Ernest Hemingway: A Glimpse into His Life Quiz

Answer: Nick Adams

Nick Adams occurs as a character in twenty-four of Ernest Hemingway's stories (twenty-five, if you count "Big Two-Hearted River" as two stories--"Part I" and "Part II"). Nick Adams first appears as an innocent and naive little boy in "Indian Camp", the first story in the 1925 book "In Our Time". By the end of the book, we see Adams as an experienced young man who has returned from World War I and is seeking solitude, comfort, and renewal in nature.

Nick Adams occurs in other stories other than those in "In Our Time", and all of them were collected and re-published in 1972 under one title, "The Nick Adams Stories", long after Hemingway's death.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in 1899, one of six children, and was raised in Oak Park, Illinois, outside of Chicago. His father, Clarence Hemingway, was a successful physician, who had a great love of hunting and fishing and the outdoors in general. He took his family to a cottage in northern Michigan every summer, and it was there that his son began a lifelong relationship with nature and a love of sporting adventure. Ernest Hemingway's mother, Grace Hall-Hemingway, was a musician who both taught and performed locally and even entertained at one time the notion of becoming an opera singer. Her desire for Hemingway to learn the cello was a constant source of conflict between the two of them; however, Hemingway would later claim that learning music had a tremendous impact on the structure of his prose. Both parents' influence can be seen in Hemingway's life as a high school student; at Oak Park and River Forest High School, he participated in football, track and field, boxing, and water polo while he and his sister Marcelline performed in the school's orchestra.

Answer: the Kansas City Star

Though Hemingway was at the "Kansas City Star" for only six months, the newspaper had a tremendous effect on Hemingway's prose style. While working as a reporter, Hemingway was instructed to "Use short sentences. Use short first paragraphs. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative". Eventually, Hemingway applied this journalist's technique to his fiction so that he created a stream-lined, stripped-down style of prose for his stories and novels, which became easily recognizable as the "Hemingway style". Much of his fiction was characterized by short paragraphs consisting of short sentences consisting of short words, and the stories were primarily presented from an objective point of view that presented only the immediately observable facts of what could be seen and heard in any given scene without any explanation or any exploration into the characters' psyches. Hemingway himself explained what he was doing: "I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows". Thus, his style is often a deceiving one; while the stories seem simple and maybe even insignificant, there is always something more profound beneath their surfaces.

Hemingway also worked as a journalist for other periodicals. After World War I, he lived in Canada for a while and worked for the "Toronto Star Weekly", and later he worked for the "Cooperative Commonwealth" in Chicago, where he met Sherwood Anderson, an American author who convinced him to move to Paris, France, from where he sent correspondence to the "Toronto Star Weekly". Much later, he would also submit correspondence for the "North American Newspaper Alliance" and the "PM" newspaper.

Answer: He joined the Red Cross Ambulance Corps.

In June of 1918 Ernest Hemingway was at the Italian Front serving as an ambulance driver. He experienced the horror of picking up the shredded and splattered remains of wartime female factory workers on his very first day in Milan. He described the incident in his non-fiction book "Death in the Afternoon", published in 1932: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments".

In July, Hemingway was severely wounded in his legs by shrapnel; nevertheless, he still managed to assist several soldiers and even personally carried a man more badly wounded than himself to safety. For such valor, he was awarded the Italian Silver Medal of Bravery. He spent six months recuperating in a Red Cross hospital in Italy, where he met and fell in love with a nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. He eventually returned to the United States, where he found readjustment difficult, he became increasingly estranged from his family, and he experienced devastation at the news that Agnes, who he believed was coming to America so that the two could get married, had become engaged to an Italian officer.

Hemingway's second novel "A Farewell to Arms", published in 1929, is based on some of his experiences in Italy.

