Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. With his highly-experimental 1851 novel, one author probably didn't expect to be rejected by a publisher who said, "We regret to say that our united opinion is entirely against the book as we do not think it would be at all suitable for the Juvenile Market in [England]. It is very long, rather old-fashioned..."
The author's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne also apparently "didn't care a penny for the book," which didn't become popular for more than 50 years after its publication. Which novel by the author of "Billy Budd" is it?
2. After this American poet was rejected by fifteen publishers for his wartime masterpiece "The Enormous Room," he dedicated the book to them once it was finally published. Then, since the publishers clearly hadn't learned, he did the same thing for the fourteen publishers who denied another of his books, "No Thanks." Who was this poet, better known for short works like "anyone lived in a pretty how town"?
3. Surely a literary personage as great as TS Eliot would know great literature when he saw it? Not necessarily: upon reading this short fable, he claimed it "wasn't convincing...After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore are the best qualified to run the farm...what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs."
What novella published in 1945 was thus wrongly dismissed?
4. About one author's best known work, it was said: "[The author] does have enormous talent of a very special kind. But this is not a well made novel, nor a saleable one nor even, I think, a good one. His frenetic and scrambling prose perfectly expresses the feverish travels, geographically and mentally, of the Beat Generation. But is that enough? I don't think so."
What novel, allegedly written on a scroll and depicting characters like Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, is it?
5. "It is overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian. To the public, it will be revolting. It will not sell, and will do immeasurable harm to a growing reputation.... I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years."
When the book finally was published, it was lauded by Graham Greene as one of the best books of 1955, leading another critic to call it "sheer unrestrained pornography." Who was the Russian author of that controversial novel about Humbert Humbert?
6. One author who had no difficulty getting published for the first time ran into trouble with his best-known novel when it wasn't accepted for serialization. The only magazine available? Hugh Hefner's "Playboy". What book with characters like Mildred Montag, Clarisse McClellan, and fire chief Captain Beatty, is it?
7. Upon rejecting the manuscript submitted by the girl's father Otto, one publisher noted that "The girl doesn't, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the 'curiosity' level."
Who was the young girl mentioned in the quote?
8. "I haven't the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say. Apparently the author intends it to be funny - possibly even satire - but it is really not funny on any intellectual level."
Decades of readers would disagree about that editorial assessment, which apparently didn't find any humor in the antics of Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder. Who was the author subjected to that criticism?
9. Apparently one editor missed the parts of a certain novel in which Simon is murdered by a group of paranoid children fearing the Beast, or in which Ralph is hunted to death on a desert island. About which of these books was the author informed that it was "an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull"?
10. About his most famous novel, which American author was told, "You'd have a decent book if you'd get rid of that Gatsby character"?
Source: Author
adams627
This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor
looney_tunes before going online.
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