50 Fun Facts About American Literature

In which Ayn Rand novel do people keep asking the cryptic question 'Who is John Galt?' as industry collapses?

Atlas Shrugged uses the question as shorthand for 'don't ask questions nobody can answer', while the industrialists who keep the country running quietly vanish.

Which Upton Sinclair novel exposing Chicago's meat-packing plants pushed Congress into the 1906 Meat Inspection Act?

The Jungle was meant as a socialist tract about immigrant workers, and Sinclair complained that he had aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit it in the stomach.

In which 1940 novel does Bigger Thomas smother Mary Dalton with a pillow, then burn her body in a furnace?

Native Son follows 20-year-old Bigger Thomas through the poverty of Chicago's South Side, where panic at being found in a white woman's bedroom turns him into a killer.

In which Washington Irving tale does schoolteacher Ichabod Crane vanish after meeting the Headless Horseman?

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow appeared in 1820 in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., the collection of 34 essays and stories whose success let Irving live as a professional writer.

Which San Francisco private detective hunts a jewelled black statuette in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon?

Sam Spade works in partnership with Miles Archer, who is found shot dead on the first night of the case, which sets the hunt for the falcon in motion.

Which 1948 Shirley Jackson story about a village stoning drew more mail than any fiction The New Yorker had run?

The Lottery cost the magazine subscriptions, and Jackson received at least ten letters a day through the summer of 1948 from readers furious at its ending.

Which dramatist, author of The Iceman Cometh, is the only playwright to have won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama?

Eugene O'Neill also won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, decades after a 1912 suicide attempt in the boarding house that became the setting of The Iceman Cometh.

Which Amy Tan novel follows four Chinese immigrant families in San Francisco and their American-born daughters?

The Joy Luck Club is built like a mahjong game, with four parts of four sections each, and one of the mothers, Suyuan Woo, has died before the novel opens.

Which 1895 Civil War novel did Stephen Crane write without ever having seen a battle?

The Red Badge of Courage was so convincing that readers assumed Crane was a veteran, though he was born six years after the war ended.

Which Tim O'Brien book of linked Vietnam stories opens with Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's platoon and its gear?

The Things They Carried gives Jimmy Cross physical reminders of Martha, a girl who does not love him back, and later has him take the blame for Kiowa's death on a riverbank.

Which Sandra Cisneros novel in vignettes follows 12-year-old Esperanza Cordero in a Latino quarter of Chicago?

The House on Mango Street draws on Cisneros's own Mexican-American childhood in Chicago, though she has said Esperanza is not simply herself.

In which Henry James novella does a governess at Bly see the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel near two children?

The Turn of the Screw never settles whether the ghosts are real or the governess's delusion, and that ambiguity is why Miles and Flora's fate is still argued over.

Which Los Angeles private investigator is summoned by General Sternwood in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep?

Philip Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep in 1939, after Chandler's pulp stories had tried out detectives called Carmady and John Dalmas.

Which Daniel Keyes novel is told in progress reports by Charlie Gordon, the first human given intelligence surgery?

Flowers for Algernon takes its title from the laboratory mouse that had the surgery first, whose decline foreshadows Charlie's own.

Which Larry McMurtry novel about ex-Texas Rangers driving cattle to Montana won the 1986 Pulitzer for Fiction?

Lonesome Dove was a bestseller set in the waning days of the Old West, and McMurtry later added a sequel, Streets of Laredo, and two prequels.

Which Thoreau essay, born of a night in jail over an unpaid poll tax, later guided Gandhi and Martin Luther King?

Civil Disobedience argues that even in jail Thoreau felt freer than the people outside, and Gandhi read it as a match for his own satyagraha.

Which author of The Devil's Dictionary vanished in 1913 after setting out to witness the Mexican Revolution?

Ambrose Bierce was never seen again, and his Devil's Dictionary had first appeared in book form in 1906 under the title The Cynic's Word Book.

Which enslaved Boston poet became the first African American to publish a book of poetry, in London in 1773?

Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral came out on 1 September 1773 and brought her fame in both England and the colonies.

Which poet of 'Paul Revere's Ride' is the only American with a bust in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's bust went up in 1884, two years after his death, making him the first non-British writer honoured there.

Which writer took Pulitzers for a novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and for the play Our Town?

Thornton Wilder won three Pulitzers in all, adding a second drama prize in 1943 for The Skin of Our Teeth.

Which two-part Tony Kushner play, subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama?

Angels in America opened on Broadway in 1993 after a London premiere at the National Theatre, and it also took the Tony Award for Best Play.

Which Philip Roth novel imagines Charles Lindbergh beating Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election?

The Plot Against America has Lindbergh win in a landslide on the slogan 'Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war', seen through a Jewish family in Roth's own Newark.

Which Octavia Butler novel drags Dana, a Black writer in 1976 Los Angeles, back to a Maryland slave plantation?

Kindred sends Dana back whenever Rufus, the slaveholder's son who turns out to be her own ancestor, is in danger.

Under which invented Dutch historian's name did Washington Irving publish his satirical 1809 A History of New York?

Diedrich Knickerbocker was launched with a hoax, as Irving ran missing-person adverts in the New York Evening Post for the crusty historian, and the name later stuck to Manhattanites and their basketball team.

Which Ralph Waldo Emerson poem, written for an 1837 monument dedication, coined 'the shot heard round the world'?

Concord Hymn was first sung to the tune 'Old Hundredth' on 4 July 1837, and its opening stanza is carved beneath Daniel Chester French's Minute Man statue.

Which Edith Wharton novel follows Lily Bart, a well-born but penniless beauty falling out of 1890s New York society?

