50 Fun Facts About Ernest Hemingway

In which Chicago suburb was Ernest Hemingway born in 1899?

Oak Park, a suburb just west of Chicago, is where Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, the second of six children; he lived there until he finished high school in 1917.

For which newspaper did Hemingway work as a cub reporter for six months after high school?

The Kansas City Star hired the 18-year-old Hemingway in October 1917; its style sheet, demanding short sentences and vigorous English, shaped his prose for good.

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

Red Cross ambulance driver was his job on the Italian front; badly wounded by mortar fire near Fossalta on July 8, 1918, he received Italy's Silver Medal of Military Valor.

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 sent him to Paris as its roving European correspondent in December 1921; his dispatches covered everything from the 1922 Genoa conference to trout fishing.

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

Hadley Richardson married Hemingway in September 1921 and moved with him to Paris; their son John, nicknamed Bumby, was born in 1923, and the marriage ended in 1927.

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

Gare de Lyon is where his first wife's suitcase of manuscripts vanished in December 1922 as she set out to join him in Lausanne; only 'Up in Michigan' and 'My Old Man' survived.

In which year was Hemingway's debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, published by Scribner's?

1926 saw Scribner's publish The Sun Also Rises in October; Hemingway had started the draft on his 26th birthday in July 1925 and finished it in about eight weeks.

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 hosts the San Fermín festival where Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley and company watch the bulls; the novel is a roman à clef about Hemingway's real July 1925 trip.

By his own count, how many versions of the ending of A Farewell to Arms did Hemingway write?

39 was Hemingway's own tally, given to the Paris Review in 1958, of how often he rewrote the ending; a 2012 Scribner edition printed 47 alternate versions.

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

Catherine Barkley is the nurse Frederic Henry loves; their flight to Switzerland ends with her death in childbirth, and the novel was banned in the Irish Free State.

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

John Donne wrote 'never send to know for whom the bell tolls' in Meditation XVII of his 1624 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions; the 1943 film starred Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.

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

To blow up a bridge behind enemy lines is Robert Jordan's assignment; the American demolitions expert, a former college instructor from Montana, is attached to a band of guerrillas for the job.

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

The Spanish Civil War took him to Madrid in 1937 as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance; he began the novel in March 1939 and finished it in July 1940.

How many days has Santiago gone without a fish at the start of The Old Man and the Sea?

84 days without a fish have left Santiago 'salao', the worst form of unlucky; on the 85th day he rows far out into the Gulf Stream and hooks the great marlin.

Which magazine printed the whole of The Old Man and the Sea in a single issue in September 1952?

Life magazine ran the complete novella in its September 1, 1952 issue, which sold a record 5.3 million copies in two days, a week before the Scribner's hardcover.

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

The Old Man and the Sea won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; Hemingway wrote it in about eight weeks in early 1951 after critics savaged Across the River and Into the Trees.

In which year did Hemingway receive the Nobel Prize in Literature?

1954 brought the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for his 'mastery of the art of narrative' and the influence of his style; too unwell to travel to Stockholm, he sent a speech instead.

How many plane crashes did Hemingway survive on his 1954 trip to Africa?

Two crashes came on consecutive days that January: the first near Murchison Falls in Uganda, the second as the rescue plane burst into flames on takeoff at Butiaba.

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

The iceberg theory is his term from Death in the Afternoon: 'the dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water'; it is also called the theory of omission.

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

Key West became home in 1928; the Whitehead Street house that Pauline's rich Uncle Gus bought for the couple in 1931 is now a museum.

The Hemingway House museum in Florida is famous for cats with what unusual feature?

Extra toes mark the famous Hemingway cats: legend traces the polydactyl colony to Snow White, a six-toed cat a ship's captain gave the writer, and the museum has kept the line going ever since.

What did the swimming pool Pauline installed at their Florida home in 1937 cost?

$20,000 was the bill for the pool, dug out of solid coral and finished in 1938; Hemingway pressed a penny into the wet cement, joking that she had taken his last one.

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

Pilar was both a pet name for his second wife Pauline and a nod to the Virgin of Pilar shrine in Zaragoza; the boat's name later went to the partisan leader in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

How much did Hemingway pay Wheeler Shipbuilding of Brooklyn for his boat in 1934?

$7,495 was the price of the 38-foot Wheeler cabin cruiser he ordered in April 1934, just weeks after returning from his first African safari.

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

Finca Vigía, 'Lookout Farm', sits in San Francisco de Paula outside Havana; he rented it in 1939, bought it for $12,500 in 1940 and wrote there until he left Cuba in 1960.

