American Literature Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
100 free American Literature trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
American literature is full of stories as strange as the books themselves: a poet who ran an insurance company, a satirist who walked into a revolution and vanished, a novelist who turned down the Pulitzer, a bank clerk who found his pen name in prison. The canon was built by outsiders, immigrants, recluses and hustlers, and the trivia reflects that. These fifty questions run from the Puritan poets of the 1650s to Pulitzer winners of the 2020s. They cover the novels taught in every high school alongside the ones that only book-club regulars know, the playwrights and poets, the hard-boiled detectives and the campus epics, with a detail in every answer that makes it stick. It suits an English classroom, a pub quiz literature round, a book-club night or anyone who wants to measure how much of the American canon they have really read.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Ayn Rand novel do people keep asking the cryptic question 'Who is John Galt?' as industry collapses?
Atlas Shrugged
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.
Q 02Which Upton Sinclair novel exposing Chicago's meat-packing plants pushed Congress into the 1906 Meat Inspection Act?
The Jungle
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.
Q 03In which 1940 novel does Bigger Thomas smother Mary Dalton with a pillow, then burn her body in a furnace?
Native Son
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.
Q 04In which Washington Irving tale does schoolteacher Ichabod Crane vanish after a ghostly chase?
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
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.
Q 05Which San Francisco private detective hunts a jewelled black statuette in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon?
Sam Spade
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.
Q 06Which 1948 Shirley Jackson story about a village stoning made New Yorker readers cancel their subscriptions?
The Lottery
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.
Q 07Which dramatist, author of The Iceman Cometh, won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama?
Eugene O'Neill
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.
Q 08Which Amy Tan novel follows four Chinese immigrant families in San Francisco and their American-born daughters?
The Joy Luck Club
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.
Q 09Which 1895 Civil War novel did Stephen Crane write without ever having seen a battle?
The Red Badge of Courage
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.
Q 10Which Tim O'Brien book of linked Vietnam stories opens with Lieutenant Jimmy Cross's platoon?
The Things They Carried
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.
Q 11Which Sandra Cisneros novel in vignettes follows young Esperanza Cordero in a Latino quarter of Chicago?
The House on Mango Street
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.
Q 12In which Henry James novella does a governess at Bly see the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel?
The Turn of the Screw
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.
Q 13Which Los Angeles private investigator is summoned by General Sternwood in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep?
Q 21Which two-part Tony Kushner play, subtitled A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama?
Angels in America
Angels in America: its Roy Cohn, the real-life lawyer, refuses to admit he has AIDS and insists his doctor call it liver cancer.
Q 22Which Philip Roth novel imagines Charles Lindbergh beating Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election?
The Plot Against America
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.
Q 23Which Octavia Butler novel drags Dana, a Black writer in 1976 Los Angeles, back to a Maryland slave plantation?
Kindred
Philip Marlowe
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.
Q 14Which novel is told in progress reports by Charlie Gordon, the first human given intelligence surgery?
Flowers for Algernon
Flowers for Algernon takes its title from the laboratory mouse that had the surgery first, whose decline foreshadows Charlie's own.
Q 15Which Larry McMurtry novel about ex-Texas Rangers driving cattle to Montana won the 1986 Pulitzer for Fiction?
Lonesome Dove
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.
Q 16Which Thoreau essay, born of a night in jail over an unpaid poll tax, later inspired Martin Luther King?
Civil Disobedience
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.
Q 17Which author of The Devil's Dictionary vanished in 1913 after setting out to witness the Mexican Revolution?
Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce: his disappearance became the premise of the 1989 film Old Gringo, with Gregory Peck playing the vanished writer.
Q 18Which enslaved Boston poet became the first African American to publish a book of poetry, in London in 1773?
Phillis Wheatley
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.
Q 19Which poet of 'Paul Revere's Ride' has a marble bust in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner?
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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.
Q 20Which writer took Pulitzers for a novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and for the play Our Town?
Thornton Wilder
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.
Kindred sends Dana back whenever Rufus, the slaveholder's son who turns out to be her own ancestor, is in danger.
Q 24Under which invented historian's name did Washington Irving publish his satirical 1809 A History of New York?
Diedrich Knickerbocker
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.
Q 25Which Ralph Waldo Emerson poem, written for a battle monument's dedication, coined 'the shot heard round the world'?
Concord Hymn
Concord Hymn: its famous phrase was later borrowed for Bobby Thomson's 1951 home run that won the New York Giants the pennant.
Q 26Which Edith Wharton novel follows Lily Bart, a well-born but penniless beauty falling out of 1890s New York society?
The House of Mirth
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.
Q 27Which Willa Cather novel is narrated by Jim Burden, an orphan from Virginia sent to his grandparents in Nebraska?
My Ántonia
My Ántonia: after Ántonia's father shoots himself, she gives up school to work the fields like a man.
Q 28Which short Thomas Pynchon novel has Oedipa Maas uncover a centuries-old feud between two mail-delivery companies?
The Crying of Lot 49
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.
Q 29Which Joan Didion memoir, written after her husband John Gregory Dunne died in 2003, won the National Book Award?
The Year of Magical Thinking
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.
Q 30Which Jhumpa Lahiri debut story collection won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction?
Interpreter of Maladies
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.