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 uses the question as shorthand for 'don't ask questions nobody can answer', while the industrialists who keep the country running quiet...

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 meeting the Headless Horseman?

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 appeared in 1820 in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., the collection of 34 essays and stories whose success let I...

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 works in partnership with Miles Archer, who is found shot dead on the first night of the case, which sets the hunt for the falcon in motion.