100 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: John Galt turns out to be an inventor leading a strike of the country's industrialists, who vanish one by one until the economy grinds to a halt.

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 a ghostly chase?

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: a shattered pumpkin is found beside Ichabod's hat, and his rival Brom Bones laughs whenever it's mentioned, hinting the Headless Horseman was a prank.

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

Sam Spade: his partner Miles Archer is shot dead on the case's first night, and in the end Spade hands the killer, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, to the police despite caring for her.

Which 1948 Shirley Jackson story about a village stoning made New Yorker readers cancel their subscriptions?

The Lottery: Jackson said she set a brutal ancient rite in the present day to shock readers with the pointless violence and inhumanity in their own lives.

Which dramatist, author of The Iceman Cometh, won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama?

Eugene O'Neill: he ordered Long Day's Journey into Night kept unpublished until 25 years after his death, but his widow had it published within three years, and it won his fourth.

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

The Joy Luck Club: after Suyuan Woo dies, her daughter Jing-mei takes her seat at the mahjong table and later travels to China to meet the twin half-sisters Suyuan left behind.

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?

The Things They Carried: Jimmy Cross burns Martha's letters and photographs after Ted Lavender is shot, blaming his daydreams about her for the death.

Which Sandra Cisneros novel in vignettes follows young Esperanza Cordero in a Latino quarter of Chicago?

The House on Mango Street: Cisneros began it at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, when feeling out of place among her classmates pushed her to write about a world they couldn't.

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

The Turn of the Screw: Miles's heart stops in the governess's arms at the end, and readers still argue whether the ghosts were real or only in her mind.

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

Philip Marlowe: when Howard Hawks's 1946 film team asked Chandler whether the chauffeur in The Big Sleep was murdered or killed himself, he admitted he didn't know.

Which 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: it began as a film script meant for John Wayne, James Stewart and Henry Fonda, and McMurtry turned it into a novel after Wayne backed away.

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

Civil Disobedience: someone interfered and paid the tax, so Thoreau was let out the next morning and went off to join a huckleberry-picking party.

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

Ambrose Bierce: his disappearance became the premise of the 1989 film Old Gringo, with Gregory Peck playing the vanished writer.

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

Phillis Wheatley: her book opened with a statement signed by 18 Boston men, John Hancock among them, vouching she wrote the poems, because many would suspect she hadn't.

Which poet of 'Paul Revere's Ride' has a marble bust in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: his poem gave Revere sole credit for the midnight ride, leaving out William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, who rode that night too.

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

Thornton Wilder: his novel's friar studies the five people killed when a Peruvian rope bridge falls, to prove God's plan, and a council has his book burned as heresy.

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

Angels in America: its Roy Cohn, the real-life lawyer, refuses to admit he has AIDS and insists his doctor call it liver cancer.

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

The Plot Against America: President Lindbergh strikes an understanding with Hitler and starts a homestead program aimed at moving Jewish families out of coastal cities.

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 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 a battle monument's dedication, coined 'the shot heard round the world'?

Concord Hymn: its famous phrase was later borrowed for Bobby Thomson's 1951 home run that won the New York Giants the pennant.

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

The House of Mirth takes its title from Ecclesiastes, 'the heart of fools is in the house of mirth', and Lily dies from an overdose of her sleeping drug, perhaps by accident.

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

My Ántonia: after Ántonia's father shoots himself, she gives up school to work the fields like a man.

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

The Crying of Lot 49: the novel ends just before lot 49 goes under the hammer, so Oedipa never learns whether the secret mail network is real.

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

The Year of Magical Thinking: Didion couldn't give away Dunne's shoes, because he would need them if he returned, the kind of thinking its title names.

Which Jhumpa Lahiri debut story collection won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?

Interpreter of Maladies: in the title story, a tour guide who interprets patients' symptoms for a doctor hears a tourist confess that her son was fathered by another man.

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

The Nickel Boys: the ending reveals that Elwood was shot dead during the escape, and the man the novel follows in the present is his friend Turner, living under Elwood's name.

Which colonial poet's collection The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America appeared in London in 1650?

Anne Bradstreet: her brother-in-law carried her poems to London and had them printed, reportedly without her knowledge.

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

Gwendolyn Brooks: after a 1967 Black writers' conference at Fisk University, she left Harper & Row to publish with Black-owned presses such as Broadside Press.

