49 Questions from Britannica’s Most Popular Literature Quizzes

Question: In which country might you (most likely) attend a Kabuki performance?

Answer: Kabuki is a ritualized, stylized form of theater developed in Japan.

Question: Who wrote Song of Solomon?

Answer: Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977) is told by a male narrator in search of his identity. Its publication brought the American writer to national attention.

Question: Which American writer is considered the originator of the modern detective story?

Answer: Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published in April 1841, is considered to be the first modern detective story.

Question: Who wrote Fahrenheit 451?

Answer: Fahrenheit 451 is a novel by Ray Bradbury. It was published in 1953.

Question: Which of these novels was not written in the 19th century?

Answer: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, making it an 18th-century novel.

Question: What was Charles Dickens’s last novel?

Answer: Charles Dickens, the English novelist, died in 1870, leaving behind an unfinished novel that was published as The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Question: Which novelist was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986?

Answer: The works of Romanian-born American novelist Elie Wiesel provide a sober yet passionate testament of the destruction of European Jewry during World War II. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986.

Question: How many novels did Emily Brontë write?

Answer: Emily Brontë wrote only Wuthering Heights. It was published in 1847, and she died soon afterward.

Question: Which of these writers often deals with the experience of Indian immigrants in the United States?

Answer: Jhumpa Lahiri, the daughter of Bengali immigrants to the United States, often writes of the Indian experience in America.

Question: What is a synonym for moist?

Answer: Moist means slightly wetted, as a towel might be after you take a shower. Damp has a similar meaning, making it a synonym.

Question: What is a synonym for noticeable?

Answer: Something noticeable is easily seen. So is something that is conspicuous, making that word a synonym.

Question: What is an antonym for dismantle?

Answer: Dismantle means “to take apart.” An antonym is an opposite term, so the opposite would be assemble, which means “to put together.”

Question: Which American novelist was famous for his depiction of the Jazz Age?

Answer: F. Scott Fitzgerald, an American short-story writer and novelist, was famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), his most notable novel being The Great Gatsby (1925).

Question: Who is the protagonist in Crime and Punishment?

Answer: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) describes a young intellectual, Rodion Raskolnikov, who is willing to gamble on ideas.

Question: Who wrote The Bluest Eye and Beloved?

Answer: Toni Morrison wrote the novels The Bluest Eye (1970) and Beloved (1987).

Question: Who wrote The Shining?

Answer: The Shining is a horror novel by the popular writer Stephen King.

Question: Who wrote The Last of the Mohicans?

Answer: James Fenimore Cooper was the author of The Last of the Mohicans and many other books in the 19th century.

Question: What was Daniel Defoe’s last major work of fiction?

Answer: In 1724 Daniel Defoe published his last major work of fiction, Roxana.

Question: What describes the borogoves in “Jabberwocky”?

Answer: “All mimsy were the borogroves,” proclaims Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” written with nonsense words.

Question: Which historical event does Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities concern?

Answer: A Tale of Two Cities is an adventure set in the years of the French Revolution.

Question: Who wrote Walden?

Answer: Henry David Thoreau is the author of the memoir Walden.

Question: Who created the amateur detective Ezekiel (“Easy”) Rawlins?

Answer: Walter Mosley’s first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), introduces Ezekiel (“Easy”) Rawlins, an unwilling amateur detective from the Watts section of Los Angeles.

Question: Who wrote the children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are?

Answer: Maurice Sendak’s many children’s books include the trilogy composed of Where the Wild Things Are (1963; winner of the Caldecott Medal), In the Night Kitchen (1970), and Outside Over There (1981).

Question: The title of a novel published in 1961 entered the English language as a reference to a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem. What’s the novel?

Answer: The novel Catch-22, written by Joseph Heller and published in 1961, was one of the most significant works of protest literature to appear after World War II. The “catch” in Catch-22 involves a mysterious Air Force regulation that asserts that a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions; but, if he makes the necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved. The term catch-22 thereafter entered the English language as a reference to a proviso that trips one up no matter which way one turns.

Question: Which novel brought E.M. Forster his first major success?

Answer: Howards End (1910) brought E.M. Forster his first major literary success.

Question: Who wrote Moll Flanders?

Answer: Daniel Defoe wrote the novel Moll Flanders (1722).

Question: The novel Death Comes for the Archbishop recounts the story of French Catholic missionaries in the southwestern United States. Who wrote it?

Answer: Willa Cather wrote about French Catholic missionaries in the southwestern United States in the novel Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

Question: Whose novel The Time Machine is set in 802,701 CE?

