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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
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.
Q 02For which newspaper did Hemingway work as a cub reporter for six months after high school?
The Kansas City Star
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.
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 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.
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 sent him to Paris as its roving European correspondent in December 1921; his dispatches covered everything from the 1922 Genoa conference to trout fishing.
Q 06Who was Hemingway's first wife, eight years his senior, whom he married in 1921?
Hadley Richardson
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.
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 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.
Q 08In which year was Hemingway's debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, published by Scribner's?
1926
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.
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 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.
Q 11By his own count, how many versions of the ending of A Farewell to Arms did Hemingway write?
39
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.
Q 12In A Farewell to Arms, ambulance officer Frederic Henry falls for which English nurse?
Catherine Barkley
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.
Q 13For Whom the Bell Tolls takes its title from a meditation by which poet?
John Donne
Q 21What name did Hemingway give to his pared-down method of leaving the deeper meaning unstated?
The iceberg theory
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.
Q 22In which Florida town did Hemingway settle in 1928 on the advice of John Dos Passos?
Key West
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.
Q 23The Hemingway House museum in Florida is famous for cats with what unusual feature?
Extra toes
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.
Q 14What is Robert Jordan's mission in For Whom the Bell Tolls?
To blow up a bridge
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.
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 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.
Q 16How many days has Santiago gone without a fish at the start of The Old Man and the Sea?
84
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.
Q 17Which magazine printed the whole of The Old Man and the Sea in a single issue in September 1952?
Life
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.
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 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.
Q 19In which year did Hemingway receive the Nobel Prize in Literature?
1954
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.
Q 20How many plane crashes did Hemingway survive on his 1954 trip to Africa?
Two
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.
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.
Q 24What did the swimming pool Pauline installed at their Florida home in 1937 cost?
$20,000
$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.
Q 25What was the name of the 38-foot fishing boat Hemingway bought in 1934?
Pilar
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.
Q 26How much did Hemingway pay Wheeler Shipbuilding of Brooklyn for his boat in 1934?
$7,495
$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.
Q 27What 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', 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.
Q 28Which of Hemingway's wives was a celebrated war correspondent in her own right?
Martha Gellhorn
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.
Q 29Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary Welsh, was a correspondent for which magazine when they met in London?
Time
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.
Q 30A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's memoir of 1920s Paris, was published in which year?
1964
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.