Literature Quiz — 50 Questions on Books and Their Authors

Who wrote Pride and Prejudice?

Answer Jane Austen

It appeared in 1813 credited only to a lady. Austen's name was never printed on any of her novels while she lived, and the book had spent years in a drawer under a different title after a publisher turned it down without reading it.

Which novel opens the story of Captain Ahab and a white whale?

Answer Moby-Dick

It sold poorly enough that Melville died largely forgotten, and the revival came seventy years later. The first British edition dropped the epilogue, so reviewers there complained about a story narrated by a man who apparently drowned.

Don Quixote was written by whom?

Answer Miguel de Cervantes

A second writer published a fake sequel under a pen name, and Cervantes answered by writing his own part two — in which the characters have read part one and meet people who recognize them. The joke is four hundred years old.

Which Russian author wrote War and Peace?

Answer Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy denied it was a novel at all, calling it something the Russian tradition had no name for. Long passages are in French, which was the everyday language of the aristocracy he was writing about — the shift into Russian is doing work.

Frankenstein was written by whom?

Answer Mary Shelley

She began it at eighteen during a wet summer on Lake Geneva, on a dare to write a ghost story, and published it anonymously at twenty. The creature is never given a name; the name belongs to the man who made him and then walked away.

Which of these did Charles Dickens write?

Answer Great Expectations

It ran in weekly installments, and the ending everyone reads is the second one — a friend persuaded Dickens the first was too bleak. Serial publication meant he could feel the audience react while the story was still being written.

The Odyssey is attributed to whom?

Answer Homer

The safer answer is that nobody knows. Study of how the poems repeat set phrases showed they were composed and carried orally for generations, so the name may belong to a tradition rather than to one person.

Wuthering Heights was written by which of the Brontë sisters?

Answer Emily

It came out under the name Ellis Bell, because the sisters expected work signed by women to be judged differently. She died the year after publication at thirty, and left only this one novel.

Which novel follows Jean Valjean and the pursuit by Javert?

Answer Les Misérables

Hugo wrote much of it in exile, and the book stops for a hundred pages to describe Waterloo and again to defend the sewers of Paris. Readers who find the digressions strange are reacting to the design, not to a flaw.

Who wrote The Canterbury Tales?

Answer Geoffrey Chaucer

It is unfinished: the plan called for each pilgrim to tell four tales, which would have made well over a hundred, and about two dozen exist. It is also the work that made English rather than French or Latin the natural language of English poetry.

Who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Answer Gabriel García Márquez

The author could not afford to mail the finished manuscript, so he sent half and posted the rest when the money came in. He also had the halves backwards, and the publisher received the second part first.

Things Fall Apart, the novel of Igbo life and colonial arrival, was written by whom?

Answer Chinua Achebe

The title comes from a line of Yeats. Achebe wrote it in part as an answer to the Africa found in European novels — a village with its own law, poetry and quarrels, seen from inside rather than as a backdrop.

Which novel by George Orwell features the Ministry of Truth?

Answer Nineteen Eighty-Four

The appendix explaining Newspeak is written in the past tense and in standard English, which quietly implies the regime described in the book eventually ended. It is the most hopeful page in it and the one most often skipped.

Mrs Dalloway was written by whom?

Answer Virginia Woolf

Woolf described her method as digging caves behind her characters so that memory could open out from a single ordinary day. The novel covers one day in June and still contains most of two lives.

Which author wrote The Old Man and the Sea?

Answer Ernest Hemingway

It was the last major work published in his lifetime and it repaired a reputation that critics had written off. The Nobel citation two years later named the mastery of narration it demonstrated.

Kafka's The Metamorphosis begins with a man waking as what?

Answer An enormous insect

The German is deliberately vague — a monstrous vermin, the kind of creature unfit for sacrifice — and Kafka insisted his publisher not draw it on the cover. Naming the species is exactly the comfort the story withholds.

Beloved and Song of Solomon were written by whom?

