Anthem (Ayn Rand)
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40 free Anthem (Ayn Rand) trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ayn Rand's Anthem is short enough to read in an afternoon and strange enough to stay with you for years. Its narrator, Equality 7-2521, lives in a future that has slid backwards into a new dark age, where every hour is planned by committee and the worst crimes are to choose, to wonder and to want. This quiz follows the story from his first confession to the last chapter: the laws of the City, the people he works beside, the girl he is not allowed to notice, the discovery that puts him in danger and the new life that follows. A final group of questions covers Ayn Rand herself, how the book was written and published, and the music and fiction it went on to influence. It is built for students revising for a test on the novella, book clubs that have just finished it and readers who want to check how much of the detail they remember. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Unspeakable Word, punished by death in Ayn Rand's Anthem, does the hero finally find in old books?
I
The lost word is "I", and when the hero finally reads and understands it he weeps for the first time in his life. Until then he has only ever spoken of himself in the plural.
Q 02Which lost discovery does Equality 7-2521 make again through his secret experiments in Ayn Rand's Anthem?
Electricity
Electricity is the strange new power he tames, using it to light a glass box salvaged from the ruins of an earlier age. He expects the gift to earn him a place among the Scholars.
Q 03Which lowly job is Equality 7-2521 given for life in Ayn Rand's Anthem, though he longs to be a Scholar?
Street Sweeper
Street Sweeper is the Life Mandate handed to him at fifteen, and he welcomes it as penance for having wanted something better. The work later leads him to the hiding place where he studies.
Q 04Which name from the old books does Equality 7-2521 choose for himself near the end of Ayn Rand's Anthem?
Prometheus
Prometheus took the light of the gods and brought it to men, which is what the hero hopes to do for a darkened world. He also notes that such bearers of light always suffer for it.
Q 05Which rock band's 20-minute suite 2112 tells a story with strong parallels to Ayn Rand's Anthem?
Rush
Rush drummer Neil Peart said the parallels dawned on him only as the story came together, so he credited Ayn Rand in the liner notes. The band also recorded a song titled Anthem.
Q 06What secret name does Equality 7-2521 give Liberty 5-3000 in Ayn Rand's Anthem, where such names are forbidden?
The Golden One
The Golden One is what he calls the girl with dark eyes and fair hair he sees working beside the road. Thinking of one woman above all others is itself a crime in the City.
Q 07Where does Equality 7-2521 flee in Ayn Rand's Anthem after the Scholars reject his invention?
The Uncharted Forest
The Uncharted Forest is forbidden ground outside the City, and he is sure nobody will pursue him there. Such woods are said to have grown over the ruined cities of an earlier age.
Q 08How does the City in Ayn Rand's Anthem execute the man who dared to speak the Unspeakable Word?
Burned at the stake
Burned at the stake as the City watched, the man seemed to the ten-year-old Equality 7-2521 to have the face of a saint. The boy felt the dying man had picked him out of the crowd.
Q 09What is the newest invention in the backward future of Ayn Rand's Anthem, where sundials still tell the time?
The candle
The candle is the society's proudest advance, and winning approval for it from every Council took fifty years. That delay is one reason the Scholars refuse to consider anything newer.
Q 10In what form does Equality 7-2521 tell his story in Ayn Rand's Anthem, an act his society counts as a sin?
A private journal
A private journal carries the whole novella, written at night on stolen paper. Writing words meant for no eyes but his own is among the first crimes the narrator admits to.
Q 11Where does Equality 7-2521 hide each night to study and experiment in Ayn Rand's Anthem?
An abandoned tunnel
An abandoned tunnel with metal tracks, left over from an earlier age, becomes his laboratory. He slips away to it during the hours everyone else must spend at the theatre.
Q 12In which country was the teenage Ayn Rand living when she first imagined the story that became Anthem?
Soviet Russia
Soviet Russia filled her school days with attacks on individualism, which set her wondering what would happen if people lost the very idea of the self. She left for America in 1926.
Q 13Which philosophical system did Ayn Rand, the author of Anthem, later develop and name herself?
Objectivism
Q 21Which doctrine, blamed by Ayn Rand for both fascism and communism, is the target of her novella Anthem?
