Best Sellers of the 1960s #2 Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Winter of Our Discontent

Apparently, John Steinbeck had a purpose for writing this praised and criticized novel. He wanted, it seems, to criticize American society in the 1960s. Some say that his purpose interfered with the artistry of this novel.
John Steinbeck is the author of "The Grapes of Wrath, "Of Mice and Men," "Tortilla Flat" and "Travels with Charley" and a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

Answer: Rabbit, Run

This novel is the first novel of a series of books dealing with Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. John Updike wrote "Rabbit, Run," "Rabbit Redux, "Rabbit Is Rich," "Rabbit At Rest" and, then, later, in 2000, a novella called "Rabbit Remembered." These books are an interesting study of the cultural world that Updike perceives.

The following Updike remark in his own words shows the intricacy of his cultural critique. He observes, "America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."

Answer: Trout Fishing in America

Richard Brautigan's highly successful novel went beyond plot to simultaneously capture multiples realities: the steps in writing a novel, a character, a pen nib, as well as a kind of retrospective grieving for a lost pastoral life.

Answer: The Fire Next Time

This book has two essays, "My Dungeon Shook - Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation," and "Down At The Cross - Letter from a Region of My Mind." Helped perhaps by its apparent objectivity, Baldwin is able here to combine autobiographical thoughts with a probing criticism of the disjunctions between what he thought America pretended to be in public and what it was in private in racial, economic and social terms.

Answer: Soul On Ice

Eldridge Cleaver was a famous Black Panther. He jumped bail when he was on trial for murder and left the United States to live in Algeria. There, he was temporarily joined by Timothy Leary. He had a conflicted life overseas, going to Cuba and France. He published "Soul on Fire" in 1978.

Then, he had a religious conversion, returned to the United States, became a conservative Republican, ran for President, cured his addiction to crack cocaine, and died in California in 1998 at the age of 62. Before his death, he ran a very popular weekly talk show in Florida.

Answer: Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in New Jersey to Jewish parents of Galician descent. He had a very prestigious education, then went on to write a series of highly original novels exploring everything from anti-Semitism, the breakup of a marriage, and the Korean War, to his own role as a novelist creating characters.

He has become famous as a key analyst of Jewish-American themes in increasingly post-modern times. Among his books are "Portnoy's Complaint," "Goodbye Columbus," and "American Pastoral."

Answer: Catch-22

The term "Catch 22" points to a bogus alternative--a seeming choice when actually there is no choice. In brief, in part, the plot of "Catch 22" involves a man who is trying to be declared insane so that he can stop flying fighter missions. He is, thus, in a catch 22/no win situation.
Heller's novel displays many poststructuralist features: non-linear action, multi-layered connotations, lack of a center stable focal point. Heller published "Closing Time" in 1992, which further investigates Yossarian and tailgate Sammy Singer.
"Catch-22" is a wonderful Mike Nichols film released in 1970 with Alan Arkin, Martin Sheen, Jon Voigt and many others.

Answer: Dutchman

Baraka was profoundly influenced by the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. Also, in 1965, Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem, and, in 1968, he founded the Black Community Development and Defense Organization. This was a Muslim group committed to affirming black culture and to gaining political power for blacks. By 1974, he switched from a Black nationalism to a more Marxist commitment.
Among other titles, he wrote "Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands"- 1990, "Funk Lore : New Poems" - 1996, and "Black Music" - 1980.

Answer: Conversation in the Cathedral

This novel has, many agree, a feeling of a James Joyce novel. Mario Vargos Llosa called it a "total novel." People make this comparison to Joyce because in this novel the reader learns this history of a total continent in a conversation in one afternoon. Vargos Llosa also wrote "The Green House" and "Death in the Andes."

Answer: The Confessions of Nat Turner

This account is, immediately, mediated. It purports to be the record of the white lawyer Thomas Gray to whom Turner confessed. Some critics have argued that Turner himself is overtly sexualized and angry. Others have said the slaveowners are presented too benevolently.
By the way, both Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin have spoken out in defense of William Styron's very intricate book.

Answer: The Reivers

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1963. Faulkner is one of three writers to have received this prize more than once. "The Reivers" takes place in the South in the early twentieth century. The novel is relatively straightforward, presenting the coming of age of one Lucius Priest, a wealthy young boy. Readers have noted that Faulkner does a splendid job in showing the increasing importance of the automobile. Faulkner readers will find that Faulkner had said he wanted to write a "Golden Book of Yoknapatawpha County." Yoknapatawpha County is the name Faulkner created for the setting of his fictions. Whether or not this is the "Golden Book" is up for readers to decide.

It is his last novel. Faulkner died in June 1962.

Answer: Arrow of God

"Arrow of God" is the third volume in a trilogy, including "Things Fall Apart," and "No Longer at Ease." "Things Fall Apart" (1959) has been called the most highly read book in modern African writing. The book explores influences of Western culture on Nigerian society.

The title comes from the poem, "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats. The third line of that poem is "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." This novel has sparked major discussions about Western views of Africa, of Western ideas of Africa as primitive and, in specific, of Conrad's famous "Heart of Darkness."

Answer: A Moveable Feast

A.E. Hotchner proposed this title to Hemingway based on a conversation he and Hemingway had had about Paris. Hemingway had prepared a final manuscript of "A Moveable Feat" before he died. His wife Mary, in spite of this, extensively edited this manuscript after his death. Her editing led many scholars to criticize her sharply.

Answer: Giles Goat-Boy, or, The Revised New Syllabus

John Barth is famous as a metafictional writer of the 1960s who radically reconstructed the writing of fiction. His writing moves from a lyrical probing of journeys in the late 1950s and 1960s to an explosive shattering of conventions about what a hero is and the author's responsibility to heroes. "Giles Goat-Boy" is a long novel dealing with the role of modern day heroes.

The novel develops very ironically in that the narrator receives Giles' story in a most indirect way--through a computer tape.

The narrator insinuates that perhaps this is not even his own writing. The entire novel questions the reality of all realities. When Barth was writing this novel, he apparently kept pinned to his wall a list of Joseph Campbell's definitions of the hero.

The book saturates its readings in intense layers of what is real.

Answer: Hell's Angels

Hunter Thompson had a very colorful life. He wrote intelligent critiques of the hippie movement in San Francisco. He criticized Bay Area radicals for not being true to their original beliefs. He shaved his head and became famous for what was called Gonzo journalism: intense, subjective, random kind of first person writing.

He was extravagant in his living and his dying, which was, as in the case of Ernest Hemingway, a suicide.