Test Your Literary Prowess With This Ernest Hemingway Quiz

In June 1944, Hemingway was embedded with soldiers making their way to the Normandy beaches for a historic amphibious assault known as D-Day. Although Hemingway didn't land on the beach that day, he witnessed the event at sea. At the time, Hemingway was a correspondent for "Collier's" magazine, where his then-wife, Martha Gellhorn, also worked. Gellhorn actually made it ashore in Normandy, becoming the first woman to do so.

Born on July 21, 1899, in Illinois, Hemingway spent his childhood and adolescence in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. He was the second of six children. After graduating from high school at 17, he set out for Kansas City to work as a reporter, eventually making his way to Italy as an ambulance driver in WWI. He continued to travel for most of his life, making his home in places such as Paris, the Florida Keys, and Havana.

As the title suggests, "The Old Man and the Sea" is the story of an old, unlucky fisherman named Santiago, who, desperate to end a long stretch of catching no fish, gets pulled into a life-or-death battle when he finally hooks a large marlin. The character of Santiago is believed to have been inspired, at least in part, by Gregorio Fuentes, Hemingway's fishing buddy and confidant from Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.

After high school but before serving in the Red Cross during World War I, Hemingway got a job as a cub reporter for "The Kansas City Star." It was his first writing job, and very influential on his later work, which was distinguished by short, simple, impactful sentences characteristic of the journalistic style. In fact, Hemingway once said the paper's style guide contained "the best rules [he] ever learned for the business of writing."

After living in the Florida Keys throughout the 1930s, Hemingway purchased a home on the island of Cuba in 1940. For the next two decades, he spent his summers in Idaho and his winters at Finca Vigía, or "Lookout Farm," near the Cuban capital of Havana. Hemingway had such a love for Cuba that when he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, he dedicated it to the Cuban people.

"The Sun Also Rises" was published under its more famous title in the U.S. in 1926, and then as "Fiesta" in England. The main protagonist is Jake Barnes, who, due to injuries sustained during the war, is impotent and can't fully pursue a physical relationship with his love Lady Brett Ashley. Jake, Brett, and their friends decide to travel from France to Spain for the running of the bulls in Pamplona — hence the British title.

Part of the so-called Lost Generation writers, a group of American expat authors and poets who congregated in Paris in the 1920s, Gertrude Stein was a mentor for Ernest Hemingway at the beginning of his career. Stein hosted a Paris salon for artistic and literary minds, drawing celebrities such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso. Hemingway and Stein grew apart in later years, but she had a lasting influence on his life and work.

As an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross toward the tail end of World War I, Hemingway ferried troops and supplies to and from the battlefield. At one point, he was injured by Austrian mortar fire but still managed to help a fellow wounded soldier — a heroic act for which the Italian government gave Hemingway the Silver Medal of Valor. His experience of the war formed the literary foundation of his masterwork novel "A Farewell to Arms," published in 1929.

Published in 1952 both as a book and in "Life" magazine, "The Old Man and the Sea" was Hemingway's last major literary work before his death in 1961 — and it also might be his greatest. The story of a struggle between an aging fisherman and a giant marlin, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1953 and made Hemingway a worldwide celebrity. Today, it is a staple in high school English classes all over the U.S.

The Spanish Civil War (1936 to 1939) pitted Spain's Nationalists, led by Francisco Franco, against the Republican government. In 1937, Hemingway traveled to Spain's capital, Madrid, to cover the civil conflict, and wrote more than two dozen dispatches for the North American Newspaper Alliance. "For Whom the Bell Tolls" is set during the conflict and tells the story of an American volunteer fighting in a Republican guerilla unit.