Answer: H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, first published in 1895, was set in the very distant future.

Question: Mirah Cohen appears in which of these novels by George Eliot?

Answer: George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) is built on the contrast between Mirah Cohen, a poor Jewish girl, and the upper-class Gwendolen Harleth, who marries for money and regrets it. The novel’s hero, Daniel, after discovering that he is Jewish, marries Mirah and departs for Palestine to establish a home for his nation.

Question: What is considered the first Australian novel?

Answer: Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton (1831) is considered the first Australian novel. It is an account of one convict’s immigration and was based on Savery’s own life.

Question: Whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was adapted for film as Blade Runner (1982)?

Answer: The American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), which was adapted for film as Blade Runner (1982).

Question: Who wrote Cry, the Beloved Country, a novel that helped focus global attention on the injustices of apartheid in South Africa?

Answer: Alan Paton is best known for his first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), a passionate tale of racial injustice that helped focus global attention on the injustices of apartheid in South Africa.

Question: Who wrote Jane Eyre?

Answer: Jane Eyre was the first novel by Charlotte Brontë to be published. The novel came out in October 1847, only six weeks after it had been accepted for publication.

Question: Which of these writers reconstructed in Wide Sargasso Sea the earlier life of the fictional character Antoinette Cosway, who was Mr. Rochester’s mad first wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre?

Answer: The West Indian novelist Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel that reconstructed the earlier life of the fictional character Antoinette Cosway, who was Mr. Rochester’s mad first wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Question: What writer of the Harlem Renaissance studied anthropology at Columbia University and did fieldwork in the American South?

Answer: Zora Neale Hurston was a writer of the Harlem Renaissance who is today best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). She attended Howard University from 1921 to 1924 and in 1925 won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied anthropology. She graduated from Barnard in 1928 and for two years pursued graduate studies in anthropology at Columbia University. She also conducted field studies in folklore among African Americans in the South.

Question: Which of these literary movements was concerned with clear, direct expression?

Answer: The 20th-century U.S. and English poets of the movement known as imagism sought to replace vague abstractions in poetry with clarity and directness.

Question: Who among these writers was initially known as an interpreter of New Orleans culture but was rediscovered in the late 20th century because of her concerns about the freedom of women?

Answer: American novelist and short-story writer Kate Chopin was first known as an interpreter of New Orleans culture. There was a revival of interest in Chopin in the late 20th century because her concerns about the freedom of women foreshadowed later feminist literary themes.

Question: Which books is said to have contributed so much to popular feeling against slavery that it is sometimes cited among the causes of the American Civil War?

Answer: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin contributed so much to popular feeling against slavery that it is sometimes cited among the causes of the American Civil War.

Question: What kind of book is a Nebula Award given for?

Answer: The Nebula Award is given annually for a book of science fiction. The first was given to Frank Herbert for Dune in 1965.

Question: What is the name for a record of a period in a person’s life?

Answer: Diaries are written by people to record their day-to-day lives. Perhaps the most famous is The Diary of Anne Frank, by a Jewish girl who hid from the Nazis during World War II.

Question: Who wrote the autobiographical Black Boy?

Answer: Richard Wright wrote the autobiographical Black Boy (1945). It chronicles his childhood poverty, his experience of white prejudice and violence, and his growing awareness of his interest in literature.

Question: Who wrote Frankenstein?

Answer: Frankenstein, a classic of 19th-century literature, was written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

Question: What was the first book in the Harry Potter series?

Answer: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, the first in the Harry Potter series of novels, was published in 1997. (It appeared in the United States as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 1998.)

Question: Who wrote Life on the Mississippi?

Answer: Life on the Mississippi is one of Mark Twain’s many well-known books.

Question: Which of these novels would be considered “dystopian”?

Answer: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World contains all the classic elements of a dystopian novel—a work, often futuristic, in which society is portrayed in its ugliest, most degraded form.

Question: In which century did science fiction become a major type of writing?

Answer: A few authors, such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, wrote science fiction in the 1800s or even earlier. But science fiction did not become a major type of writing until the 1900s.

Question: Who was the author of The Grapes of Wrath?

Answer: The Grapes of Wrath, set during the years of the Great Depression, is a famous novel by John Steinbeck.

Question: Who wrote Cat’s Cradle?

Answer: Kurt Vonnegut wrote Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, and many other popular novels.

Question: What was the first of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels to be published after his death?

Answer: The Silmarillion was published in 1977. J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973.