A Literary Odd-One-Out Trivia Quiz

Answer: Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born Jósef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Berdychiv, now in northern Ukraine. Polish was his native language, and he did not learn to speak fluent English (though with a heavy Polish accent) until he was in his twenties. However, he mastered the art of writing in English so well that he is regarded as one of the greatest fiction writers in English literature. Originally a subject of the Russian Empire, he was granted British citizenship in 1886.

Conrad's experiences in the French and British merchant marines greatly influenced his work: many of his novels and short stories, which feature anti-heroic characters struggling against an indifferent universe, have a nautical setting. Among Conrad's best-known works - mostly written in the first two decades of the 20th century - there are the novels "Lord Jim" (1900) and "Nostromo" (1904), and the novella "Heart of Darkness" (1899). Many of Conrad's works have been adapted in various media.

The three writers listed as wrong answers all had English as their mother tongue: Henry James was American (though he became a British citizen one year before his death), Oscar Wilde was Irish, and E.M. Forster was English.

Answer: Brave New World

Published in 1932, "Brave New World" is the best-known work by English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). Along with George Orwell's "1984" (1949), it is considered the archetypal dystopian novel, though it was not the very first example of this literary subgenre. While Orwell's novel is a nightmarish depiction of a police state, Huxley's begins as a parody of utopian fiction, slowly revealing the ugliness of an apparently perfect society based on psychological manipulation, genetic engineering and recreational drugs.

The novel's title comes from a line in William Shakespeare's "The Tempest", spoken by Miranda, the play's innocent heroine, when she first meets the people responsible for her father's downfall and exile. Much of the inspiration for "Brave New World" came from recent events, such as the Great Depression and people's need for stability even at the cost of freedom, as well as from Huxley's reading of Henry Ford's autobiography. Indeed, Ford is the closest thing to a deity in the World State where the novel is set.

"Mrs Dalloway" (by Virginia Woolf) was published in 1925, as was "The Great Gatsby" (by F. Scott Fitzgerald). "The Sun Also Rises" (by Ernest Hemingway) was published in 1926.

Answer: George Eliot

One of the greatest English novelists of the 19th century, George Eliot (1819-1880) was born Mary Ann Evans. As in the Victorian era women writers were expected to limit themselves to romance novels when writing under their own name, she decided to adopt a pen name when she started writing realistic fiction, separating her established career as a translator, editor and critic from her work as a novelist. George was the first name of her common-law husband, philosopher George Henry Lewes, while Eliot was, according to the author herself, "a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word".

Though she also wrote a fair amount of poetry and non-fiction, George Eliot is mainly known for her outstanding works of fiction, in particular the novels "The Mill on the Floss" (1860), "Silas Marner" (1861) and "Middlemarch" (1871-1872). Some of the themes tackled by Eliot in her novels are rooted in her own experiences as an intelligent, highly educated woman whose unconventional lifestyle ran counter to society's expectations.

Scottish author George MacDonald, known for his fairy tales, was a contemporary of George Eliot's, while Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was born a few decades later. English author George Orwell (pen name of Eric Arthur Blair) was born in 1903.

Answer: Beatrice

Beatrice is one of the main characters of the comedy "Much Ado About Nothing", probably written by William Shakespeare between 1598 and 1599, and included in the First Folio (1623). Set in the Sicilian city of Messina, the play features a large cast of characters that revolve about two couples, Claudio and Hero (whose romance is sabotaged by the machinations of the villainous Don John), and Beatrice and Benedick, whose verbal sparring conceals their mutual attraction.

In the play, Beatrice is the niece of Messina's governor Leonato, and thus the cousin of his daughter Hero. Unlike the latter, who is a rather stereotypical heroine of a star-crossed (albeit temporarily) romance, Beatrice is witty and sharp-tongued, and holds her own in the "merry war" with Benedick, a sworn bachelor. The two are finally tricked by a group of other characters into confessing their love for each other. Beatrice is also very protective of her cousin Hero, and even asks Benedick to avenge her by killing Claudio, who has publicly spurned Hero causing her apparent death. Many famous English actresses have portrayed Beatrice on stage; in Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of "Much Ado About Nothing" (1993), she was played by Emma Thompson.

The three wrong answers are characters of Greek mythology that appear in some of the Greek tragedies that have survived. Medea is the protagonist of the eponymous play by Euripides, while Antigone appears in all the three tragedies by Sophocles set in Thebes (including one that bears her name). Electra has two plays (one by Sophocles and one by Euripides) titled after her; she is also a major character in Aeschylus' "Oresteia" trilogy.

Answer: James Joyce

James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1882. He was a university student when Queen Victoria died in 1901, and did not start his literary career until 1904, when he wrote the novel "Stephen Hero" - later reworked as "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1916). Though Joyce left Dublin in 1904 and only returned there for brief periods before his death in 1941, all of his works of fiction are set there. In fact, one might argue that Dublin is the true protagonist of Joyce's literary output - even more so than its people.

The most famous of Joyce's works, the monumental novel "Ulysses" (1922), takes place over the space of a single day, 16 June 1904 (the date of the author's first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle) - now celebrated by Joyce fans as "Bloomsday". Leopold Bloom is the hero of the novel, identified with Odysseus; the structure of the book recalls that of Homer's "Odyssey". "Ulysses" is also known for Joyce's daring experiments with language and the stream-of-consciousness technique, which were taken even further in his last major work, "Finnegans Wake" (1939).

The three writers listed as wrong answers are all major figures of Victorian literature. Tennyson and Browning are known mostly for their poetry, while Arnold was also a prolific cultural critic.

