Literature Quiz
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This book trivia quiz spans the whole shelf: 199 free questions with answers on classic and modern novels, poets and playwrights, world literature from Dante to Chinua Achebe, and the literary terms (bildungsroman, frame narrative, conceit) that book clubs argue about. Some are gentle openers, such as who created Sherlock Holmes; others, like which Mark Twain book was the first typewritten manuscript submitted to a publisher, are for people who read the acknowledgements. It suits English teachers looking for a warm-up, book clubs wanting a light round before discussion, and quiz hosts who need a literature section that will not embarrass them. Every answer has been verified against a primary source or reference encyclopaedia, and each question reveals its explanation and citation once you have answered. Play it through, share your score, and see who in the group actually finished Moby-Dick.
30 of 199 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which novel begins with the line "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"?
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) opens with one of the most famous first lines in English literature, contrasting the era of the French Revolution.
Q 02In One Hundred Years of Solitude, what is the name of the fictional town founded by the Buendía family?
Macondo
Macondo, founded by patriarch José Arcadio Buendía, is modelled on Aracataca, the Colombian town where the author was born. Comala is Juan Rulfo's ghost town in Pedro Páramo.
Q 03Odysseus takes ten years to sail home from the Trojan War to which island?
Ithaca
Odysseus reaches Ithaca alone, since all of his crewmates are killed on the way, and he has been gone twenty years.
Q 04What pen name did Mary Ann Evans use to publish her novels?
George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans adopted the male pen name George Eliot to ensure her works were taken seriously. She wrote Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and The Mill on the Floss.
Q 05Which Shakespeare play features the characters Prospero and Ariel?
The Tempest
The Tempest is widely thought to draw on the Sea Venture, an English ship wrecked on Bermuda in 1609 on its way to Jamestown.
Q 06Which superstate does Big Brother rule in George Orwell's 1984?
Oceania
Oceania is always at war with Eurasia or Eastasia, and when the enemy switches, the Party rewrites the records to say it was always so.
Q 07Who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gabriel Garcia Marquez found the novel's voice in his grandmother, who told the most extraordinary things as if they were plainly true.
Q 08In which novel does the character Atticus Finch defend a man accused of a crime he did not commit?
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) features lawyer Atticus Finch defending Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of assaulting a white woman in 1930s Alabama.
Q 09What literary device describes giving human qualities to non-human things?
Personification
Personification is the attribution of human characteristics to animals, inanimate objects, or abstract concepts, such as saying the wind whispered through the trees.
Q 10Which Russian author wrote Crime and Punishment?
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Dostoevsky published Crime and Punishment in 1866. The novel follows Raskolnikov, a destitute student who commits murder and grapples with guilt and moral redemption.
Q 11Which 14-line poetic form, usually in iambic pentameter, did Shakespeare write 154 of?
Sonnet
A sonnet in Shakespeare's form ends with a rhyming couplet; the Petrarchan version splits into an octave and a sestet.
Q 12Which author created the character of Sherlock Holmes?
Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1887). Holmes appeared in four novels and 56 short stories.
Q 13In Cervantes' novel, what does Don Quixote believe the windmills are?
Giants
Giants: Don Quixote charges the windmills on horseback, and the scene gave English the phrase 'tilting at windmills'.
Q 21Who is the author of the Harry Potter series?
J.K. Rowling
J.K. Rowling wrote the seven Harry Potter novels (1997-2007), which have sold over 500 million copies worldwide and become one of the best-selling book series in history.
Q 22Which novel by Toni Morrison follows a formerly enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of her dead daughter?
Beloved
Beloved (1987) is based on the true story of Margaret Garner. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and is considered Morrison's masterpiece.
Q 23What Japanese form of poetry traditionally consists of 17 syllables in a 5-7-5 pattern?
Haiku
Haiku is a Japanese poetic form of three lines with 5, 7, and 5 syllables. It traditionally contains a seasonal reference (kigo) and a cutting word (kireji).
Q 14What is the name of the whale in Herman Melville's famous novel?
Moby Dick
Moby Dick (or the White Whale) is the great sperm whale Captain Ahab obsessively pursues in Melville's 1851 novel of the same name.
Q 15Which Nobel Prize-winning author wrote The Old Man and the Sea?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer for it in 1953 and the Nobel in 1954; it was the last major work published in his lifetime.
Q 16Which mythological figure is the subject of Milton's narrative poem about the fall from Heaven?
Satan
Satan is so compelling in Milton's poem that William Blake said Milton was 'of the Devil's party without knowing it'.
Q 17Which Bronte sister published Jane Eyre as 'Currer Bell'?
Charlotte
Charlotte, as Currer Bell, rushed to London with Anne in 1848 to prove to her publisher that the Bells were not one author.
Q 18Which novella opens with a travelling salesman waking up transformed into a monstrous insect?
The Metamorphosis
The Metamorphosis's author told his publisher that the insect itself must not be drawn, not even shown from a distance.
Q 19Which ancient Greek playwright is called the father of tragedy, and wrote the Oresteia trilogy?
Aeschylus
Aeschylus reportedly died when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head; he added a second actor, turning recitation into drama.
Q 20What term describes a speech in which a character, alone on stage, speaks their thoughts aloud?
Soliloquy
Soliloquy comes from the Latin for 'speaking alone', and it lets the audience overhear thoughts no other character hears.
Q 24Which Victorian novel features the character Ebenezer Scrooge?
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) tells the story of the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, who is visited by three spirits on Christmas Eve and transformed by the experience.
Q 25Which prophet's book closes the Old Testament in Protestant Bibles, the last word before the New Testament?
Malachi
Malachi ends with God promising to send Elijah, and in Matthew's Gospel Jesus says John the Baptist is that Elijah.
Q 26Which author wrote The Great Gatsby, a novel set during the Jazz Age?
F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940 believing his work forgotten, and The Great Gatsby was already sliding into obscurity.
Q 27Which 1950s literary movement produced Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Allen Ginsberg's Howl?
Beat Generation
The Beat Generation also gave us William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch; the word 'beatnik' was coined in 1958 by a San Francisco columnist.
Q 28In whose play does a salesman named Willy Loman struggle with the failure of his American Dream?
Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949) follows Willy Loman's mental deterioration as he confronts the gap between his dreams and reality. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Q 29Which Italian poet tours Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in The Divine Comedy?
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri wrote the poem in exile, after his political rivals had him banished from Florence for life.
Q 30What term describes a story within a story, such as the structure used in Conrad's Heart of Darkness?
Frame narrative
A frame narrative embeds one or more tales inside a main story; Heart of Darkness begins with an unnamed narrator on a yawl in the Thames.