Answer: Brett Ashley

Brett Ashley is a fictional character from Hemingway's novel "The Sun Also Rises" although she is somewhat based on the real-life Duff, Lady Twysdon, a British socialite and expatriate living in Paris at the time Hemingway and Hadley were there. Hemingway, Lady Twysdon, her lover Pat Guthrie, and Harold Loeb, who had experienced a brief romantic encounter with Lady Twysdon had traveled to Pamplona to witness bullfighting. Hemingway was apparently attracted to Lady Twysdon as well, and he and Loeb came to blows at one point during the trip. Hemingway incorporated some of his experiences into his novel "The Sun Also Rises".

Hemingway was married to Pauline Pfeiffer from 1927 to 1940. She met Hemingway while she was working for "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue" magazines and was living in Paris at the time Hemingway and Hadley Richardson were. It was with Pfeiffer that Hemingway had an affair while married to Hadley, and it was Pfeiffer who persuaded Hemingway to sign a contract with the book publisher Scribner's.

He was married to Martha Gellhorn from 1940 to 1945. She met Hemingway while he and Pfeiffer were living in Key West, Florida. Hemingway and Gellhorn travelled to Spain together and reported on the Spanish Civil War. They soon began an affair, and his marriage to Pfeiffer ended. Gellhorn's marriage to Hemingway came to an end when she could no longer handle his constant attempts to prevent her pursuing her career as a traveling reporter. Gellhorn is now considered one of the greatest American correspondents of the twentieth century.

Hemingway was married to Mary Welsh from 1946 until his death in 1961. He met her in London and began an affair with her while his marriage to Gellhorn was failing. Welsh was an American author and journalist stationed in London during World War II. She became the executor of Hemingway's literary legacy after his death.

Answer: Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein took Hemingway under her wing and introduced him to a great number of expatriate writers and artists who lived and gathered in the Montparnasse Quarter of Paris. Hemingway was a regular at Stein's salon, and it is there that he met Pablo Picasso. Eventually, however, Hemingway began to withdraw from Stein's guidance, and their relationship devolved into a quarrel that lasted decades. In his novel "The Sun Also Rises", Hemingway credits Stein with this phrase. She used it to refer to the young men who had lived through World War I and were now wandering aimlessly without any definite sense of purpose.

While in Paris, Hemingway also met the American poet Ezra Pound during a chance encounter in a book store. Pound became another mentor for Hemingway, and the two became good friends and toured Italy together. Pound also introduced Hemingway to the Irish writer James Joyce, with whom Hemingway often got drunk.

After a couple of years in Paris, Hemingway and his wife Hadley Richardson returned to the States for a few months only to come back to Paris to live for a while longer. It is then that he met F. Scott Fitzgerald. The two had a rocky friendship, but the success of Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby", published in 1925, became one of the primary motivations for Hemingway to write and publish a novel of his own. "The Sun Also Rises", published in 1926, was the result. While both novels are complex enough to incorporate many different themes, they share at least one theme in common--the search for meaning by those among the "Lost Generation".

Answer: Key West, Florida

Ernest Hemingway and Pauline Pfeiffer along with their two sons, Patrick and Gregory (Hemingway also had an older son, Jack, through his first marriage), lived in the house now referred to as The Hemingway Home and Museum from 1931 to 1939. The home was purchased by Pauline's uncle and given to them as a wedding gift. While the Hemingways no longer lived there by 1940, Hemingway continued to own the house until his death. His wife at that time, Mary, eventually sold it, and it is now a United States National Historic Landmark.

The house came with a carriage house, and Hemingway converted the upper room into a writer's studio. Over the years that he lived there, he not only finished "A Farewell to Arms", but he also wrote the novel "To Have and Have Not", the non-fiction "Green Hills of Africa", and several famous short stories, such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber".

Before Hemingway and Pfeiffer lived in their famous house, they lived in Key West for two to three years in rented housing.

Answer: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway decided to write "For Whom the Bell Tolls" at the suggestion of his third wife, the famous author and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. A Pulitzer Prize committee unanimously selected "For Whom the Bell Tolls" to win the award for fiction. However, Nicholas Murray Butler, the ex-officio head of the Pulitzer Board, overruled the committee's decision because he felt the book to be too offensive and unrepresentative of American values. Thus, no Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was given that year.