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

Natty Bumppo: Cooper let him die in The Prairie in 1827, then went back and wrote two novels about his younger years, The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer.

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

The Awakening: reviewers condemned it as morbid and immoral in 1899, and it faded from view until scholars revived it in the 1960s and it became a feminist classic.

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

The Yellow Wallpaper: when her husband finally unlocks the door, he finds the narrator creeping around the stripped room and faints, so she creeps over him each time she passes.

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

William Carlos Williams: though he practised medicine all his life, he became an open mentor to younger poets, including Allen Ginsberg and the Beats.

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

White Noise 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 shares its title with a film inside the novel so entertaining that its viewers lose interest in everything but watching it, and eventually die.

Which Pulitzer-winning Jeffrey Eugenides novel is narrated by Cal Stephanides, raised as a girl in a Greek-American family?

Middlesex: Cal's grandparents were a brother and sister who married on their voyage to America, passing down the recessive gene behind Cal's condition.

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

Harry Angstrom: he drives south on impulse, turns around, and back in his hometown moves in with a woman named Ruth instead of going home to his pregnant wife.

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: in Little Women, Alcott has Jo secretly write sensation stories for money, until Professor Bhaer condemns such writing and she gives them up.

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

Wallace Stevens: after his 1955 Pulitzer, Harvard offered him a professorship, and he declined because taking it meant giving up his job at The Hartford.

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

An American Tragedy: when the boat capsizes, Clyde Griffiths swims to shore and leaves Roberta to drown, and his trial ends in a death sentence.

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

Raymond Carver: after his death, his original versions came out as Beginners, restoring the passages Lish had cut and the endings he had rewritten.

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

Saul Bellow: Humboldt's Gift draws on his friend Delmore Schwartz, whose dazzling 1938 debut made him a literary star, but who burned out and died of a heart attack in a New York hotel in 1966.

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

A Prayer for Owen Meany: Owen and the narrator practise a slam-dunk move for years, and it later lets them save Vietnamese children from a grenade, at the cost of Owen's life.

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

Stranger in a Strange Land: Valentine Michael Smith, raised by Martians, founds a Church of All Worlds, and a real church later took the name and the water-sharing.

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.

Which NFL team took its name from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, who is buried in its home city?

The Baltimore Ravens got their name from a fan contest that drew 33,288 voters, a nod to the poet who also spent the early part of his career in the city.

Which coffee chain took its name from the chief mate of the Pequod in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick?

Starbucks was named after a partner argued that words beginning with "st" were powerful; the founders tried Starbo, a misread mining-town name, before remembering the whaler's mate.

Which author of The Old Man and the Sea survived two plane crashes in Africa within two days?

Ernest Hemingway reached Entebbe after the second crash to find reporters covering the story of his death. He won the Nobel Prize later in 1954 but was recuperating and decided against traveling to Stockholm.

Which Jazz Age novelist was named after a distant cousin, the lyricist of The Star-Spangled Banner?

F. Scott Fitzgerald was christened Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, after the cousin who wrote the anthem's lyrics in 1814.

Which author wrote Green Eggs and Ham to win a $50 bet that he couldn't use just 50 different words?

Dr. Seuss took the wager from Bennett Cerf, his editor at Random House, who doubted anyone could write an engaging children's book with so small a vocabulary.

Which Maine author's wife rescued the first pages of his debut novel, Carrie, from the trash?

Stephen King had thrown out the opening of Carrie in the trailer the couple shared in Hermon, Maine; Tabitha King retrieved it the next day and convinced him to keep writing.

Which celestial visitor lit the sky both when Mark Twain was born in 1835 and when he died in 1910?

Halley's Comet had made its closest approach two weeks before his birth, and in 1909 Twain predicted he would go out with it; he died of a heart attack the day after it came closest to the Sun.

Which Beat writer typed the first draft of On the Road on a 120-foot paper scroll in three weeks?

Jack Kerouac taped sheets of tracing paper together and typed single-spaced with no margins or paragraph breaks; the published novel was shorter and gave every major character a pseudonym.

Which playwright of Death of a Salesman was married to Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe for five years?

Arthur Miller wed Monroe in June 1956, the year the House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed him, and wrote the screenplay of her film The Misfits as the marriage fell apart.

Which author wrote Fahrenheit 451 at UCLA on a typewriter rented for ten cents per half hour?