Which of Hemingway's wives was a celebrated war correspondent in her own right?

Martha Gellhorn covered wars from the 1930s to Vietnam and reported D-Day by stowing away on a hospital ship; she married Hemingway in Cheyenne in November 1940 and divorced him in 1945.

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

Time magazine had Mary Welsh in its London bureau in 1944 when Hemingway, then covering the war, met her at lunch; he proposed on their third meeting, and they married in 1946.

A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's memoir of 1920s Paris, was published in which year?

1964 saw A Moveable Feast published three years after his death; he began it after recovering two trunks of old notebooks from the Paris Ritz in 1956, and his widow Mary edited it.

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

Bullfighting is the subject; Hemingway first watched the corrida in Spain in 1923, and the book walks the reader through the ritual, the matadors and the art of the cape.

Which 'white hunter', who had guided Theodore Roosevelt in 1909, led Hemingway's 1933 safari?

Philip Percival, the Kenya-based professional hunter, ran the 1933-34 safari and became 'Pop' in Green Hills of Africa and the model for the hunter Robert Wilson in the Macomber story.

For what did Hemingway receive a Bronze Star in 1947?

Journalism under fire in World War II earned him the Bronze Star in 1947: the citation praised his bravery as a correspondent in combat areas from Normandy to the Hürtgen Forest.

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

The Fifth Column, Hemingway's only full-length play, was written in 1937 in a besieged hotel and published in 1938 in the same volume as his First Forty-Nine Stories.

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

Ketchum, where he had bought a house overlooking the Big Wood River in 1959, is where he shot himself on July 2, 1961; his father had also died by suicide, in 1928.

Where was Hemingway treated with electroconvulsive therapy as many as 15 times in December 1960?

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, admitted him in late November 1960 under the cover story of treating high blood pressure; the electroshock treatments there wrecked his memory, and he was released in January 1961.

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

Sloppy Joe's, the Duval Street bar Hemingway frequented in the 1930s, launched the festival in 1981; its look-alike contest of white-bearded 'Papas' falls around his July 21 birthday.

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

Mariel Hemingway played Tracy, the teenage girlfriend in Manhattan (1979), and earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination; her sister Margaux was a 1970s supermodel.

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

An abortion is the never-named subject: the American and 'the girl' call it 'the operation' while waiting for a train in the Ebro valley; the story appeared in Men Without Women.

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

Ring Lardner Jr. was the byline he borrowed for his Trapeze columns at his high school, in homage to the Chicago Tribune sportswriter Ring Lardner; he also wrote for the literary magazine Tabula.

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

Physician was Clarence Hemingway's profession: the family doctor taught Ernest to hunt, fish and camp on the family's summers in northern Michigan, and killed himself in 1928.

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

Cello was the instrument Grace Hemingway, a trained singer and music teacher, pressed on her son; he played it in the school orchestra with little enthusiasm.

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

Sherwood Anderson, whom Hemingway had met in Chicago in 1921, urged Paris over Rome and wrote letters of introduction that opened the city's expatriate circle to the couple.

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

Gertrude Stein stood as godmother at Bumby's 1924 christening; she passed on the 'Lost Generation' remark he used as an epigraph, and their friendship later curdled into a decades-long quarrel.

Hemingway met Ezra Pound by chance in 1922 at which Paris bookshop?

Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach's rue de l'Odéon shop, is where he ran into Pound in early 1922; Pound, fourteen years older and fresh from editing The Waste Land, became his mentor.

Which leader did Hemingway call 'the biggest bluff in Europe' after a 1923 interview?

Benito Mussolini posed with a book to look studious during the January 1923 interview, but Hemingway noticed it was a French-English dictionary held upside down; Italy banned A Farewell to Arms until 1948.

Who was Hemingway's long-time editor at Scribner's, whose death in 1947 hit him hard?

Max Perkins, who also edited Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe, took on The Sun Also Rises for Scribner's and stayed his editor until dying in June 1947; Hemingway dedicated his 1952 novella to him and Charles Scribner.

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

Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, was where Windemere stood; Ernest spent every childhood summer there learning to hunt, fish and camp, and the northern woods became the setting for his Nick Adams stories.

Which 19-year-old Venetian inspired the 1950 novel Across the River and into the Trees?

Adriana Ivancich, a Venetian aristocrat he met on a duck shoot in December 1948, became the model for Renata, the young countess who beguiles the dying Colonel Cantwell in the novel.

During his 1953 African trip, Hemingway officially became a member of which people?

Kamba is the tribe he declared himself a member of during the 1953-54 safari, shaving his head and courting a young Kamba woman he called Debba, as recounted in True at First Light.