Literary Skeletons II Trivia Quiz

Answer: Dickens

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is one of the most beloved Victorian writers. His novels "Great Expectations", "A Tale of Two Cities", "Oliver Twist", and "A Christmas Carol" are perennial favorites. "Bleak House" was published initially as a serial between March 1852 and September 1853. Critically, the novel is praised as one of his best, partially because of his experimental reliance on two narrators: one, a third-person omniscient narrator, and the other, a first-person narrator, the central character Esther Summerson.

Answer: Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962) was born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi. The "u" was added to his last name in 1918, probably because of a typographical error or a spelling mistake made by a publisher. Faulkner's greatest novels are "The Sound and the Fury", "As I Lay Dying", "Light in August", and "Absalom! Absalom!" He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, and two of his other novels--"A Fable" and "The Reivers"--each won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Answer: Orwell

George Orwell (1903-1950) was born Eric Arthur Blair and became one of England's most well-known writers because of two highly influential novels: "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-four". "Shooting an Elephant" is one of his most anthologized essays and relies on a narrator's account of serving in Burma as a police officer who is required to kill an aggressive elephant; Orwell uses the story to represent the tragedy of Great Britain's colonization of southeast Asia and India.

Answer: Hardy

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is another important Victorian writer of novels; however, his poetry is often included in collections of twentieth-century works. Some of his most celebrated novels are "The Return of the Native", "Tess of the d'Urbervilles", "The Mayor of Casterbridge", and "Jude the Obscure". "Under the Greenwood Tree" is his second novel, published in 1872, and marks the beginning of several novels set in "Wessex", the name Hardy used for England's southwest counties.

Answer: Sophocles

Sophocles (c. 496-406 BC) is one of only three ancient Greek playwrights whose work still remains. He joins the company of Euripedes and Aeschylus. One historical source claims Sophocles wrote 123 plays, but only seven of these remain. Two of his greatest works are "Oedipus the King" and "Antigone".

Answer: Flaubert

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was a French writer, who is known primarily for his first published novel "Madame Bovary". He is also known infamously for his promiscuous lifestyle: he frequently had sex with prostitues of both genders and was plagued with venereal diseases most of his life.

Answer: Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born to Jewish parents in Prague, which at that time was a city in Austria-Hungary. He is, of course, widely revered for his short story "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis") in which a salesman awakens one morning to discover that he has turned into a vermin (some interpret the creature to be a giant roach). "The Castle" or "Das Schloss" is one of his most important novels and is about a man who struggles against bureaucracy to gain entry to a castle where the authorities of the town can be found. Kafka died young due to tuberculosis.

Answer: Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is a highly celebrated and well-known American writer. He greatly influenced the genre of horror fiction with his stories like "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Cask of Amontillado", and "The Mask of the Red Death".

However, he also is often credited with the creation of the detective story with the publication of his story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". He wrote three stories revolving around an investigative, logical character named Auguste Dupin, who would become an inspiration to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

He also wrote much poetry, his primary love and interest, such as "The Raven" and "Annabel Lee". His only published novel is "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket". Jules Verne, the French writer, took it upon himself to write a sequel to this novel entitled "An Antarctic Mystery" or "The Sphinx of the Ice Fields".

Answer: Cooper

James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) was an early American writer of fiction, primarily known for his Leatherstocking Tales, which include "The Pioneers", "The Last of the Mohicans", "The Deerslayer", "The Pathfinder", and "The Prairie". Leatherstocking is one of the names of the central characters in all five books, the character generally known as Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo.

His father bought thousands of acres of land in upstate New York and founded the settlement of Cooperstown.

Answer: Defoe

Daniel Defoe (c. 1661-1731) was an English writer who was born with the name Daniel Foe but added the "De" to make himself sound more aristocratic. He is, of course, mostly recognized as the author of "Robinson Crusoe", but "Moll Flanders" is an equally important book about the plight of a woman who from birth until her death struggles to survive in a male-dominated world by resorting to theft, prostitution, and various relationships with men.

Answer: Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American author and is mostly associated, of course, with his book "Walden" (1854) ; however, he also wrote other important pieces such as "Resistance to Civil Government", a.k.a. "Civil Disobedience" (1849) and "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" (1849).

He died young from tuberculosis. Because he was known for his transcendentalist and non-orthodox religious leanings, a relative asked him before his death if he had made peace with God; Thoreau responded, "I did not know we had ever quarrelled".

Answer: Eliot

George Eliot (1819-1880) was and still is a very popular Victorian writer. Her real name was Mary Anne (sometimes spelled Mary Ann and Marian) Evans. Her most famous novels are "Mill on the Floss", "Adam Bede", "Middlemarch", and "Silas Marner". She, as did many female authors of the Western world, used a male pen name due to her fear of not being taken seriously as a female writer.

She is also known as an important religious dissenter, and translated into English various translations of works that questioned the historical accuracy of the Bible and the life of Christ.

