Modern Library 100 Best Novels
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50 free Modern Library 100 Best Novels trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
In 1998 the Modern Library asked its editorial board to rank the best English-language novels of the twentieth century. The result became one of the most talked-about reading lists ever published, and readers have been working through it, and arguing with it, ever since. This quiz covers the list from top to bottom: which books took the highest places, which authors appear again and again, the plots and characters behind the famous titles, and the very different ranking the public produced when readers were invited to vote online. It is for readers ticking off the list one book at a time, book clubs looking for a challenge, and anyone curious how much of the century's most celebrated fiction they really remember.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which novel set on a single June day in Dublin tops the Modern Library list of 100 best novels?
Ulysses
Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom and two other Dubliners through 16 June 1904, a date fans now celebrate every year as Bloomsday.
Q 02Which cartoon dad shares his name with an Iowa bookkeeper in Nathanael West's novel The Day of the Locust?
Homer Simpson
Homer Simpson is a former hotel accountant who moves to California for his health in the 1939 novel. Matt Groening, whose own father was called Homer, has said the character was an inspiration for the name.
Q 03Which Joseph Heller war satire about the bombardier Yossarian began life with the number 18 in its title?
Catch-22
Catch-22 started out as Catch-18, but the number was changed so that readers would not confuse it with Leon Uris's newly published war novel Mila 18.
Q 04Which English author placed both a farmyard fable and a dystopia about Big Brother on the Modern Library list?
George Orwell
George Orwell was the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, whose dystopia stands at No. 13 on the list and whose fable Animal Farm stands at No. 31.
Q 05Which Beat Generation writer typed On the Road on one continuous 120-foot scroll of paper?
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac cut and taped sheets of tracing paper into the roll, and the published novel later hid his real-life friends behind pseudonyms.
Q 06Which F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, second on the Modern Library list, was nearly titled Trimalchio in West Egg?
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby got its name after the editor Maxwell Perkins talked Fitzgerald out of Trimalchio, a nod to the crude upstart in the Roman satire the Satyricon.
Q 07Which teenage narrator roams New York after being expelled from Pencey Prep in The Catcher in the Rye?
Holden Caulfield
Holden Caulfield was already the hero of a short story J. D. Salinger sold to The New Yorker in 1941, a decade before the novel made him an icon of teenage rebellion.
Q 08Which San Francisco private eye hunts a black bird statuette in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon?
Sam Spade
Sam Spade runs his detective agency with a partner, Miles Archer, and Humphrey Bogart played him in the 1941 film version.
Q 09Which object does Ralph blow to summon the stranded boys to meetings in William Golding's Lord of the Flies?
A conch shell
A conch shell found on the beach helps Ralph get elected chief, and it is smashed by the same boulder that kills Piggy.
Q 10Which John Steinbeck novel follows the Joad family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California?
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath takes its title from a line in The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Q 11Which Irish writer holds both first and third place on the Modern Library list of 100 best novels?
James Joyce
James Joyce takes third place with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the story of his alter ego Stephen Dedalus, and appears again at No. 77 with Finnegans Wake.
Q 12Which pig drives out his rival Snowball and becomes the tyrant of Animal Farm?
Napoleon
Napoleon is an allegory of Joseph Stalin, and he seizes power by setting dogs he raised from puppies on his rival.
Q 13Which German city's firebombing does Billy Pilgrim survive as a prisoner of war in Slaughterhouse-Five?
Dresden
Dresden was where Kurt Vonnegut himself lived through the 1945 raid as a captured American serviceman, an experience he turned into the novel.
Q 21Which Polish-British author of Lord Jim and Nostromo has the most novels on the Modern Library list, with four?
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in what is now Ukraine, and six other authors trail him on the list with three novels each.
Q 22Which novel about business leaders who vanish on strike won the Modern Library's online readers' poll?
Atlas Shrugged
Atlas Shrugged led a nonscientific online vote in which Ayn Rand took four of the top ten places, yet the board's own hundred has no room for any of her books.
Q 23Which Alabama courtroom novel came fifth in the Modern Library readers' poll but is absent from the board's list?
To Kill a Mockingbird
Q 14Which Russian-born novelist and butterfly expert wrote both Lolita and Pale Fire in English?
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov was an expert lepidopterist and composer of chess problems who wrote his first nine novels in Russian before switching languages in the United States.
Q 15Which American novelist drew on his time as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy for A Farewell to Arms?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was seriously wounded by shrapnel on the Italian Front in 1918, and the novel's narrator is likewise an American lieutenant in Italy's ambulance corps.
Q 16Which gold rush forms the backdrop to Jack London's sled-dog novel The Call of the Wild?
Klondike
Klondike prospectors in Canada's Yukon needed strong sled dogs, which is why the dog Buck is stolen from a ranch in the Santa Clara Valley and sold north.
Q 17The title of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury comes from a soliloquy in which Shakespeare tragedy?
Macbeth
Macbeth speaks the soliloquy on hearing that his wife is dead, and Faulkner hands his first chapter to Benjy, a Compson brother with a mental disability.
Q 18Which novella on the Modern Library list follows Marlow up an African river to find the ivory trader Kurtz?
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness first ran as a three-part magazine serial in 1899, and only its 1902 publication in book form made it eligible for a list of twentieth-century novels.
Q 19Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea imagines the early life of the first Mrs Rochester from which Victorian novel?
Jane Eyre
Jane Eyre keeps Bertha Mason hidden as the madwoman in the attic, and Rhys reimagines her as Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress in 1830s Jamaica.
Q 20Which happiness-producing drug keeps citizens docile in the World State of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World?
Soma
Soma is handed out to the population, and late in the novel John the Savage tries to break up a distribution of it to lower-caste workers.
To Kill a Mockingbird finished just behind The Lord of the Rings in the public vote, and neither book appears among the hundred chosen by the board.
Q 24Which publisher owns the Modern Library imprint, whose board picked the 100 best novels in 1998?
Random House
Random House actually began in 1927 as a subsidiary of the Modern Library, then outgrew its parent and turned it into an imprint.
Q 25Which Bloomsbury novelist wrote To the Lighthouse, the top-ranked novel by a woman on the Modern Library list?
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf reaches No. 15 with her story of the Ramsay family's visits to the Isle of Skye, and every book ranked above it was written by a man.
Q 26Which author of The Age of Innocence became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction?
Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton took the prize in 1921, and she has a second novel on the Modern Library list in The House of Mirth, ranked No. 69.
Q 27In The Sun Also Rises, which Spanish city's bull-running festival draws Jake Barnes and his expatriate friends?
Pamplona
Pamplona hosts the Festival of San Fermín, and the novel is a roman à clef based on a real trip its author made there in 1925.
Q 28In which Scottish city does Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie groom her favourite schoolgirls in the 1930s?
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is also where Spark went to school, and she based Miss Brodie in part on Christina Kay, a teacher of hers for two years.
Q 29In which Italian city does Lucy Honeychurch stay at the Pensione Bertolini in A Room with a View?
Florence
Florence is where Lucy and her chaperone were promised rooms overlooking the River Arno, the view that gives the novel its title.
Q 30Which Bombay-born Nobel laureate wrote Kim, the tale of an orphan drawn into the Great Game in India?
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling won the prize in 1907 as its first English-language recipient, and his novel popularised the phrase Great Game for the rivalry between Russia and Britain.