Ray Bradbury wrote the first version, a novella called The Fireman, in nine days in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library, then returned to the same typing room to double its length.

Which author based Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird on her childhood friend and neighbor Truman Capote?

Harper Lee later went with Capote to Holcomb, Kansas, to help him research the murders behind In Cold Blood, just as her own manuscript was going into production.

Which author of The Grapes of Wrath drove around America with his poodle for Travels with Charley?

John Steinbeck made the 1960 road trip in a custom camper truck he named Rocinante, after Don Quixote's horse.

Which New York landmark displays Emma Lazarus's sonnet The New Colossus on a bronze plaque?

The Statue of Liberty got the plaque in 1903; Lazarus, who died in 1887, had written the sonnet in 1883 for an auction raising money to build the pedestal.

Which president, whom Walt Whitman never met, does the poet mourn as a fallen ship's captain?

Abraham Lincoln's assassination drew four poems from Whitman, who had seen the president several times during the war and later recited O Captain! My Captain! at lectures on his death.

Which author sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush at 21 and later set The Call of the Wild there?

Jack London found little gold and came down with scurvy in the goldfields, but the Yukon gave him the settings for White Fang and the short story To Build a Fire.

Which songwriter who grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Bob Dylan was honored for creating new poetic expressions within the American song tradition, eight years after the Pulitzer board gave him a special citation.

Which teen narrator roams New York after his expulsion from Pencey Prep in a J. D. Salinger novel?

Holden Caulfield narrates The Catcher in the Rye, which between 1961 and 1982 was the most censored book in American high schools and libraries.

Which author of Slaughterhouse-Five survived the bombing of Dresden as a prisoner in a meat locker?

Kurt Vonnegut was captured at the Battle of the Bulge, and for years after the war he could not write a version of the raid that satisfied him or his publishers.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's ancestor John Hathorne was a judge in which dark episode of colonial history?

The Salem witch trials shadowed the family name, and Hawthorne probably added the "w" to his surname in his early twenties to distance himself from his notorious forebears.

Which author's Uncle Tom's Cabin outsold every other book in 19th-century America except the Bible?

Harriet Beecher Stowe first published the story as a 40-week serial in an abolitionist periodical, and as a book it sold an unprecedented 300,000 copies in less than a year.

Which author of Beloved was the first Black woman of any nationality to win the Literature Nobel?

Toni Morrison won the prize in 1993; before her own novels took off, she was the first Black woman senior editor in the fiction department at Random House.

Which author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was a San Francisco streetcar conductor at 16?

Maya Angelou was the first Black woman to hold the job in the city, and she went on to recite her poem On the Pulse of Morning at Bill Clinton's first inauguration.

Which poet, the only winner of four Pulitzers for Poetry, recited at John F. Kennedy's inauguration?

Robert Frost had composed a new poem for the occasion, but the bright sunlight kept him from seeing the text, so he recited The Gift Outright from memory instead.

Which Atlanta author published only one novel in her lifetime, the epic Gone with the Wind?

Margaret Mitchell was struck by a speeding motorist in 1949 while crossing Peachtree Street in Atlanta, on her way to see a movie with her husband.

Which label for the American writers of 1920s Paris is Gertrude Stein credited with coining?

The Lost Generation was a phrase Stein is said to have heard from a French garage owner who serviced her car.

Which character fakes a liver complaint to dodge more combat missions in Joseph Heller's Catch-22?

Yossarian is trapped by the rule that names the novel, which Heller first called Catch-18 until his agent feared confusion with Leon Uris's Mila 18.

Which Tennessee Williams heroine moves in with sister Stella and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski?

Blanche DuBois is the heroine of A Streetcar Named Desire; Jessica Tandy played her in the original 1947 Broadway production opposite Marlon Brando's Stanley.

Emily Dickinson, who saw just ten of her poems published, was born in which Massachusetts town?

Amherst was Dickinson family ground: her grandfather helped found Amherst College and in 1813 built the Homestead, a mansion on the town's main street.

Which Nobel laureate invented Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, as a setting for his fiction?

William Faulkner modelled it on Lafayette County, renamed its county seat of Oxford as Jefferson, and often called the place his apocryphal county.

Which author began The Outsiders at 15 and wrote most of it as a high school junior?

S. E. Hinton used her initials at her publisher's suggestion, so that male book reviewers would not dismiss a novel about teenage gangs because a woman wrote it.

