Q 01/05

In which Ayn Rand novel do people keep asking the cryptic question 'Who is John Galt?' as industry collapses?

A) The Fountainhead

B) Atlas Shrugged

C) We the Living

D) Anthem

Answer · why

B) Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged: John Galt turns out to be an inventor leading a strike of the country's industrialists, who vanish one by one until the economy grinds...

Q 02/05

Which Upton Sinclair novel exposing Chicago's meat-packing plants pushed Congress into the 1906 Meat Inspection Act?

A) The Octopus

B) The Pit

C) The Jungle

D) King Coal

Answer · why

C) The Jungle

The Jungle was meant as a socialist tract about immigrant workers, and Sinclair complained that he had aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit...

Q 03/05

In which 1940 novel does Bigger Thomas smother Mary Dalton with a pillow, then burn her body in a furnace?

A) Black Boy

B) Uncle Tom's Children

C) Invisible Man

D) Native Son

Answer · why

D) Native Son

Native Son follows 20-year-old Bigger Thomas through the poverty of Chicago's South Side, where panic at being found in a white woman's bedroom turns ...

Q 04/05

In which Washington Irving tale does schoolteacher Ichabod Crane vanish after a ghostly chase?

A) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

B) Rip Van Winkle

C) The Devil and Tom Walker

D) The Spectre Bridegroom

Answer · why

A) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: a shattered pumpkin is found beside Ichabod's hat, and his rival Brom Bones laughs whenever it's mentioned, hinting the H...

Q 05/05

Which San Francisco private detective hunts a jewelled black statuette in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon?

A) Nick Charles

B) Sam Spade

C) Continental Op

D) Ned Beaumont

Answer · why

B) Sam Spade

Sam Spade: his partner Miles Archer is shot dead on the case's first night, and in the end Spade hands the killer, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, to the police...