A Literary Tour of the US Trivia Quiz

Published in 1951, "From Here to Eternity" was James Jones' debut novel, loosely based on his experiences as a member of the Hawaiian Division's 27th Infantry in the months leading to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the US's entry in WWII. In 1952 the book won the National Book Award, and in 1953 was adapted into a film directed by Fred Zinneman that won 8 Academy Awards (including Best Picture).

The novel's main setting is Schofield Barracks, a US Army installation in Honolulu County, on the island of O'ahu, Hawaii. It was established in 1908 to provide mobile defense to the island and, in particular, the naval base of Pearl Harbor. The barracks is separated by the adjacent town of Wahiawā by a reservoir. Because of its military setting and tense atmosphere, "From Here to Eternity" hardly ever lingers on the beauty of the tropical island, but rather emphasizes its negative aspects - such as the unrelenting sun and red dust mentioned in the opening chapter.

Published in 1903, "The Call of the Wild" is one of Jack London's most famous works, and a classic of adventure fiction. It tells the story of Buck, a huge crossbred dog, who is stolen from his happy California home to be sold as a sled dog in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush of the 1890s. Forced to fight for survival in that harsh environment, Buck becomes increasingly more primitive, and eventually surrenders to the "call of the wild". In 1906 London wrote a companion novel, "White Fang", also set in the Yukon Territory.

"The Call of the Wild" was inspired by California-born London's own experiences in Alaska and Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush, where he spent almost a year. Though the story touches a number of different locations - such as Seattle, where Buck is shipped from California - its main setting is the hostile wilderness of the North. There Buck and his team must make long trips along the trail connecting the port of Skagway with the mining camps, carrying heavy equipment across the Coast Mountains. Skagway and the now abandoned town of Dyea (where Buck arrives from Seattle) are located at the end of the Inside Passage, in southeast Alaska: they are now part of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park.

Unlike "The Grapes of Wrath", which is partly set in Oklahoma and on Route 66, John Steinbeck's novella "Of Mice and Men" (published in 1937) is wholly set in California, the Nobel Prize-winning author's home state. The story of migrant ranch workers George Milton and Lennie Small was inspired by Steinbeck's own experiences as a teenager, in the years prior to the Great Depression, working alongside migrant workers in the sugar beet farms at Spreckels, a company town near his hometown of Salinas.

George and Lennie's journey begins when they are chased out of the amusingly-named town of Weed, located in northwest California, near the towering volcano Mount Shasta. From there, they travel south to Soledad, in Monterey County, 34 km (21 mi) southeast of Salinas. The book opens with a description of the tree-lined banks of the Salinas River, where the two characters sit down to drink and rest before continuing their journey to a nearby ranch. The peaceful clearing with its green pool becomes the pair's meeting place, and eventually the setting for the novella's tragic ending.

First performed on 3 December 1947, "A Streetcar Named Desire" is one of Tennessee Williams' most popular works - also on account of the iconic 1951 film adaptation starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh. The play, which won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, was probably inspired by various events in its author's biography - such as the plight of his sister, Rose, who, like the play's protagonist, Blanche DuBois, suffered from mental illness.

Like other major works by Williams, "A Streetcar Named Desire" is set in his native South (he was born in Mississippi), and displays some of the Gothic elements that often accompany literary works set in that part of the US. Williams was living in New Orleans' famed French Quarter while writing the play: the titular streetcar line (active between 1920 and 1948) ran very close to his apartment. Now a popular tourist destination, the French Quarter (known in French as "Vieux Carré", Old Square) was built after the fires that destroyed most of the old city's buildings in 1788 and 1794. In the play, it is depicted as shabby and somewhat disreputable: in fact, in the early 20th century the area had fallen into disrepair, and was inhabited mainly by people (many of them immigrants) who were attracted by the cheap rents.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1960) was for over fifty years the only book published by Harper Lee. A second novel, "Go Set a Watchman", was published as a sequel in 2015, just a few months before the author's death. The novel is loosely based on Lee's childhood and adolescence in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where she grew up and became close friends with future fellow writer Truman Capote - who she would portray in the novel as Scout and Jem Finch's friend Dill.