Hemingway wrote the novel after he left Spain and while living between residences in Cuba, Wyoming, and Idaho. Interestingly, while in Madrid, Hemingway wrote his only known play, "The Fifth Column", and he did so while the city was under bombardment.

Answer: Battle of Kursk

Hemingway never made it to the Eastern Front to have seen the Battle of Kursk between Russian and German forces.

He was, however, present for the Normandy Landings. The landing craft he was on came close enough to the Omaha Beach Landing that he was able to see the bodies of five waves of soldiers lying in the water off the shore. After his landing craft came under fire, the commanding officer required the craft to return to the USS Dorothea Dix.

Later, Hemingway joined the 22nd Infantry Regiment on its march to Paris. In defiance of the Geneva Convention, Hemingway put together a small militia in Rambouillet. As a war correspondent, he was not allowed to lead troops; he was formally charged but managed to avoid prosecution after claiming he served in only an advisory role. From Paris, he went on to report on the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, where he was present during some of the heaviest fighting.

Finally, he traveled to report on the Battle of the Bulge but was hospitalized for pneumonia. By the time he recuperated and traveled to sites of battle, most of the heavy fighting was over.

Answer: The Nobel Prize for Literature

James Mellow, an American author and biographer, speculates that Ernest Hemingway accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature with a great amount of suspicion. Mellow argues that Hemingway believed the prize had been awarded to him out of sympathy and obligation, for Hemingway had nearly lost his life earlier that year and some publications had erred through early publications of his obituaries.

In fact, Hemingway was in such pain from his accidents that he could not travel to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize.

In lieu of his attendance, he sent a speech to be read at the presentation of his award. The speech included the following words: "Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing.

He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day". One can certainly sense the depression from which Hemingway was also suffering.

Answer: two successive airplane crashes

In 1954, Ernest Hemingway chartered a flight over the Belgian Congo as Christmas present for his wife at that time, Mary Welsh. After striking an abandoned utility pole, the airplane was forced to make a crash landing. Hemingway suffered a head wound, and on the very next day, while trying to reach medical care in Entebbe, Uganda, a second plane Hemingway had boarded blew up in the air after take off. He was badly burned and suffered a second head wound that caused a concussion so severe that he lost cerebral fluid. By the time he finally arrived in Entebbe, he had already been reported as dead, and obituaries had been printed. Later, Hemingway discovered that he had two cracked discs as well as a ruptured liver and kidney. He continued to suffer tremendous pain, and to attempt to handle it, he began to drink more heavily than he had previously. For several months in 1955 and 1956, he was bedridden and ordered to stop drinking. He managed to quit for a while but soon returned to his alcoholic behavior.

Many speculate that these airplane crashes were the beginning of Hemingway's end. Of course, there were many other factors. He was already in poor health as he was suffering from hypertension, arteriosclerosis, and liver disease and eventually began suffering from diabetes as well; much of this was a result of his heavy drinking for most of his life. Furthermore, Hemingway's body had been ravaged by several accidents, including a car wreck that had given him an earlier concussion, and anthrax and pneumonia. Finally, in 1961, Hemingway was diagnosed with hemochromatosis, which ultimately leads to mental and physical deterioration. Most speculate that this genetic disease was the primary factor contributing to Hemingway's depression, which was exacerbated by his injuries, health problems, and alcoholism. Hemingway eventually reached a state in which he could no longer do the things he enjoyed and was good at doing. He physically could no longer hunt and travel as he had, and his ability to write tremendously declined. In 1960, while in Cuba, Hemingway had to seek assistance from the writer A. E. Hotchner, who found that Hemingway's writing was overly wordy, incoherent, and confused and that Hemingway was having trouble even physically seeing well enough to write. In his last few months, he had grown paranoid and worried that he was being watched by the FBI. He also spent time in the Mayo Clinic, where he received electro shock therapy. Two days after his return to his Idaho home following his last Mayo Clinic visit, he went upstairs and shot himself in the head with a double-barreled shotgun.