Answer: Six Characters in Search of an Author

Written in 1921, "Six Characters in Search of an Author" ("Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore") is one of the best known plays by Italian author and dramatist Luigi Pirandello. Its first performance (also in 1921) at Rome's Teatro Valle was not well received by the audience, who objected to the play's content and structure. In fact, "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is an absurdist play about the relationship among playwrights, their characters, and those who work in theatre productions. The titular six characters have no name, but are only designated as the Father, the Mother, the Stepdaughter, the Son, the Boy and the Child. They interrupt the rehearsal of a play by Pirandello himself, explaining to the Director that they are unfinished characters looking for an author willing to finish their story. Things then take a peculiar (and eventually tragic) turn. The play was translated in English in 1922.

Born in Agrigento (Sicily), Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934 for his contribution to dramatic art. Along with about 40 plays, he also wrote a large number of short stories, many set in his native Sicily, and several novels - such as "The Late Mattia Pascal" ("Il fu Mattia Pascal", 1904), in which he explores themes of identity.

The three wrong answers are all titles of novels by Colombian writer and journalist Gabriel García Marquez, written between 1967 and 1985. Known as one of the standard-bearers of magic realism, García Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

Answer: J.D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger is one of a group of authors who produced a single, very successful novel in their lifetime, and then almost nothing else. Born in New York City in 1919, he began his literary career in the early 1940s by writing short stories, before he was drafted into the US Army and served in WWII. In early 1948, one of his short stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", was published in "The New Yorker", earning widespread critical acclaim.

Published in 1951, his novel "The Catcher in the Rye" featured the main character of one of his early short stories, rebellious 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, who was partly based on Salinger himself. The book's initial reception was mixed, as a number of critics objected to the defiant attitude and coarse language of the protagonist (and first-person narrator): however, the novel was such a big hit with the reading public that it was reprinted eight times within two months of publication. Following the book's success, Salinger started withdrawing from the limelight, and his writings became even sparser among the turmoil of his personal life. Though some people close to Salinger claimed he had written a large number of novels and stories, his last original work published during his lifetime dates from 1965. After a final interview in 1980, Salinger disappeared from public view until his death in 2010.

William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Toni Morrison all wrote more than one novel. They were all awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for their outstanding contributions to modern American fiction. Faulkner won in 1949, Steinbeck in 1962, and Morrison (the first Black woman of any nationality to receive a Nobel Prize) in 1993.

Answer: The Flowers of Evil

Published in 1857, "The Flowers of Evil" ("Les Fleurs du mal") is a collection of poems by French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire. The collection includes most of Baudelaire's poetic output, written from 1840 until his death in 1867. Baudelaire dedicated it to another great French writer, Théophile Gautier, who was a major influence on his work. "Les Fleurs du mal" has been translated into English numerous times, often by people who were poets themselves - such as Arthur Symons, Aldous Huxley and Clark Ashton Smith, who all contributed to the 1940 edition.

Not surprisingly, considering its title, "The Flowers of Evil" proved extremely controversial upon publication: six of its poems were censored because of their "immoral" content, and Baudelaire had to pay a hefty fine. Indeed, Baudelaire's poetry does often explore themes of eroticism, exoticism and decadence. However, his poems - also remarkable for Baudelaire's sophisticated use of language and varied verse forms - also focus on psychological aspects such as boredom ("ennui"), weariness, self-disgust and an obsession with sin and death. The influence of "The Flowers of Evil" for the literary movements of the late 19th century (first and foremost Symbolism and Aestheticism) cannot be overstated.

The three novels listed as wrong answers are among the best-known works of fiction in French published in the 19th century. "The Red and The Black" (1830) was written by Stendhal, "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" (1831) by Victor Hugo, and "The Count of Monte Cristo" (1846) by Alexandre Dumas (père).

Answer: Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia (at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), from a Jewish family. His parents originally spoke Yiddish as a native language, but Franz grew up speaking Standard German - the language in which he wrote all of his literary works. Though a prolific writer in spite of the commitments of his day job as an insurance officer, Kafka published little of his work during his lifetime, and was so racked by self-doubt that he burned most of his writings before his death from tuberculosis in 1924. In fact, his friend and literary executor Max Brod was instructed by Kafka to burn all of his unfinished works, but Brod did not comply and had them published.

Among the few works published in Kafka's lifetime there is the novella "The Metamorphosis" ("Die Verwandlung", 1915) - the harrowing story of a salesman who one morning finds himself transformed into a huge insect. His novels "The Trial" ("Der Prozess"), The Castle" ("Der Schloss") and "Amerika", none of them completed, were published between 1925 and 1927: like most of Kafka's short stories, they explore themes of alienation, guilt and existential anxiety, with their characters finding themselves pitted against incomprehensible, oppressive powers. The English adjective "Kafkaesque" describes the kind of bizarre, disturbing situations that characterize Kafka's writings.

Playwright Bertolt Brecht and novelists Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse were all born in Germany, though they all left the country at some point before WWII. Mann and Hesse were also awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature - respectively in 1929 and 1946.

Answer: The Second Coming

"The Second Coming" is probably the most famous of William Butler Yeats' poems - often cited in times of social and political instability for its bleak (and prophetic) message and powerful imagery. Written in 1919, the poem was included in the collection "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" (1920), the poem describes the aftermath of WWI in allegorical terms, comparing the turmoil gripping Europe to the Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ - which, in this case, turns out to be a nightmarish Antichrist figure.

Born in Sandymount, Ireland, in 1895, Yeats is one of the most significant figures of literary modernism and the Irish Literary Revival of the late 19th and early 20th century. He was also associated with Irish nationalism and Ireland's struggle for independence - one of the reasons why he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. He died in France in 1939.

American-born T.S. Eliot was a contemporary of Yeats', also one of the leading lights of modernism and a Nobel Prize winner (1948). The three poems listed as wrong answers were all written between 1917 and 1925, when he was already living in England. He became a British citizen in 1927.