A Rose for Emily
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
40 free A Rose for Emily trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily is one of the most often anthologized short stories in American literature, and one of the most unsettling. In a handful of pages it follows a proud, isolated woman and the neighbors who watch her for decades, then ends on a discovery that sends readers back to the first page to see what they missed. This quiz covers the whole story: what happens and in what order, who the people around Emily are, the clues tucked into small details, and how the unusual narrator shapes what we know. A few questions step outside the text to the author, the place he wrote about, how the story first reached print, and the music and screen version that borrowed from it. It is written for students revising for a reading quiz or a final test, teachers who want ready-made multiple-choice questions, and book-club readers checking how closely they read. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through or print the set for a class.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In A Rose for Emily, which poison does Emily Grierson demand from the druggist without saying what it is for?
Arsenic
Arsenic arrives at her house in a box the druggist has labelled as rat poison, under a skull and crossbones. The town assumes she means to kill herself.
Q 02Which Northern foreman courts Emily Grierson in A Rose for Emily and is last seen entering her house at dusk?
Homer Barron
Homer Barron was soon driving out with Emily every Sunday afternoon, and the town expected a wedding. When he disappeared, people assumed he had deserted her.
Q 03In A Rose for Emily, what do the townspeople notice on the second pillow beside the body?
A strand of gray hair
A strand of gray hair, long and iron-colored like Emily's own, lies in the hollow of a head on that pillow. It tells the town she had been lying beside the corpse.
Q 04William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily opens with which event, which the whole town attends partly out of curiosity?
Her funeral
Her funeral gives the townspeople a chance to see inside a house that no outsider had entered for ten years. The men, the narrator says, come out of a kind of respectful affection.
Q 05In A Rose for Emily, what does Emily tell callers for three days after her father's death?
That he is not dead
That he is not dead is all she will say, meeting visitors at the door dressed as usual, with no sign of grief. She gives way only as the law is about to step in.
Q 06When a foul smell spreads from Emily's house in A Rose for Emily, what do four men sprinkle there after midnight?
Lime
Lime is spread in her cellar and outbuildings by men who slink about like burglars, because nobody will tell a lady that her property stinks. The odor fades within a week or two.
Q 07In A Rose for Emily, what is the name of the manservant who cooks and gardens for Emily Grierson for decades?
Tobe
Tobe is named only once, when Emily calls him to show her visitors out; otherwise the narrator never uses his name. He is the one person who knows what her house holds.
Q 08In A Rose for Emily, what does Emily Grierson refuse to pay when a new generation of town leaders calls on her?
Her taxes
Her taxes had been waived for life by a mayor of the old school, and she simply repeats that she owes nothing. The visitors are shown out with the bill still unpaid.
Q 09Which narrative point of view does William Faulkner use throughout A Rose for Emily?
First-person plural
First-person plural narration, all we and our, lets the town itself tell the tale as shared gossip. No single narrator is ever named or described.
Q 10A Rose for Emily, with its decaying house and long-hidden corpse, is a classic of which literary genre?
Southern Gothic
Southern Gothic fiction swaps the haunted castle for the decaying plantation world of the post-Civil War South. Emily's shuttered home stands where those two traditions meet.
Q 11In A Rose for Emily, which former mayor does Emily tell her visitors to consult, though he died a decade earlier?
Colonel Sartoris
Colonel Sartoris made the arrangement with her in 1894 as a gentleman's agreement, with nothing on the town's books. To Emily, his word still stands.
Q 12In A Rose for Emily, which invented debt lets the mayor spare Emily's pride over what she owes?
A loan from her father
A loan from her father to the town is the mayor's fiction, since a Grierson would never accept charity. The narrator says only a man of his generation could invent it and only a woman believe it.
Q 13In A Rose for Emily, which building job brings Emily's Yankee suitor to town the summer after her father dies?
Q 21Which magazine ran A Rose for Emily in 1930, the first national periodical to print a William Faulkner story?
The Forum
The Forum gave the tale five two-color drawings by Weldon Bailey and split it into five numbered sections. At the time it was a widely read journal with a taste for Southern subjects.
Q 22A Rose for Emily was reprinted in which 1931 book, William Faulkner's first volume of short stories?