Answer Toni Morrison

She was the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993. Beloved grew from a newspaper account of an escaped enslaved woman who killed her own child rather than see her taken back.

Which novel is set in the Dublin of a single day in June?

Answer Ulysses

The day is 16 June 1904, the date of the author's first outing with the woman he later married, and readers now walk the route every year. US customs seized the book, and a 1933 court ruling let it in.

Who wrote The Trial and The Castle?

Answer Franz Kafka

Both are unfinished, and both exist against their author's wishes: he asked his friend to burn everything, and the friend published it instead. Almost everything Kafka is known for arrived after his death.

In Search of Lost Time was written by whom?

Answer Marcel Proust

Seven volumes, and the first was rejected by publishers — one reader later wrote to apologize, calling it the worst mistake of his career. The author paid to print it himself.

How many lines does a sonnet have?

Answer Fourteen

Fourteen, but the shape inside them differs. The Italian form breaks eight against six and turns in the middle; the English form runs three quatrains and lands the turn in a final couplet, which is why English sonnets so often end with a snap.

Which Shakespeare play features the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?

Answer Hamlet

They are two minor courtiers sent to spy on the prince and disposed of in a line of dialogue. Three and a half centuries later Tom Stoppard put them at the center of their own play, waiting offstage while the tragedy happens elsewhere.

A haiku is traditionally built on which pattern?

Answer Three phrases of five, seven and five sound units

The count is of sound units rather than syllables — a distinction that survives translation badly, which is why English haiku that stick rigidly to five and seven often feel padded. Traditionally there is also a seasonal word and a cutting point.

Paradise Lost was written by whom?

Answer John Milton

Milton was completely blind by the time he composed it and dictated the whole poem to whoever was at hand, often his daughters. He sold the rights for ten pounds.

Which term describes verse without rhyme but with a regular meter?

Answer Blank verse

Unrhymed but measured, it is the default line of English drama and the line of Paradise Lost. It works because it stays close to the rhythm of ordinary speech while remaining unmistakably verse.

Waiting for Godot was written by whom?

Answer Samuel Beckett

Beckett wrote it in French first and then translated it into English himself, which is unusual enough to matter: the flatness people notice in the English is a choice made twice.

In a Greek tragedy, what is the chorus?

Answer A group who comment on the action, often in unison

They began as the whole of the performance — theater grew out of choral song, and the first actor was someone who stepped out of the group to answer it. Over time the numbers shrank as individual characters took over.

Which poet wrote The Waste Land?

Answer T. S. Eliot

Ezra Pound cut the draft to roughly half its length, and Eliot dedicated the poem to him as the better craftsman. The published version carries the author's own notes, which he later said had become a bigger nuisance than the poem.

What is iambic pentameter?

Answer Five pairs of syllables per line, the second stressed

Ten syllables in five soft-hard pairs. It became the standard English line because it holds about as much as a speaker can say in one breath, which is why verse in it can sound like a person talking.

A Doll's House, the play that ends with a departure and a door, was written by whom?

Answer Henrik Ibsen

A German producer refused to stage the ending and Ibsen, with no copyright protection to stop a worse rewrite, wrote a softened alternative himself and called it a barbaric outrage. The original ending is the one performed.

Elizabeth Bennet appears in which novel?

Answer Pride and Prejudice

The famous opening line about a single man in possession of a good fortune is not the author speaking — it is the voice of the neighborhood, stated as though it were a law of nature, and the novel spends four hundred pages testing it.

Which detective lives at 221B Baker Street?

Answer Sherlock Holmes

The address did not exist when the stories were written; Baker Street was numbered only to the high eighties. When the street was later extended, the bank occupying the site employed someone to answer the letters that kept arriving.

Middle-earth is the setting created by which author?

Answer J. R. R. Tolkien

The name is Old English for the inhabited world, not an invention. Tolkien was a philologist who built the languages first and the stories afterward, to give the languages somewhere to have been spoken.