The setting of "To Kill a Mockingbird", the fictional town of Maycomb, the seat of Maycomb County, is described as a "tired old town" in the book's first chapter, with grass growing in the sidewalks, unpaved, red clay roads, and unrelenting summer heat. Maycomb is surrounded by cottonfields, and the Finch family plantation, Finch's Landing, lies "some twenty miles east", on the banks of the Alabama River. Monroeville provided much of the inspiration for Maycomb: in spite of Lee's less than complimentary portrait of the fictional town, Monroeville has capitalized on the fame of her two most famous native children, with about 30,000 tourists visiting the town every year because of its association with the book and its iconic film adaptation. In 1997, Monroeville was designated "literary capital of Alabama" by the state legislature.

The first of a series of four novels written by Mark Twain about the characters of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" was published in 1876. The story of Tom, an orphaned boy who lives with his aunt, and his friend Huck Finn, a free-spirited vagrant boy, is set in the fictional town of St Petersburg, Missouri - based on Hannibal, the city on the Mississippi River where Twain lived as a boy.

Located about 180 km (110 mi) northwest of St Louis, Hannibal is the largest city in Marion County. Twain's family moved there when he was four; he lived there on and off until he left for Nevada in 1861. During those years, Twain became fascinated with the Mississippi, and eventually became a licensed steamboat pilot. Its association with the great writer has made Hannibal a popular destination for cultural heritage tourism. Twain's home is part of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum complex, comprising nine properties - including the houses of the people who inspired the characters of Becky Thatcher and Huck Finn; the house is bordered by the white picket fence that appears in Chapter 2 of the book.

Published in 1906, "The Jungle" is the best-known work by author and political activist Upton Sinclair, one of a group of writers, journalists and photographers who earned the rather unflattering name of "muckrackers". Sinclair's novel, a rare example of an exposé written in fictional form, had the intent of raising public awareness of the plight of workers in the meatpacking industry. The author spent seven weeks working incognito in Chicago's meatpacking plants in order to gather information for his novel. Though highly divisive because of its shocking content and Sinclair's uncompromising socialist stance, the novel opened the public's eyes on the health violations committed in those plants, and led to reforms such as the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.

"The Jungle" chronicles the often-heartbreaking story of Jurgis Rudkus and his family, a group of Lithuanian immigrants recently arrived in Chicago. The main setting of the novel are Chicago's Union Stock Yards and its neighbouring area (now known as Back of the Yards) in the city's South Side. The stockyards opened in 1865, and were operative for 106 years - earning Chicago the nickname of "hog butcher of the world". By the time "The Jungle" was published, the stockyards employed 25,000 people and produced over three-quarters of the meat consumed in the US. The environmental impact of the industry was considerable - as pointed out in the stomach-turning description of "Bubbly Creek" in Chapter 9. The Yards closed at the end of July 1971; the only significant structural element remaining today is the entrance gate, designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1981.

Written by Toni Morrison (who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993), "Beloved" was published in 1987, and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. A harrowing tale about the horrors of slavery, with a strong supernatural element, the novel (which in 1998 was adapted as a film starring Oprah Winfrey) focuses on Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, and a mysterious young woman who calls herself Beloved. Dedicated by Morrison to the "Sixty Million and more" victims of the Atlantic slave trade, "Beloved" is set in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873 - just a few years after the official end of slavery in the US. Morrison was herself an Ohio native: her first novel, "The Bluest Eye", is set in her hometown of Lorain.

"Beloved" is based on a true event that happened in Cincinnati in 1856. Much of the action takes place in the house where Sethe lives with her daughter Denver, at 124 Bluestone Road - a rather forbidding, gray and white house owned by a white family that was the home of Sethe's mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. This haunted house - whose very number has multiple symbolic meanings - is as much a character as the humans in the story. The city of Cincinnati takes centre stage in some of the novel's chapters - as in the description the messy job of pig processing in the city's slaughterhouses. Another important location in the novel is the plantation of Sweet Home in Kentucky, across the Ohio River, where Sethe and other characters were once enslaved.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha" is the only work mentioned in this quiz to be written in verse rather than prose. Published in 1855, it is an epic poem in 22 chapters (plus an introduction), written in trochaic tetrameters - a metre based on that of the "Kalevala", the Finnish national poem, which had been published a few years earlier. Inspired by legends of the Ojibwe Native American people (though the historical Hiawatha was Iroquois, from the Northeast US), the poem was enormously successful upon publication, though some critics were less than enthusiastic; it also became the subject of numerous parodies.