These 13
These 13 was named for its thirteen stories and dedicated to Faulkner's wife Estelle and their baby daughter, who had died days after her birth. It later became a collector's item.
Q 23Which honor for 1949 did William Faulkner, author of A Rose for Emily, receive a year late beside Bertrand Russell?
The Nobel Prize
Paving the sidewalks
Paving the sidewalks is the contract that brings a construction company with mules, machinery and a Yankee foreman. Little boys trail the crew to hear him curse and the workers sing.
Q 14Whom do the ladies of the town force to call on Emily Grierson about her Sunday drives in A Rose for Emily?
The Baptist minister
The Baptist minister never told anyone what passed between them, and he refused to go back. His wife then wrote to Emily's relations, asking them to step in.
Q 15In A Rose for Emily, from which state do two cousins arrive during Emily's scandalous courtship?
Alabama
Alabama is where the estranged kin live; they had fallen out with Emily's father over an old relative's estate. The town soon finds them even haughtier than Emily and is glad to see them go.
Q 16In A Rose for Emily, what does Emily order from the jeweler with her suitor's initials on each piece?
A silver toilet set
A silver toilet set for a man was followed two days later by a full outfit of men's clothes, nightshirt included. The town concluded the couple had married.
Q 17Which genteel art does Emily Grierson teach the town's daughters in a downstairs studio in A Rose for Emily?
China painting
China painting lessons bring girls to her door for six or seven years when she is about forty. When that generation grows up, the pupils stop coming and the front door closes for good.
Q 18Which town, the seat of William Faulkner's invented county, is home to Emily Grierson in A Rose for Emily?
Jefferson
Jefferson appears in story after story by Faulkner, with the same courthouse square and many of the same families. Its cemetery holds both Union and Confederate soldiers.
Q 19A Rose for Emily takes place in which fictional county, the setting of most William Faulkner novels?
Yoknapatawpha
Yoknapatawpha is built from Chickasaw words, and Faulkner called it his apocryphal county, even drawing a map of it for one novel. He placed over 50 stories there.
Q 20Which Mississippi town, William Faulkner's longtime home, was the model for the setting of A Rose for Emily?
Oxford
Oxford is the seat of Lafayette County, where Faulkner's family settled when he was a small boy and his father opened a livery stable. He lived there for nearly all the rest of his life.
The Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949 was held over and presented in December 1950. Faulkner so disliked the fuss that his teenage daughter heard the news in her principal's office.
Q 24Asked by students in 1957 where A Rose for Emily came from, what kind of tale did William Faulkner call it?
A ghost story
A ghost story was his phrase, and he said the whole thing grew from one picture in his mind, a small detail in an abandoned house. At another session he said Emily's particular tragedy was invented.
Q 25Which British band put a song titled A Rose for Emily on the 1968 album Odessey and Oracle?
The Zombies
The Zombies' keyboard player Rod Argent wrote it, and critics disagree over whether it retells Faulkner's tale or only borrows the name. It was taped at EMI's Abbey Road studios.
Q 26Which band's 2004 song To the End loosely retells A Rose for Emily on the album Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge?
My Chemical Romance
My Chemical Romance gave the tale one of the album's heavier, punk-inspired tracks, placed third in the running order. The record's main themes are love, loss and revenge.
Q 27Where was William Faulkner writer-in-residence in 1957 when he took students' questions about A Rose for Emily?
University of Virginia
University of Virginia audiences heard him at thirty-six public events over two spring terms, and most sessions were taped. Over 28 hours of the recordings were later digitized.
Q 28In an early rejected draft of A Rose for Emily, which surname did William Faulkner give Emily instead of Grierson?
Wyatt
Wyatt survives in the published version as the name of an elderly relative whose estate the family quarrelled over. Faulkner revised the tale once more for its 1931 book publication.
Q 29Which eighty-year-old mayor in A Rose for Emily hears complaints about the smell from Emily's house?
Judge Stevens
Judge Stevens asks how anyone can accuse a lady of such a thing in person, so the problem is dealt with quietly after dark. His family name recurs across Faulkner's fiction.
Q 30In A Rose for Emily, which relative of Emily Grierson does the town remember as having gone completely mad?
Her great-aunt
Her great-aunt's madness is why the town says insanity runs in the family, a remark it makes when Emily is still single at thirty. A quarrel over the old lady's estate had split the family.