Who is the narrator of The Great Gatsby?

Answer Nick Carraway

He tells us on the first page that he is inclined to reserve judgment, and then judges everyone. Reading the book a second time mostly means noticing how much the narrator wants us to like him.

Macondo is the town at the center of which novel?

Answer One Hundred Years of Solitude

The town is founded, flooded, forgotten and erased inside one family's history, and the parish records of the region it was drawn from were themselves lost. The book is about a place that leaves no evidence it existed.

Which novel features the character Atticus Finch?

Answer To Kill a Mockingbird

A first draft featuring an older version of the same character sat unpublished for fifty-five years before appearing in 2015. In it he holds views the famous novel gives no hint of, which unsettled a lot of readers.

Anna Karenina was written by whom?

Answer Leo Tolstoy

The opening about happy and unhappy families is quoted so often that people forget the book goes on to disprove it. Tolstoy later renounced his own fiction, this one included, as a distraction from moral work.

Which novel is narrated by a boy called Pip?

Answer Great Expectations

The narrator is the grown man looking back at the boy, which is why the judgments in it are so much harder than the boy could have made. The gap between the two is where the book actually happens.

Captain Nemo commands which vessel?

Answer The Nautilus

Verne named the submarine after a real experimental craft built decades earlier by Robert Fulton. He got the electric power and the long submerged voyages right, and the pressure a hull could survive very wrong.

Which Kafka character is transformed at the start of the story?

Answer Gregor Samsa

He wakes and his first worry is not what he has become but that he will miss his train and lose his job. That is the joke and the horror of the story compressed into a single paragraph.

What is an unreliable narrator?

Answer One whose account the reader has reason to doubt

The reader is given enough to see past the teller — a boast that does not add up, a detail reported without understanding. The term was coined by a critic in 1961, but the device is far older than the name.

What does bildungsroman describe?

Answer A novel following a character from youth into maturity

German for a novel of formation, and the form usually ends with the character taking a place in society rather than escaping it. That ending is what separates it from an adventure story about a young person.

What is a metaphor, as distinct from a simile?

Answer A comparison stated as identity, without like or as

A simile admits it is comparing; a metaphor does not. The difference matters because a metaphor asks the reader to accept the identity for a moment, which is why an exhausted one still shapes thinking after it stops being noticed.

What is an epistolary novel?

Answer One told through letters or documents

Letters, diaries, cuttings, transcripts. The form gives a story the texture of evidence, and it lets a writer hand the reader documents the characters have not compared with one another.

What is dramatic irony?

Answer The audience knows something a character does not

The audience knows what the character does not, so ordinary lines become unbearable. Greek tragedy relied on it completely, since everyone in the theater already knew the myth and was watching a man walk toward it.

What does stream of consciousness attempt to reproduce?

Answer The unbroken flow of a character's thoughts

Thought as it actually arrives — interrupted, associative, ungrammatical. The phrase was borrowed from a psychologist, and the technique is an attempt to get the sentence to behave the way attention does.

What is a protagonist's foil?

Answer A character whose contrast highlights the protagonist's traits

The word comes from jewelry: a thin sheet of bright metal set behind a stone to make it shine. A foil is not an opponent but a contrast, which is why the pairing often involves friends.

What does allegory mean?

Answer A story whose surface stands for something else throughout

Every element stands for something else, consistently, so the surface story can be read twice. That is what separates it from a book that merely has symbols in it, where the correspondence is local rather than total.

What is the difference between plot and story?

Answer Plot is how events are arranged and revealed; story is the events themselves

One critic put it as the king died and then the queen died, against the king died and then the queen died of grief. The events can be identical while the arrangement changes what the reader is able to understand and when.

What is a novella?

Answer A work longer than a short story but shorter than a novel

Long enough to develop and short enough to read at a sitting. The word counts people quote are publishing conventions rather than rules, and several books usually called novels are shorter than several usually called novellas.