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50 free American Literature trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 uses the question as shorthand for 'don't ask questions nobody can answer', while the industrialists who keep the country running quietly vanish.
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 meeting the Headless Horseman?
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
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.
Q 05Which San Francisco private detective hunts a jewelled black statuette in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon?
Sam Spade
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.
Q 06Which 1948 Shirley Jackson story about a village stoning drew more mail than any fiction The New Yorker had run?
The Lottery
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.
Q 07Which dramatist, author of The Iceman Cometh, is the only playwright to have won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama?
Eugene O'Neill
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.
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 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.
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 and its gear?
The Things They Carried
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.
Q 11Which Sandra Cisneros novel in vignettes follows 12-year-old Esperanza Cordero in a Latino quarter of Chicago?
The House on Mango Street
The House on Mango Street draws on Cisneros's own Mexican-American childhood in Chicago, though she has said Esperanza is not simply herself.
Q 12In 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
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.
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 opened on Broadway in 1993 after a London premiere at the National Theatre, and it also took the Tony Award for Best Play.
Q 22Which Philip Roth novel imagines Charles Lindbergh beating Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election?
The Plot Against America
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.
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 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.
Q 14Which Daniel Keyes 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 was a bestseller set in the waning days of the Old West, and McMurtry later added a sequel, Streets of Laredo, and two prequels.
Q 16Which Thoreau essay, born of a night in jail over an unpaid poll tax, later guided Gandhi and Martin Luther King?
Civil Disobedience
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.
Q 17Which author of The Devil's Dictionary vanished in 1913 after setting out to witness the Mexican Revolution?
Ambrose Bierce
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.
Q 18Which enslaved Boston poet became the first African American to publish a book of poetry, in London in 1773?
Phillis Wheatley
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.
Q 19Which poet of 'Paul Revere's Ride' is the only American with a bust in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner?
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's bust went up in 1884, two years after his death, making him the first non-British writer honoured there.
Q 20Which writer took Pulitzers for a novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and for the play Our Town?
Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder won three Pulitzers in all, adding a second drama prize in 1943 for The Skin of Our Teeth.
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 Dutch 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 an 1837 monument dedication, coined 'the shot heard round the world'?
Concord Hymn
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.
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 was Wharton's 1905 breakthrough, serialised first in Scribner's Magazine, and it follows Lily's slide from dinner parties to a boarding house.
Q 27Which Willa Cather novel is narrated by Jim Burden, an orphan from Virginia sent to his grandparents in Nebraska?
My Ántonia
My Ántonia pairs Jim with Ántonia Shimerda, the elder daughter of Bohemian immigrants, in the fictional prairie town of Black Hawk.
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 is the shortest of Pynchon's novels, and Oedipa stumbles into the conspiracy as executor of the estate of an ex-lover, Pierce Inverarity.
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 took the 2005 nonfiction award and was a Pulitzer finalist, written while Didion's daughter Quintana lay gravely ill in hospital.
Q 30Which Jhumpa Lahiri debut story collection won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has sold over 15 million copies?
Interpreter of Maladies
Interpreter of Maladies also took the PEN/Hemingway Award and was named The New Yorker's best debut of the year.