Q 01/05

What was Mark Twain's real name?

A) Samuel Langhorne Clemens

B) Samuel Orion Clemens

C) John Marshall Clemens

D) Henry Langdon Clemens

Answer · why

A) Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Samuel Langhorne Clemens: yet by his last years a firm called the Mark Twain Company was looking after his affairs.

Q 02/05

Twain was born in 1835 in a village called Florida, in which state?

A) Kentucky

B) Tennessee

C) Missouri

D) Illinois

Answer · why

C) Missouri

Missouri: Twain joked that the village had a hundred people and that he increased its population by one per cent.

Q 03/05

Which Mississippi port town, Twain's boyhood home, became the fictional St. Petersburg?

A) Cairo

B) Hannibal

C) St. Louis

D) Keokuk

Answer · why

B) Hannibal

Hannibal: slavery was legal there then, and it became a central theme of Huckleberry Finn.

Q 04/05

After his father died in 1847, Twain left school after which grade to apprentice as a printer?

A) Fifth

B) Third

C) Eighth

D) Tenth

Answer · why

A) Fifth

He later educated himself in public libraries in the evenings and joined the printers' union at 18.

Q 05/05

Which novelist did Twain say had scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115?

A) Nathaniel Hawthorne

B) James Fenimore Cooper

C) Herman Melville

D) Washington Irving

Answer · why

B) James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper: Twain opened by quoting critics who praised Cooper, then said they could not have read him.