Literature Through the Ages (2): the 1910s Quiz

Answer: "Howards End" (E.M. Forster)

Edward Morgan Forster OM CH was born in London in 1879. He published his first novel, "Where Angels Fear to Tread", in 1905. "The Longest Journey" (in 1907), "A Room with a View" (1908) and "Howards End" (1910) followed soon thereafter. He completed "Maurice" in 1914 but it would not be published until after his death in 1970 aged 91. The last of the novels published during his lifetime was also his greatest success -- "A Passage to India", published in 1924.

Forster wrote numerous short stories, two plays, a film script, a libretto ("Billy Budd" in 1951), biographies, travel pieces and numerous miscellaneous article, but no more novels during the second half of his life.

In 1992, "Howards End" became the fifth Forster novel adapted for the big screen. Directed by James Ivory, the film starred Anthony Hopkins, Vanessa Redgrave, Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson.

The alternatives were all published in 1910. Other novels published that year include Hermann Hesse's "Gertrud", Baroness Orczy's "Lady Molly of Scotland Yard", H.G. Wells' "The History of Mr Polly", L. Frank Baum's "The Emerald City of Oz", Frances Hodgson Burnett's "The Secret Garden", Rudyard Kipling's "Rewards and Fairies" and Lucy Maud Montgomery's "Kilmeny of the Orchard".

Answer: "The Phantom of the Opera" (Gaston Leroux)

Originally serialized over a period of six months in "Le Gaulois" starting in September 1909, Gaston Leroux's "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra" was first published as a novel in 1910 and its English translated debuted the following year. It was famously adapted for the cinema in 1925, with Lon Chaney, Sr. in the title role of the Phantom, and for the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical in 1986, with Michael Crawford heading the London cast.

The first collection of previously serialized short stories featuring amateur detective Father Brown was published in 1911. Four further collections would be published between 1914 and 1935. J.M. Barrie's 1904 play, "Peter and Wendy", was published in novel form in 1911 under the titles "Peter Pan", "The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up" and "Peter and Wendy". Other novels published this year include Max Beerbohm's "Zuleika Dobson", Algernon Blackwood's "The Centaur", Joseph Conrad's "Under Western Eyes", Eduard von Keyserling's "Wellen", Bram Stoker's "The Lair of the White Worm", Beatrix Potter's "The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes" and D.H. Lawrence's "The White Peacock".

Answer: "Tarzan of the Apes" (Edgar Rice Burroughs)

Edgar Rice Burroughs was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1875. In addition to creating the character of Tarzan in 1912, in the same year Burroughs first introduced the Virginia-born John Carter, who was transported to Mars at the beginning of the "Barsoom" series of novels. Other series of novels by the same author were set on the Moon and on Venus.

The alternatives were all published in 1912. Other novels first published that year include Willa Cather's "Alexander's Bridge", Jack London's "A Son of the Sun", Edna Ferber's "Buttered Side Down", Franz Kafka's "The Judgement", D. H. Lawrence's "The Trespasser", Stephen Leacock's "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town", Edith Wharton's "The Reef" and Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice".

Answer: "Sons and Lovers" (D.H. Lawrence)

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was born in 1885 in the former coal-mining town of Eastwood on the southwestern border of Nottinghamshire. He published his first novel, "The White Peacock", in 1911. "Sons and Lovers" was his third novel and, although it received at best luke warm acclaim at the time, it is now widely considered his greatest work.

Lawrence followed "Sons and Lovers" with two of his other highly-acclaimed works, "The Rainbow" in 1915 and "Women in Love" in 1920, although it is perhaps his penultimate novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover", published just two years before his premature death in 1930, for which he is most widely known.

The alternatives were all published in 1913. Other notable novels from that year include John Buchan's "The Power-House", Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Poison Belt", Henry James' "A Small Boy and Others", Jack London's "The Valley of the Moon" and P.G. Wodehouse's "The Little Nugget"

Answer: "Our Mr. Wrenn" (Sinclair Lewis)

Harry Sinclair Lewis was born in 1885 in the city of Sauk Centre in central Minnesota. Novelist, short-story writer and playwright, in 1930 he became the first American winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of just 35. In the preceding decade he had published a large body of outstanding work including the highly acclaimed "Main Street", "Babbitt", Arrowsmith" (for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, which he declined) and "Elmer Gantry". The latter two were both adapted for award-winning movies in the 1930s.

