Tennis for Bookworms Trivia Quiz

Answer: J.D. Salinger

Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010) is undoubtedly most famous for his coming-of-age novel "The Catcher in the Rye". The novel's iconic protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is an angst-filled teen uncertain about growing up in a world full of "phonies". Instead, he gets kicked out of several private schools, and spends much of the book wandering around New York City, all the while delivering his angst-filled interior monologue directly to the reader. By the novel's end, Holden finds solace and an open ear in his little sister Phoebe, although it becomes apparent that he's telling his tale in a mental asylum, so something clearly went wrong there.

Salinger's other work never achieved close to the popularity of "Catcher", but he wrote other worthwhile fiction too. He wrote a few other books, most notably "Raise High the Roof, Carpenters" and "Franny and Zooey". In addition, his imaginatively-titled short story collection "Nine Stories" contains enduring works like "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" and "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", which depicts the death of one of Salinger's recurring characters, Seymour Glass. Salinger's 2010 death after years of living as a mysterious recluse allowed some of his undiscovered letters to be revealed, giving some introduction to his personal life. Apparently he was a big tennis fan, especially supporting John McEnroe and Tim Henman.

Answer: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are perhaps best-known as the hopeless spies for the king in Shakespeare's uber-classic "Hamlet." Childhood friends of the titular prince of Denmark, they try without success to figure out the protagonist's motivations. Angered, Hamlet engineers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's own deaths. While on a boat to England with his "friends", Hamlet replaces the letter condemning him to death with one condemning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and then escapes during a pirate attack.

Tom Stoppard, a notable Czech practitioner of the Theater of the Absurd during the 20th century, expects his audiences to know that back-story at the introduction to his own parody, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead". However, this parody is far from a farce. While Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do demonstrate that they are hopelessly insecure and unable to make any strong actions or decisions to save themselves, the ending is rather tragic. Even though the play's protagonists witness their own deaths foretold during a play-within-a-play, they feel powerless to avoid them. This, in combination with the bizarre set of circumstances that frame the drama (the opening scene features the two men flipping a coin and it landing heads up 92 times in a row), make the work an important one in existentialist literature.

Answer: "A Room with a View"- E.M. Forster

E.M. Forster's novel "A Room with a View" opens in Florence, Italy, where the English protagonist Lucy is staying with her cousin Charlotte. The novel's title comes from an incident early in the novel, when Charlotte complains that the pair's room looks out onto the courtyard, rather than the river Arno. A Mr. Emerson offers to switch rooms with Lucy and Charlotte, and although they first deny his "room with a view" because Emerson is so crass, they eventually accept. Later, touring Florence, Lucy is shocked to see a murder in the streets, and faints, but she is comforted by Emerson's son George. The two have a heart-to-heart, and Lucy realizes she loves him, but Charlotte disapproves of the Emersons' lack of manners. When she witnesses Lucy and George kissing in a field, Charlotte whisks Lucy back to England immediately.

The next time we see Lucy, she is being courted by an uppity Englishman named Cecil Vyse, whom she eventually accepts. Living at their country home and preparing for the marriage, Lucy and Cecil are surprised to find new neighbors: the Emersons. Lucy is understandably mortified, especially when she realizes that she prefers George to Cecil. Cecil refuses to play tennis with the group, and instead reads his romance novel, which, due to a series of unforeseen circumstances, contains a scene exactly modeled on the Lucy/George field-kissing incident. Lucy is mortified and breaks off her engagement to Cecil. She and George elope to Florence.

Answer: Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas, pere, is best-known for his revenge tale, "The Count of Monte Cristo", as well as for a series sometimes known as the "d'Artagnan Romances". That cycle of three novels begins with the ever-popular "The Three Musketeers", and also includes "Twenty Years After" and "The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later". The last novel is itself made up of three to four book-length sections, including one titled "The Man in the Iron Mask". Dumas' series centers on the title man, who, at the beginning of "The Three Musketeers", attempts to engage Athos, Aramis, and Porthos in duels before joining their ranks. In that novel, the group gains the favor of the royalty before they are opposed by Cardinal Richelieu and his spy, Milady de Winter.

In the sequel, "Twenty Years After", the group's allegiance to King Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin is split, with d'Artagnan and Porthos favoring the royals, and the two other Musketeers against them. Their allegiances to Oliver Cromwell and Charles I are also called into question in the lengthy novel which occasionally pits the four former friends against each other. In the final novel in the series, d'Artagnan is once more pitted against Aramis, who plots to replace King Louis XIV with his twin brother, "The Man in the Iron Mask". At the end of that enormous book, d'Artagnan dies in battle.

Answer: The Great Gatsby

Francis Scott Fitzgerald (named for Francis Scott Key) very well known for his Jazz Age novel, "The Great Gatsby". Nick Carraway, an introverted bond trader who moves to New York for business, narrates the story of Jay Gatsby, a fabulously wealthy individual who throws luxurious parties from his mansion every Saturday night. In reality, Gatsby was just hoping that his old flame Daisy would show up to one of the parties; however, Daisy had (somewhat unhappily) married Tom Buchanan, a former classmate of Nick's. Affairs, insincerity, and a rather tragic car accident characterize this novel, which ends with Gatsby's death and funeral. Only Nick, Gatsby's father, and one other man attend the service. Gatsby's "friends", such as Klipspringer, attended all of the wild parties, but couldn't be bothered to show up to the funeral.

