Hemingway Quiz

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899 - 1961) was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, known for his spare, economical prose style and his novels and stories about war, adventure, love, and loss. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Hemingway served as an ambulance driver in World War I - An experience that deeply shaped his writing - And later worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris during the 1920s, becoming part of the "Lost Generation" of American expatriate writers. His circle included Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce.

Hemingway's Major Works and Writing Style

Hemingway's major novels include "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), "A Farewell to Arms" (1929), "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940), and "The Old Man and the Sea" (1952). "The Old Man and the Sea" - A novella about an old Cuban fisherman's epic struggle with a great marlin - Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 and was cited when Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway's signature writing technique is often called the "Iceberg Theory" (or theory of omission): the idea that most of the story's meaning should be implied beneath the surface, with only a small visible tip of dialogue and action.

Hemingway lived a life as adventurous as his fiction - He was wounded in WWI, survived multiple plane crashes, hunted big game in Africa, fished marlin off Cuba, and covered the Spanish Civil War. He lived for extended periods in Paris, Key West, Cuba, and Idaho. His marriages (four in total) and his complicated relationships with friends and rivals have been extensively documented. Hemingway struggled with depression and alcoholism in his later years and died by suicide in 1961. His writing - Laconic, masculine, and deeply concerned with grace under pressure - Remains enormously influential. Also try our Animal Farm quiz and our poetry quiz.