong and the bulls were undersized.
Q 10Which name is given to Hemingway's method, on show in The Sun Also Rises, of leaving the key facts unsaid?
The iceberg theory
The iceberg theory holds that a story gains force from what the writer knows but leaves out, as most of an iceberg rides below the waterline. Jake's injury, never spelled out, is the classic case.
Q 11Jake Barnes, who keeps paying the bills for his idle Paris friends, earns his own living in which trade?
Journalism
Journalism keeps Jake at a newspaper office by day, as it had kept Hemingway, a Paris correspondent for the Toronto Star. Hemingway credited a newsroom style sheet with the foundation of his prose.
Q 12Robert Cohn was a champion at Princeton in which sport, one he took up despite disliking it?
Boxing
Boxing was Cohn's answer to feeling like an outsider at Princeton, and it made him middleweight champion. The skill lies idle until Pamplona, where he floors three men in a single night.
Q 13Which bankrupt Scot is Lady Brett Ashley engaged to marry once her divorce comes through?
Mike Campbell
Q 21Jake Barnes tries to pray before the festival and then feels ashamed of being a poor member of which faith?
Catholicism
Catholicism gives Jake little comfort: his prayer wanders from his friends to the bullfights to making money. On the train down from Paris, a party of pilgrims from Ohio had beaten him to lunch in the dining car.
Q 22Which swashbuckling star played Brett's drunken fiancé in the 1957 film The Sun Also Rises, opposite Tyrone Power?
Errol Flynn
Errol Flynn's performance led him to a run of roles as alcoholics. Even Hemingway, who walked out of the film, allowed that Flynn was the best thing in it.
Q 23Which signal announces the start of the Pamplona festival at noon on Sunday 6 July in The Sun Also Rises?
A rocket
Mike Campbell writes to Brett constantly and shrugs off her affairs, yet drink turns him vicious towards Robert Cohn. He blames his bankruptcy on friends who let him down.
Q 14Which fish do Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton catch on their five-day trip to the streams near Burguete?
Trout
Trout fill their bags at the Irati River, where the two men cool their wine in the cold water and say little about the war. The trip is the book's calm interlude before Pamplona.
Q 15Jake Barnes first met Brett Ashley in a wartime hospital in England, where she was serving as what?
A volunteer nurse
A volunteer nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, Brett met Jake as he recovered from his wound. Her true love had died of dysentery, and by Jake's account she has twice married men she did not love.
Q 16Which saint's festival in Pamplona, famous for its morning bull runs, is the high point of The Sun Also Rises?
San Fermín
San Fermín is honoured each July with processions, bullfights and dawn runs through the streets. Hemingway first went in 1923, and his book is a large part of why outsiders now flock there.
Q 17Dancers at the Pamplona festival seat Brett Ashley on a wine cask and give her a wreath of what?
Garlic
Garlic is what the dancers wear around their own necks. They refuse to let Brett dance, wanting her as a figure to circle instead, like an idol at the heart of the party.
Q 18Which prejudice in the portrayal of Robert Cohn has The Sun Also Rises long been criticised for?
Antisemitism
Antisemitism runs through the taunts Cohn takes from the group, and the narration rarely lets his background drop. The publisher queried the bull scenes yet let the slurs stand.
Q 19Stranded in a cheap hotel after sending Pedro Romero away, how does Brett Ashley summon Jake Barnes to her side?
By telegram
By telegram, twice over: one wire reaches Jake forwarded from Paris and another from Pamplona, both saying she is in trouble. He books a place on that night's train at once.
Q 20Which fellow novelist's advice led Hemingway to cut the opening pages of The Sun Also Rises before it was printed?
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald read the draft and urged him to trim the slow start by at least 2,500 words. Hemingway went further and told the publisher to drop the whole opening sequence.
A rocket bursts over the square, and seven days and nights of drinking and dancing begin. Pamplona still opens its festival that way, with a firework called the chupinazo set off at noon on 6 July.
Q 24Robert Cohn, sure that life is passing him by, begs Jake Barnes to travel with him to which part of the world?
South America
South America had seized Cohn's fancy through W. H. Hudson's romance The Purple Land, which he took as a guide to life. He offers to pay for both of them; Jake proposes a drink instead.
Q 25Jake Barnes counts himself Robert Cohn's friend for which sport, as against Cohn's literary friend Braddocks?
Tennis
Tennis is all the two men share at first: Jake ranks himself as the friend for games, not for confidences. Cohn loved to win, yet his game fell apart once he fell for Brett Ashley.
Q 26Basque passengers on the bus to Burguete teach Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton to drink from what?
Wineskins
Wineskins pass from one passenger to the next on the crowded bus, and an old Basque who once lived in the United States joins the talk. Jake later buys two of his own for the Pamplona party.
Q 27What does Montoya, who judges men by their passion for bullfighting, do for a living in Pamplona?
Hotelier
Hotelier to the best bullfighters, Montoya hangs photographs of those he thinks have the real passion and forgives a fellow devotee almost anything. He turns cold once Romero is seen drinking with Jake's crowd.
Q 28Which New York house published The Sun Also Rises, with Maxwell Perkins as Hemingway's editor?
Scribner's
Scribner's printed 5,090 copies at two dollars each and went back to press within two months. The firm had agreed to take all of Hemingway's later work as well.
Q 29The Sun Also Rises is dedicated to Hemingway's son and to which wife, who later received the book's royalties?
Hadley
Hadley Richardson, his first wife, went to Pamplona with him three summers running. The marriage broke up as the book came out, and he made over its earnings to her in the divorce.
Q 30Under which one-word title, also Hemingway's working title, did Jonathan Cape publish The Sun Also Rises in Britain?
Fiesta
Fiesta was Hemingway's working title while he drafted the book in the summer of 1925. Cape used it for the London edition of 1927, which also dropped both epigraphs.