Collectivism
Collectivism, the idea that the individual must be sacrificed to the group, was in her view the root of the political disasters of the 1930s. Anthem imagines a world where it has won completely.
Q 22What blunt working title did Ayn Rand drop from Anthem because it gave away too much of the theme?
Ego
Ego struck her as too blunt and unemotional, so she picked a title that lets readers discover for themselves what is praised. The book remained, in her mind, an ode to the self.
Q 23What pastime marked out International 4-8818, the hero's only friend in Ayn Rand's Anthem?
Drawing on walls
Objectivism treats a person's own happiness as the moral purpose of life, the conviction Anthem's hero reaches on his own. Ayn Rand set the system out in full only in her later books.
Q 14What shape do people in Ayn Rand's Anthem believe the Earth is, a sign of their lost science?
It is flat
It is flat, they are taught, with the sun circling around it. Their doctors are no better off, still treating the sick by bleeding them.
Q 15Which everyday state is a grave sin in Ayn Rand's Anthem, yet is how the narrator begins his tale?
Being alone
Being alone is both a crime and a sin in the City, where nobody may act or think apart from the group. The hero's stolen hours of solitude are where his independence begins.
Q 16Which Ayn Rand work was she researching when she took a summer break to write Anthem?
The Fountainhead
The Fountainhead went on to become a best seller, and only after that success did Anthem appear in the United States. Until then American publishers had not wanted it.
Q 17In which country was Ayn Rand's Anthem first published, after American publishers turned it down?
England
England saw the first edition, issued by the publisher Cassell, eight years before a revised American version appeared. Cassell had already handled an earlier Ayn Rand novel.
Q 18Where do Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000 find the old house they make their home in Ayn Rand's Anthem?
In the mountains
In the mountains they come upon a house left from the old world and decide to stay. They are astonished to find it was built for only two people.
Q 19Which name does Liberty 5-3000 take at the end of Ayn Rand's Anthem, when she is expecting the hero's child?
Gaea
Gaea was the mother of the earth and of all the gods in the old legends the hero has been reading. He asks her to take the name as the mother of the free people he hopes will follow.
Q 20What name does Liberty 5-3000 give Equality 7-2521 in Ayn Rand's Anthem after he tells her his name for her?
The Unconquered
The Unconquered is what she has been calling him in her own mind all along. Each has singled the other out, which their laws forbid.
Drawing on walls with pieces of coal, he made pictures that set people laughing, and there is still laughter in his eyes. He is the first person the hero plans to go back and rescue.
Q 24Which body in Ayn Rand's Anthem decides each fifteen-year-old's work for the rest of their life?
The Council of Vocations
The Council of Vocations hands out every Life Mandate, and nobody may question its choice. By pushing the best young minds into manual labor, the rulers head off dissent.
Q 25Which yearly event in Ayn Rand's Anthem sees the state assign men and women to each other?
The Time of Mating
The Time of Mating sends every man older than twenty and every woman older than eighteen to a single arranged night. Children born from it are raised by the state and never know their parents.
Q 26How does Equality 7-2521 get out of the Palace of Corrective Detention in Ayn Rand's Anthem?
He simply walks out
He simply walks out, because the locks are old and nobody is on watch. No prisoner in the City has ever thought of trying to escape before.
Q 27In Ayn Rand's Anthem, what is the sin of wanting one career or having one best friend called?
Transgression of Preference
Transgression of Preference covers any favoring of one person or task over another, since all are supposed to be equal. The hero commits it in both ways.
Q 28What does Equality 7-2521 see for the first time when he bends over a stream in Ayn Rand's Anthem?
His own reflection
His own reflection looks back at him from the water, and he is delighted that his body seems as worthy as his mind. He has lived twenty-one years without seeing it.
Q 29To which class of workers does Liberty 5-3000 belong in Ayn Rand's Anthem when the hero first sees her?
Peasants
Peasants like her live outside the City and work the fields, where he notices her from a road at its edge. She is seventeen when they meet.
Q 30How does Equality 7-2521 leave the hall in Ayn Rand's Anthem when the Scholars move to destroy his invention?
Through a window
Through a window he goes, smashing the glass with his fist and leaping out with the box held in his arms. He runs without knowing where until the City is behind him.