Don’t Know Much About® “Papa”

Ernest Hemingway, the larger-than-life American novelist, was born on July 21 in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899.

They called him “Papa.” One of America’s most successful and admired novelists, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) once compared his bare-bones style to an iceberg:

“There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.”

Beneath Hemingway’s famously understated prose, which often celebrated such traditionally masculine pursuits as combat, hunting and boxing, his heroes encountered doubt, isolation, and failure. Wounded as an ambulance driver during World War I, and shaken by his experience of the Great War, Hemingway moved to Paris in 1921 and joined a circle of similarly disenchanted young writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos.

Hemingway’s breakthrough novel, The Sun Also Rises, popularized a phrase borrowed from author Gertrude Stein: the “Lost Generation.”
See if you can find answers to these quick questions about the great Lost Generation author who took his own life with a shotgun blast on July 2, 1961.

1. Before Hemingway turned to fiction, what job helped develop his spare writing style?
2. What recurring, semi-autobiographical Hemingway hero was first featured in the 1924 story collection, In Our Time?
3. In A Farewell to Arms, how does main character Frederic Henry serve during World War I?
4. What is the subject of Hemingway’s 1932 nonfiction book, Death in the Afternoon? (Hint: It’s also prominently featured in his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises.)
5. Which Hemingway work contains the famous line, “Man is not made for defeat.  A man can be destroyed but not defeated”?
6. What was Hemingway’s oft-cited definition of “guts?”

A year after his death, one critic wrote that Hemingway was, “a writer who gets smaller as you grow older.”

Do you agree?

Teachers. Is Hemingway still on your reading lists?

There is an extensive archive of Hemingway material at the New York Times which includes many of his dispatches for the Times from Spain during the Spanish Civil War.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/ernest_hemingway/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=ernest%20hemingway&st=cse

The quiz is adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature

Answers

1. Newspaperman.  Fresh out of high school, Hemingway (at age seventeen) took a job as a junior reporter for the Kansas City Star.  He later worked as a foreign correspondent covering wars in Europe.
2. Nick Adams. Often read as an alter ego for Hemingway, he is a prototype for many later Hemingway characters, as well as the protagonist of the posthumously published collection, The Nick Adams Stories (1972).
3. Just as Hemingway himself served—as an ambulance driver on the Italian front.
4. Spanish bullfighting.
5. The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
6. “Grace under pressure.”

Ken

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