Which author of Their Eyes Were Watching God lay in an unmarked grave until Alice Walker marked it?

Zora Neale Hurston had been dead for thirteen years when Walker commissioned the marker, and Walker's 1975 Ms. magazine article about the search revived interest in her work.

Which Ralph Ellison novel has an unnamed narrator living underground in a room he has lined with light bulbs?

Invisible Man won the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction, making Ellison the first African-American writer to win it; the narrator runs his lights on power stolen from the city grid.

Which poet published her only novel, The Bell Jar, as Victoria Lucas a month before her death?

Sylvia Plath used the pen name to shield the real people behind her characters; the novel appeared under her own name only in 1966 and was not published in the United States until 1971.

Which poet wrote The Negro Speaks of Rivers as a teenager while crossing the Mississippi?

Langston Hughes said he wrote it in ten or fifteen minutes on the back of an envelope, on his way to visit his father in Mexico.

Which author of Go Tell It on the Mountain left America for Paris at 24 to escape racial prejudice?

James Baldwin based the 1953 novel partly on his own family, and Time magazine has ranked it among the top 100 English-language novels.

Which St. Louis-born poet of The Waste Land became a British subject and won a Nobel Prize?

T. S. Eliot moved to England at 25 and renounced his American citizenship in 1927, yet he told a friend that Missouri and the Mississippi had marked him more deeply than anywhere else.

Which daughter of missionaries wrote The Good Earth, America's best-selling novel of 1931 and 1932?

Pearl S. Buck spent most of her life before 1934 in China, and in 1938 she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Which Lorraine Hansberry drama was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway?

A Raisin in the Sun opened in 1959 with Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee Younger of Chicago's South Side, and it was also the first Broadway play with a Black director, Lloyd Richards.

Which Allen Ginsberg poem got its publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti arrested on obscenity charges?

Howl was cleared when Judge Clayton Horn ruled that it had redeeming social importance; customs officials had earlier seized 520 copies arriving from England.

Which author drew on night shifts as a hospital orderly for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

Ken Kesey worked the graveyard shift at a mental health facility in Menlo Park; afterwards he and his friends, the Merry Pranksters, became known for their LSD-fuelled Acid Tests.

Which author of The Gift of the Magi published stories while in prison for embezzlement?

O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter, a former bank teller; a friend in New Orleans forwarded his stories so that publishers had no idea their author was a prisoner.

Which Art Spiegelman book about his father was the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize?

Maus retells a Holocaust survivor's story with Jews drawn as mice and Germans as cats; the Pulitzer board sidestepped the question of its category with a Special Award in Letters.

Which hitman lets a coin toss decide who lives in Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men?

Anton Chigurh is hired in 1980 to retrieve a satchel holding $2.4 million; Javier Bardem won an Academy Award for playing him on screen.

Which author of A Good Man Is Hard to Find raised some 100 peafowl on her Georgia farm, Andalusia?

Flannery O'Connor also kept ducks, ostriches, emus and toucans, and described her peacocks in an essay titled The King of the Birds.

Which playwright of Fences set nine of his ten Century Cycle plays in Pittsburgh's Hill District?

August Wilson set each play in a different decade of the twentieth century; the lone exception to the Pittsburgh setting is Ma Rainey's Black Bottom.

Which author of The Giving Tree also wrote the Johnny Cash hit A Boy Named Sue?

Shel Silverstein's song peaked at number 2 on the U.S. chart for Cash in 1969 and won a Grammy in 1970; he also released his own recording of it.

Which author's Roots follows Kunta Kinte, taken from The Gambia at 17, and his American descendants?

Alex Haley saw the 1977 television miniseries made from the novel win nine Emmys and a Peabody.

Which N. Scott Momaday novel, a Pulitzer winner, follows Abel home to New Mexico from World War II?

House Made of Dawn drew on Momaday's own years at Jemez Pueblo, and one critic dated the start of the Native American Renaissance from its Pulitzer win.

Which author published The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, about a mute man in a Georgia mill town, at 23?

Carson McCullers opened her 1940 debut with two mute friends, John Singer and Spiros Antonapoulos, who are separated when Antonapoulos is sent to an asylum.

Which John Kennedy Toole novel won a posthumous Pulitzer after his mother got it published?

A Confederacy of Dunces reached print through Thelma Toole and the novelist Walker Percy; its hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, is an unemployed medievalist living with his own mother in New Orleans.