The House of Mirth was Wharton's 1905 breakthrough, serialised first in Scribner's Magazine, and it follows Lily's slide from dinner parties to a boarding house.

Which Willa Cather novel is narrated by Jim Burden, an orphan from Virginia sent to his grandparents in Nebraska?

My Ántonia pairs Jim with Ántonia Shimerda, the elder daughter of Bohemian immigrants, in the fictional prairie town of Black Hawk.

Which short Thomas Pynchon novel has Oedipa Maas uncover a centuries-old feud between two mail-delivery companies?

The Crying of Lot 49 is the shortest of Pynchon's novels, and Oedipa stumbles into the conspiracy as executor of the estate of an ex-lover, Pierce Inverarity.

Which Joan Didion memoir, written after her husband John Gregory Dunne died in 2003, won the National Book Award?

The Year of Magical Thinking took the 2005 nonfiction award and was a Pulitzer finalist, written while Didion's daughter Quintana lay gravely ill in hospital.

Which Jhumpa Lahiri debut story collection won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has sold over 15 million copies?

Interpreter of Maladies also took the PEN/Hemingway Award and was named The New Yorker's best debut of the year.

Which Colson Whitehead novel, based on Florida's abusive Dozier reform school, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

The Nickel Boys draws on the real Dozier School, which ran for 111 years before its abuse was exposed.

Who became the first published writer of England's North American colonies with the 1650 collection The Tenth Muse?

Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan who sailed to Massachusetts aboard the Arbella in 1630, married at sixteen, and wrote much of her verse between raising eight children.

Who became the first African American to win any Pulitzer Prize, for the 1949 poetry collection Annie Allen?

Gwendolyn Brooks won on 1 May 1950 and went on to serve as Poet Laureate of Illinois, having identified with Chicago for the rest of her life.

Which frontiersman, called Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans, is the hero of Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales?

Natty Bumppo goes by a different name in each of the five novels, among them Pathfinder, Leatherstocking, Deerslayer and simply 'the trapper'.

Which 1899 Kate Chopin novel ends with its heroine swimming out to her death in the Gulf of Mexico off Grand Isle?

The Awakening follows Edna Pontellier, a New Orleans wife whose unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood collide with the turn-of-the-century South.

Which 1892 Charlotte Perkins Gilman story is the journal of a woman whose physician husband imposes a 'rest cure'?

The Yellow Wallpaper grew out of Gilman's own treatment by Silas Weir Mitchell, the era's leading expert on women's mental health, who never replied to the copy she sent him.

Which poet of 'The Red Wheelbarrow' spent his working life as a doctor practising paediatrics in Rutherford, New Jersey?

William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford in 1883 and practised both paediatrics and general medicine there, writing poems such as 'This Is Just to Say' in between.

Which Don DeLillo novel sends professor Jack Gladney's family fleeing an 'airborne toxic event' from a chemical spill?

White Noise, published in 1985, has Gladney pioneer the field of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill without being able to speak German.

Which 1996 novel set around the Enfield Tennis Academy and a nearby drug-recovery house runs to hundreds of endnotes?

Infinite Jest is David Foster Wallace's encyclopedic magnum opus, and some of its endnotes carry footnotes of their own.

Which Pulitzer-winning Jeffrey Eugenides novel is narrated by Cal Stephanides, an intersex man from a Greek family?

Middlesex opens with Cal's grandparents fleeing Bursa in Turkey for the United States in 1922, and Eugenides insists the book is not autobiography.

Which former high-school basketball star, nicknamed Rabbit, walks out on his family in John Updike's Rabbit, Run?

Harry Angstrom is selling a kitchen gadget called the MagiPeeler when the 1960 novel opens, and on impulse he drives south to 'escape' a loveless marriage.

Which Sinclair Lewis novel about a medical researcher won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize, which its author then declined?

Arrowsmith was written with the science writer Paul de Kruif, who took a quarter of the royalties without a credit, and Lewis did accept the Nobel Prize four years later.

Under which pen name did Louisa May Alcott write lurid sensation stories for adults, far from the world of Little Women?

A. M. Barnard was the name on thrillers such as Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power, published in 1866, two years before Little Women.

Which poet of 'The Emperor of Ice-Cream' spent most of his life as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut?

Wallace Stevens evaluated surety claims by day, won the Pulitzer in 1955 and then declined a Harvard post because it meant leaving the firm.

Which Theodore Dreiser novel fictionalised Chester Gillette's 1906 murder of Grace Brown at an Adirondack lake?

An American Tragedy turns Gillette into Clyde Griffiths, deliberately keeping his initials, and its 1951 film version was retitled A Place in the Sun.

Whose collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love was heavily cut by the editor Gordon Lish?

Raymond Carver's widow Tess Gallagher later fought Knopf to republish the stories as he originally wrote them, before Lish's 1981 edits.

Which Nobel laureate, author of Herzog and Humboldt's Gift, was born in Quebec before his family moved to Chicago?

Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellows in Lachine, Quebec, in 1915, and his family moved to Chicago's Humboldt Park when he was nine.

In which John Irving novel does a tiny boy with a high-pitched voice kill the narrator's mother with a foul ball?

A Prayer for Owen Meany gives its title character an underdeveloped larynx, a conviction that he is God's instrument, and a newspaper column written entirely in capitals.

Which Robert Heinlein novel coined the word 'grok' as part of the language of a human raised by Martians?

Stranger in a Strange Land follows Valentine Michael Smith, born on Mars and brought to Earth as a young adult, whose water-sharing rituals inspired a real-world church.

Which Marilynne Robinson novel is a long letter from the dying Iowa minister John Ames to his seven-year-old son?

Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Ames confesses in the letter that he burned one sermon rather than preach it.