Answer: Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was a highly influential American writer. His transcendentalist philosophy and emphasis on individualism and nonconformity not only affected American culture and religion, but his views on poetry and literature have continued to affect American writers to this day. Thoreau's life was forever altered because of Emerson's views, and Walt Whitman's poetry might not have existed, at least not in its current format.

His understanding of nature and spirituality can still be seen in the work of contemporary poets such as Mary Oliver.

His most famous essays are "Self-Reliance", "The American Scholar", "Nature", "The Poet", and "The Over-Soul". He also led the transcendentalist movement through his lectures, writings, the formation of the Transcendental Club, and his editorship of "The Dial".

Answer: Updike

John Updike (1932-2009) was an American author of stories, novels, poems, and critical reviews. He is mostly hailed and remembered for his series of books about his character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom: "Rabbit, Run", "Rabbit Redux", "Rabbit Is Rich", and "Rabbit at Rest".

He eventually wrote a novella called "Rabbit Remembered". "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest" each won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; thus, he joined the ranks of William Faulkner and Booth Tarkington as the only three writers ever to win more than one Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Answer: Chopin

Kate Chopin (1851-1904) was an American writer of fiction; she was born Katherine O'Flaherty in Missouri and married Oscar Chopin of Louisiana, where she lived for twelve years until her husband died. She returned to live with her mother, who died a year later. Faced with depression over the loss of her husband and her mother and the tremendous stress of having to raise six children alone, she turned to writing at her doctor's suggestion to provide her a focus in life and a source of income. She became a highly influential feminist writer with her novel "The Awakening" and several stories, such as "The Story of an Hour" and "Desiree's Baby".

Answer: Dreiser

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was an American author, primarily representative of the artistic movement Naturalism. His most famous novels are "Sister Carrie" (1900) and "An American Tragedy" (1925). Of interest is the fact that he had planned to return to America on board the "Titanic" during his first European excursion but ended up taking a different ship after a friend convinced him to take advantage of a cheaper rate.

Answer: Sterne

Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) was an Anglican priest as well as a writer, born in Ireland of English parents. He is known mostly for his experimental novel "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a Gentleman", which was published originally and in part in 1759.

He also published the novel "A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy" and several sermons and memoirs. He eventually died of tuberculosis.

Answer: Welty

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was an American Southern writer, who lived most of her life in Jackson, Mississippi. "The Optimist's Daughter" (1972) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973. A couple of her other novels are "Delta Wedding" and "Ponder Heart", and her short stories have been critically acclaimed and are frequently anthologized, such as "A Worn Path", "Why I Live at the P.O.", and "A Visit of Charity".

Her photography has also been celebrated. She had occasion to take several photographs during the Great Depression in Mississippi when she worked for the Works Progress Administration; many of these photos can be found in the collections "One Time, One Place" and "Photographs".

Answer: Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was not only a German writer of fiction, poetry, and drama but an artist and a politician as well. His first novel, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774), was a success, but he is perhaps best known for his tragic closet drama "Faust", which was published in two parts: the first part in 1808, and the second part in 1832.

As a closet drama, it was not truly meant to be performed on stage but is still written in the format of a play.

Answer: Maugham

William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was an English author, perhaps best known for his novel "Of Human Bondage" (1915). However, his later novel "The Razor's Edge" (1944) is equally as good. Much of what is contained in the novel, Maugham was able to write due to his own travels in Europe while working for the British Secret Service and his own personal visits to India and southeast Asia.

Answer: Tyler

Anne Tyler, an American author of a number of novels, was born in Minnesota in 1941, and in 2013 resided with her family in Baltimore, Maryland. Some of her most celebrated novels are "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant", "The Accidental Tourist", and "Ladder of Years". Her eleventh novel "Breathing Lessons" won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989.

Answer: Barth

John "Jack" Barth is an American author, born in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1930. He is primarily recognized for postmodern short stories and novels. "The Sot-Weed Factor" (1960) and "Giles Goat-Boy" (1966) are two of his most significant novels, and "Lost in the Funhouse" (1968) is an influential collection of American short stories.

He is considered a master of "Metafiction", which is the deliberate destruction of the illusion created when reading a story by the story's consistent reference to itself; in other words, the story often refers to itself or to the elements and strategies of creating fiction within the story.

Answer: Smollett

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) was a poet and writer from Scotland. He is best known for his picaresque novels, such as "The Adventures of Roderick Random" (1748), "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle" (1751), and "The Expedition of Humphry Clinker" (1771).

A picaresque novel is a satirical adventure story that revolves around the experiences of a young rogue who survives in a corrupt society through the use of his own intelligence.

Answer: Euripides

Euripides (c. 480 - c. 406 BC) is considered one of the three greatest tragedians of Ancient Greece, Sophocles and Aeschylus being the other two. He is credited with having written ninety to ninety-five plays, including "Medea", "Alcestis", "Andromache", "Hecuba", "Heracles", and "Orestes".

Answer: DeLillo

The American author Don DeLillo was born in 1936 and grew up in the Bronx, New York City. The 1985 publication of "White Noise" gained him great critical attention, and "Mao II" (1992) and "Underworld" (1998) were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.