"The Great Gatsby" only showed moderate commercial success upon release - nothing to compare with Fitzgerald's earlier novels - but it gained more fame and scholarly appreciation after Fitzgerald's death. After "Gatsby", he would write a few other novels, including the critically-acclaimed "Tender is the Night", as well as some popular short stories.

Answer: Henry V

A series of four history plays, beginning with "Richard II" and ending with "Henry V", gives the complete Shakespearean tale of the famous British monarch who really did win the Battle of Agincourt. Before the events of the play, we had last seen Henry at the end of "Henry IV, Part 2" when his father died, forcing young Hal to take the throne and reject his low-life companion Falstaff. Falstaff, a classic Shakespearean comic character who also appeared in "The Merry Wives of Windsor", dies offstage during "Henry V".

At the beginning of the play, Henry claims some land in France, which makes the French dauphin mad, and results in the insulting gift of tennis balls. Henry vows war, and the scene shifts to some of his old partying rabble-rousers, who are forced into the army to serve the king with whom they were once acquaintances. When Henry's life is threatened in an assassination plot, the once good-natured man orders the execution of those involved, including an ex-friend. Moving on to France, the army succeeds in winning battles despite being outnumbered, thanks to Henry's charismatic leadership. At Harfleur, Henry declares "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more." Later, before the climactic Battle of Agincourt, he gives the well-known St. Crispin's Day Speech, which notably references "we few, we happy few, we band of brothers."

Answer: "Main Street"- Sinclair Lewis

Sinclair Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, doing so in 1930 in recognition of his ability to create "new types of character" and use powerful social criticism. Lewis' social criticism is readily apparent in his 1920 novel "Main Street", which focuses on Carol, a cosmopolitan and beautiful woman who falls in love with a Midwestern doctor. Carol moves to Dr. Kennicott's home-town of Gopher Prairie and soon realizes that the insular, prejudiced people living in the area are unwilling to submit to her "reforms". "Main Street" is a satire of the rural towns idealized by some during the early twentieth century, and of the domesticity of women. Lewis' other works tack on satire to other areas of society. "Babbitt" attacks conformity, humorously lampooning a real estate salesman who gets a peep of individualism after his friend goes to jail. "Kingsblood Royal" attacks racism in society, and "Elmer Gantry", named for a preacher, lambastes hypocrisy.

Answer: W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham was an author full of contradictions: rumor has it that he was the highest-paid author in the world at one point, yet he's hardly as famous today as contemporary British authors like EM Forster or DH Lawrence. In an autobiography, Maugham wrote that he himself stood in the "first row of second-tier writers." The 30s were a time of experimentation, when Modernist authors like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner were having their impact on literature. Maugham used a traditional style of prose, which has led to him being somewhat forgotten amidst the clamor of the early twentieth century.

Maugham's best-known novel is probably "Of Human Bondage", the semi-autobiographical story of Philip Carey. The clubfoot Philip's numerous affairs, spurned loves, and general misfortune in every sense of the word makes up the majority of the novel's plot. In addition, Maugham wrote about Larry Darrell, a WWI fighter pilot, in "The Razor's Edge", and fictionalized the life of painter Paul Gauguin in "The Moon and Sixpence".

Answer: David Foster Wallace

If you're a tennis fan and/or looking for a good six-month project, David Foster Wallace's crowning achievement "Infinite Jest" could be a good place to look. Titled for a line in Hamlet's graveyard speech, the novel spans more than 1000 pages, has more than 300 footnotes (some of which take up multiple pages), is riddled with complex vocabulary, and has an extremely contorted narrative chronology. The "Infinite Jest" of the title is a film so engaging that one who watches it loses all interest in life and becomes addicted to seeing it again and again. For that reason, a group of wheelchair-bound Quebec separatists are interested in using the film for acts of terrorism. Mixed into that plot is Hal Incandenza, a genius tennis player who lives at the Enfield Tennis Academy, as well as an addiction rehabilitation center called the Ennet House. The novel is notorious for being very difficult to read, but some claim that Wallace's "Infinite Jest" is the novel itself, for many of those who get through the tome enjoy it so much that they start it over again.

Wallace, who tragically died in 2008 at the age of 46, also wrote the novel "The Broom of the System" and the unfinished "The Pale King". He might be better-known for an essay about a bad pleasure cruise that he took, "A Supposedly Fun Thing That I'll Never Do Again".

Answer: Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) wasn't just a "complete player"; he was also a complete author. Although he was responsible for such mainstream works as "Ada or Ardor", "Pnin", and the autobiographical "Speak, Memory", the Russian author and translator is undoubtedly most famous now for "Lolita". Narrated by the aged lust-driven European Humbert Humbert, "Lolita" describes a man's seduction of the young girl Dolores Haze. Nabokov makes it difficult, though. Although Russian, Nabokov wrote the novel in English, and Humbert's monologues are intriguing, full of puns and wordplay. Dolores is hardly a picture of pure innocence, either.

Nabokov had other tricks up his sleeve, too. He was an accomplished chess player, contributing to chess theory and describing the game in his novel "The Defense". He also was a lepidopterist who discovered several species of butterflies. Nabokov suffered from synesthesia, a condition in which a person associates two senses together. In Nabokov's case, numbers were frequently associated with colors. He even wrote some poetry. Sort of. "Pale Fire", one of Nabokov's most enduring works other than "Lolita", consists of a 999-line poem written by fictional poet John Shade, and then a novel consisting of the poem's annotations following it.

(For those interested, I couldn't find any information on James Joyce's actual tennis game, though it is known that he frequently wore tennis shoes, so perhaps the author of "Ulysses" was a player himself!)