Longfellow, a native of New England, set his poem on the south shore of Lake Superior (called by its Ojibwe name of Gitche Gumee, meaning "Great Sea"), in the Pictured Rocks area of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Named after its colourful sandstone cliffs, Pictured Rocks was designated as the first National Lakeshore in 1966. Longfellow chose that particular area because it was mentioned in one of his main sources of inspiration, the writings of geologist and ethnologist Henry Schoolcraft. The Hiawatha National Forest, home to plentiful flora and fauna, is located immediately south of the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Washington Irving wrote the short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" while he was living in Birmingham, England. Like its companion piece, "Rip van Winkle", it was published in the collection "The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent" (1819-1820). This well-known tale - a Halloween favourite - was inspired both by Northern European legends about ghostly, headless horsemen and the discovery of the headless corpse of a Hessian soldier in the village of Sleepy Hollow, New York, during the American Revolutionary War.

Located about 32 km (20 mi) north of New York City, on the east bank of the Hudson River, Sleepy Hollow (known as North Tarrytown until 1996) is an old colonial Dutch settlement, now part of the town of Mount Pleasant. Irving visited the village on various occasions in the 1790s with his friend James K. Paulding. The Headless Horseman of Irving's story is said to have been buried in the cemetery of the 17th-century Old Dutch Church, which also features prominently in the tale. The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where a number of famous people (including Irving himself) are buried, is adjacent to the Old Dutch Burying Ground, but privately owned. The village is a popular tourist destination, especially around Halloween, and has been frequently used as a filming location.

Written by Arthur Miller as an allegory for McCarthyism - the persecution by the US government by people suspected of being Communists - "The Crucible" was premiered on 22 January 1953 in New York City. Though critical reception was largely negative, the play won a Tony Award for Best Play in the same year. "The Crucible" is a dramatized account of the Salem witch trials, which took place in 1692-1693 in the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Though based on real events, the play takes some liberties with historical accuracy - as in the case of the purported affair between John Proctor and Abigail Williams.

Nicknamed (not surprisingly) "The Witch City", Salem is located on the North Shore, the coastal region of Massachusetts between Boston and New Hampshire. Established in 1626, the city - as well as other locations around the Massachusetts Bay - became associated with Puritanism, whose strict control on colonial society culminated in the witch trials of the early 1690s. Though the city is rich in cultural heritage, only one building remains with direct connections to the trials - the Jonathan Corwin House (known locally as the Witch House, now a museum), which was used by the Court that sentenced 19 people (including John Proctor) to the gallows. The city is also home to a museum dedicated to the witch trials, founded in 1972 - as well as a memorial to the victims, inaugurated in 1992.

Published in 1985, John Irving's "The Cider House Rules" chronicles the childhood and coming of age of Homer Wells, who grows up in a Maine orphanage directed by Dr. Wilbur Larch. The story, which in 1999 was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie, takes place before, during and after WWII. Most of Homer's story revolves around his close relationship with the doctor, who becomes a father figure to him, even though the young man disapproves of his mentor's performing abortions.

The orphanage where much of the action takes place is located in the fictional town of St. Cloud, located in a river valley in inland Maine. In the novel's first chapter, the town is described as a rather dismal place - a former logging camp, now a mill town, named after its almost constant cover of clouds - with long winters and "never any spring". Later in the story the action shifts to the apple orchards owned by the family of Homer's friend Wally, located in a place near the Maine coast (hence their name of Ocean View Orchards). The novel's title refers to a list of rules that migrant workers are supposed to follow at the Orchards, but are unaware of because none of them can read.