Authors
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50 free Authors trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The greatest writers often led lives as strange as their plots. One drafted a classic on a typewriter rented by the half hour, another went missing and made the front pages, and a third began a bestseller to settle a wager with an editor. This quiz covers famous authors and their books, from ancient epics to modern bestsellers: novelists, poets, playwrights and children's writers. Some questions hand you the book and ask who wrote it; others name the writer and ask for the book, the pen name or the story behind it. It suits book club regulars, students revising the classics and anyone who likes knowing who wrote what. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave with a few stories worth repeating.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Dr. Seuss book was written after his editor bet him he couldn't use only 50 different words?
Green Eggs and Ham
Green Eggs and Ham won Dr. Seuss a $50 wager with his editor, Bennett Cerf. His earlier hit about a mischievous cat had needed 236 different words.
Q 02Which author was unmasked in 2013 as Robert Galbraith, the supposed first-time writer of The Cuckoo's Calling?
J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling was revealed by The Sunday Times that July. The detective novel then surged from 4,709th place to the best-selling novel on Amazon.
Q 03Which debut Stephen King novel was rescued from the trash by his wife Tabitha after he gave up on it?
Carrie
Carrie survived because Tabitha King retrieved its first three pages and persuaded her husband to keep going. The family was living in a trailer in Maine at the time.
Q 04Which author conceived Frankenstein during a ghost-story contest proposed by Lord Byron near Lake Geneva?
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley grew anxious when she could not think of a story, until the idea arrived in a waking dream after midnight. She was still a teenager that summer of 1816.
Q 05Which crime novelist, creator of Hercule Poirot, made headlines by vanishing for 11 days in 1926?
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie was found at a hotel in Harrogate, registered under the surname of her husband's lover. Doctors diagnosed a loss of memory, and opinion remains divided on why she vanished.
Q 06Which children's author was a wartime RAF fighter pilot before writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?
Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl scored five aerial victories in the Second World War, enough to qualify as a flying ace. He went on to serve as an intelligence officer.
Q 07Which American author took his pen name from a riverboat leadsman's cry for two fathoms of water?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain was the call for a depth of 12 feet, which meant safe water for a steamboat. Samuel Clemens learned it while working as a pilot on the Mississippi.
Q 08Which J.R.R. Tolkien book began as a single sentence scribbled on a blank exam paper he was marking?
The Hobbit
The Hobbit grew from that idle line into a finished story by late 1932, which Tolkien then lent to friends. He was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon at the time.
Q 09Which spy novelist borrowed the name of his famous hero from the author of a Caribbean bird guide?
Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming, a keen birdwatcher, owned Birds of the West Indies by the American ornithologist James Bond. He wanted a name for his agent that sounded as ordinary as possible.
Q 10Which author based Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird on her childhood neighbour Truman Capote?
Harper Lee
Harper Lee grew up next door to the young Capote, who stayed with his aunts while his mother was in New York City. Like Dill, he had a gift for fascinating stories.
Q 11Which George Orwell book retells the Russian Revolution through rival leaders named Napoleon and Snowball?
Animal Farm
Animal Farm was, in Orwell's own words, intended primarily as a satire on the revolution. Its prize boar Old Major stands in for both Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
Q 12Which English playwright's will famously left his wife Anne his second-best bed with the furniture?
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare added the bequest between the lines of his will, and what he meant by it is still uncertain. The rest of his household goods went to his daughter Susanna and her husband.
Q 13Which Victorian novelist worked in a boot-blacking factory at 12 while his father sat in debtors' prison?
Q 21Which American author of The Raven pioneered detective fiction with his Paris sleuth C. Auguste Dupin?
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe wrote only a few Dupin stories, yet they laid the groundwork for the fictional sleuths who followed. His poem about the raven was an instant success in 1845.
Q 22Which Herman Melville novel is narrated by a sailor named Ishmael aboard the whaling ship Pequod?
Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick follows Captain Ahab's hunt for the white sperm whale that bit off his leg. Some British reviewers were puzzled, because their edition lacked the epilogue in which Ishmael survives.
Q 23Which Ray Bradbury novel grew from a story typed on a rented typewriter in a UCLA library basement?
Fahrenheit 451
Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot polish. He later drew on his father's time in the Marshalsea prison for Little Dorrit.
Q 14Which author of Emma published her books anonymously, the first described only as written "By a Lady"?
Jane Austen
Jane Austen saw four novels reach print without her name on them, and they brought her no public fame in her lifetime. Sense and Sensibility came first, in 1811.
Q 15Which H.G. Wells novel did Orson Welles stage on radio in 1938 as a series of fake news bulletins?
The War of the Worlds
The War of the Worlds convinced some listeners that Martians really were invading, though the scale of the panic is disputed. Welles apologised at a news conference the next morning.
Q 16Which Edinburgh-born doctor killed off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, only to revive him later?
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle wanted more time for his historical novels, so in 1893 he sent the detective over the falls with Professor Moriarty. Holmes was back in print eight years later.
Q 17Which F. Scott Fitzgerald novel sold poorly until free copies were sent to American soldiers in World War II?
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby had sold fewer than 20,000 copies within months of its 1925 release. About 155,000 copies later went to troops overseas, and its popularity surged.
Q 18Which novelist published Wuthering Heights, the only novel she wrote, under the pen name Ellis Bell?
Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë chose a pseudonym that kept her own initials, as her sisters did with Currer and Acton Bell. She died in 1848, aged 30, a year after the book came out.
Q 19Which American author drove a Red Cross ambulance in wartime Italy before writing A Farewell to Arms?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was seriously wounded by shrapnel in 1918 while serving on the Italian Front. The novel's narrator, Frederic Henry, is likewise an American in the ambulance corps.
Q 20Which country was home to Hans Christian Andersen, author of The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling?
Denmark
Denmark is where Andersen was born, in the city of Odense in 1805. Odense now has museums devoted to him and a marathon that carries his name.
Fahrenheit 451 began as The Fireman, typed at ten cents per half hour in UCLA's Powell Library. Bradbury went back to the same room to double its length in nine days.
Q 24Which J.D. Salinger novel is narrated by Holden Caulfield after his expulsion from Pencey Prep?
The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye has Holden fail every class except English. Salinger may have modelled the Pennsylvania boarding school on the Valley Forge Military Academy.
Q 25Which French author published Les Misérables while living in exile on the Channel island of Guernsey?
Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo spent his Guernsey exile at Hauteville House in Saint Peter Port and stayed on the island until 1870. The City of Paris now preserves the house as a museum.
Q 26Which French author created Captain Nemo, whose submarine Nautilus outclassed the real vessels of the 1860s?
Jules Verne
Jules Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas for his Voyages extraordinaires, a run of bestselling adventure novels developed with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel.
Q 27Which author of Little Women served as a Union nurse during the American Civil War?
Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott nursed for six weeks at a hospital in Georgetown before typhoid fever cut her service short. Her letters home became the book Hospital Sketches.
Q 28Which subject did Alice's Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll teach at Christ Church, Oxford?
Mathematics
Mathematics won Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, a lectureship that he held for 26 years. He was also a photographer and an Anglican deacon.
Q 29Which John Steinbeck novel follows the Joad family from drought-stricken Oklahoma to California?
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath sends the Joads west in a Hudson sedan converted into a truck after their land is repossessed. Thousands of other families make the same journey in search of work.
Q 30Which creator of Peter Rabbit became a prize-winning breeder of Herdwick sheep in England's Lake District?
Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter left almost all her property to the National Trust when she died in 1943. She is credited with preserving much of the land that is now a national park.