Nonfiction Books
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50 free Nonfiction Books trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
True stories sell as well as invented ones. Memoirs top the bestseller lists, works of reportage have brought down governments and changed laws, and a single science book can put a new word into everyday speech. This nonfiction quiz covers the books that readers keep recommending: celebrity and survivor memoirs, true crime, popular science, history, economics and self-help, along with older classics of philosophy and politics. Most questions ask who wrote a book, what it is about or where it takes place, and each answer comes with a short explanation. It works for book clubs, classrooms and anyone who reads more fact than fiction. Play it on screen or print the questions for a quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which author took friend Harper Lee to Kansas to research the murders behind In Cold Blood?
Truman Capote
Truman Capote called the 1966 book a nonfiction novel: the true story of the Clutter family killings, told with the pacing of fiction.
Q 02Which 1962 book by biologist Rachel Carson warned that pesticides such as DDT were harming the environment?
Silent Spring
Silent Spring swayed public opinion so strongly that it led to a US ban on DDT for farm use, despite fierce opposition from chemical companies.
Q 03Anne Frank addressed most entries in the diary she kept in hiding to a character with which name?
Kitty
Kitty began as one of several imagined pen pals in the first notebook, but by November 1942 Anne Frank was writing to her alone.
Q 04Which word for an idea that spreads through a culture did Richard Dawkins coin in The Selfish Gene?
Meme
Meme was coined in 1976 as a unit of cultural evolution that copies itself much as a gene does, long before the word came to mean a joke shared online.
Q 05Which magazine gave its entire August 31, 1946 issue to John Hersey's report on the Hiroshima bombing?
The New Yorker
The New Yorker had planned to spread John Hersey's article over four issues, then gave a whole edition to it instead.
Q 06Rebecca Skloot's 2010 bestseller is about which woman, whose cancer cells became the first immortal human cell line?
Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, yet the HeLa cells grown from her tumor are still used in medical research, and her family did not learn of them until 1975.
Q 07Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air recounts a 1996 storm that killed eight climbers on which mountain?
Mount Everest
Mount Everest was at first a purely professional trip for Jon Krakauer, who went as a journalist for the adventure magazine Outside.
Q 08Whose 2004 biography by Ron Chernow inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write a hit Broadway hip-hop musical?
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton returned to the bestseller list in 2015 on the back of the musical, for which Ron Chernow served as historical consultant.
Q 09Which Malcolm Gladwell bestseller popularized the idea that mastery takes about 10,000 hours of practice?
Outliers
Outliers points to the Beatles and Bill Gates as proof, though the authors of the original study have disputed how Malcolm Gladwell used their findings.
Q 10Which 2018 memoir by Michelle Obama sold more than two million copies within 15 days of its release?
Becoming
Becoming opens with her childhood in an apartment above the great-aunt who gave her piano lessons, and it was the top-selling book published in the US that year.
Q 11Which memoir by Tara Westover follows her from a survivalist family in rural Idaho to a Cambridge PhD?
Educated
Educated recounts how she started college at 17 without ever having had any formal schooling.
Q 12Which physicist was warned that every equation would halve the readership of A Brief History of Time?
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking need not have worried: the book became a bestseller and has sold more than 25 million copies in 40 languages.
Q 13Which Yuval Noah Harari bestseller on human history grew out of his university lectures in Jerusalem?
Sapiens
Sapiens first appeared in Hebrew in 2011 and only reached English readers three years later.
Q 21Which thinker co-wrote The Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx for the Communist League in 1848?
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels and his co-author wrote it as a political pamphlet, and it was first published not in Germany but in London.
Q 22Which economist used the metaphor of an invisible hand in the 1776 treatise The Wealth of Nations?
Adam Smith
Adam Smith used the phrase only once in the whole book, yet it became the best-known image of self-interest serving the public good in a free market.
Q 23Which novelist based the essay A Room of One's Own on two 1928 lectures at Cambridge women's colleges?
Virginia Woolf
Q 14Which author's 1936 self-help classic How to Win Friends and Influence People has sold over 30 million copies?
Dale Carnegie
Dale Carnegie had been running business courses in New York since 1912, long before the book made his name.
Q 15Cheryl Strayed's memoir Wild recounts her 1,100-mile solo hike in 1995 along which long-distance route?
Pacific Crest Trail
Pacific Crest Trail hiking began for Cheryl Strayed in the Mojave Desert, and her account of the journey became the first selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0.
Q 16Which activist's memoir, co-written with Christina Lamb, recounts being shot by the Taliban at age 15?
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai was attacked in October 2012 after campaigning for girls' schooling in Pakistan's Swat Valley, where her father ran schools.
Q 17Which comedian's memoir Born a Crime describes his childhood in South Africa during the apartheid era?
Trevor Noah
Trevor Noah took the title from his own birth: his parents' interracial relationship was illegal under apartheid.
Q 18Which chef's 2000 bestseller Kitchen Confidential grew out of a magazine essay submitted by his mother?
Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain's mother, a New York Times copy editor, got the essay to a magazine editor through a colleague, and it launched his media career.
Q 19Which ancient Chinese strategist is credited with The Art of War, a military treatise of 13 chapters?
Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu means Master Sun, and the treatise attributed to him dates from roughly the 5th century BC.
Q 20Which Florentine wrote The Prince, a guide to ruling that was not printed until five years after his death?
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli had already seen the work stir controversy in manuscript; the printed version of 1532 needed the permission of the Medici pope Clement VII.
Virginia Woolf argued that a woman needs money and a private space of her own if she is to write fiction.
Q 24Which Betty Friedan book grew out of a 1957 survey of her former Smith College classmates?
The Feminine Mystique
The Feminine Mystique found that many of those classmates were unhappy as housewives, and it is widely credited with sparking second-wave feminism in the US.
Q 25Which writer spent two years in a self-built cabin on Ralph Waldo Emerson's woodland, then wrote Walden?
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was no hermit: the cabin stood within walking distance of his family home in Concord, and his mother and sisters often brought him food.
Q 26Charles Darwin's 1839 travel book made his name by describing a survey expedition aboard which ship?
HMS Beagle
HMS Beagle gave the book the title it is known by today; it was first published as Journal and Remarks and brought its author considerable fame.
Q 27Which writer's pamphlet Common Sense, published anonymously in January 1776, rallied Americans behind independence?
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine's pamphlet became an immediate sensation and was read aloud in taverns and meeting places, six months before the Declaration of Independence.
Q 28Which abolitionist's 1845 memoir of his years in slavery carried a preface by William Lloyd Garrison?
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass wrote it while living in Lynn, Massachusetts, and its two introductions vouched that a former slave really was the author.
Q 29Which poet's 1969 book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings begins with her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas?
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou wrote it after her friend James Baldwin and her editor challenged her to write a life story that was also a piece of literature.
Q 30Which journalist shaped Malcolm X's life story from interviews held between 1963 and 1965, then wrote its epilogue?
Alex Haley
Alex Haley finished the book after his subject was assassinated in February 1965, and it was published that October.