Although "Our Mr Wrenn" was not a commercial success when it was first published, the review in the 'New York Times' compared this first-time novelist with Dickens!

The alternatives were all published in 1914. Other works published that year include G.K. Chesterton's "The Flying Inn", Theodore Dreiser's "The Titan", Edna Ferber's "Personality Plus", D.H. Lawrence's "The Prussian Officer and Other Stories", Booth Tarkington's "Penrod" and P.G. Wodehouse's "The Man Upstairs".

Answer: "The Thirty-Nine Steps" (John Buchan)

John Buchan was born in 1875 in Perth, Scotland. 1st Baron Tweedsmuir GCMG, GCVO, CH, PC, he was not only a highly-acclaimed novelist, but also a historian and politician who served from 1935 until his death in 1940 as the 15th Governor-General of Canada. Following his death, he was honoured with a state funeral in Canada and numerous Canadian places (a village in Saskatchewan, a mountain and a region in British Columbia, and numerous roads and streets) were subsequently named for him.

"The Thirty-Nine Steps" is the best-known of Buchan's action-adventure novels. he wrote it while convalescing in a nursing home on the Isle of Thanet in Kent, and the author noticed his 6-year old niece practising her numbers by counting the stairs leading down from his room to the beach, hence the title of the novel. Hitchcock's famous 1935 adaptation starred future Oscar-winner Robert Donat as Richard Hannay.

The alternatives were all published in 1915. Other works that year include Willa Cather's "The Song of the Lark", Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Valley of Fear", Herman Hesse's "Knulp", Jack London's "The Little Lady of the Big House" and Eleanor H. Porter's "Pollyanna Grows Up".

Answer: "Seventeen" (Booth Tarkington)

Newton Booth Tarkington was born in 1869 in Indianapolis, Indiana. A prolific writer, his first novel was published in 1899 and "Seventeen" was his twentieth. He is perhaps best remembered today for "The Magnificent Ambersons", for which he won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was later adapted for a classic Orson Welles film in 1942. He again won the Pulitzer in 1922, for "Alice Adams", putting him in a group of multiple winners that contained only Tarkington, William Faulkner and John Updike.

The alternatives were all first published in 1916, posthumously in the case of Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger", a work on which he had worked for almost 20 years prior to his death in 1910. Also published in this year were Henri Barbusse's "Under Fire", Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" and H.G. Wells' "Mr. Britling Sees It Through".

Answer: "Summer" (Edith Wharton)

Born Edith Newbold Jones in New York City in 1862, Edith Wharton published her first short story in 1891, but was 40 years old by the time she wrote the first of her fifteen novels. She moved permanently to France shortly before the outbreak of WWI, and during that conflict she performed heroics in support of refugees, the injured and displaced. Her best-known novel is probably "The Age of Innocence", which earned her the first Pulitzer Prize for Fiction ever won by a woman writer. She was nominated three times for the Nobel Literary Prize, in 1927, 1928 and 1930.

The three alternatives were also published in 1917, posthumously in the case of Henry James, who had died the previous year. Other novels from 1917 include Elizabeth von Arnim's "Christine", Edgar Rice Burroughs' "A Princess of Mars", Joseph Conrad's "The Shadow Line", Arthur Conan Doyle's "His Last Bow" (a collection of Holmes stories) and Sinclair Lewis's "The Job".

Answer: "My Antonia" (Willa Cather)

Willa Sibert Cather was born in 1873 in the community of Gore in northern Virginia. Her published writing career began with a collection of poems in 1903, a collection of short stories and a 1909 biography of Mary Baker Eddy before she produced her first novel, "Alexander's Bridge", in 1912. The "Prairie Trilogy" began with "O Pioneers" in 1913, continued with "The Song of the Lark" in 1915 and concluded with "My Antonia". Her next novel, "One of Ours", set during WWI, earned her the 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Heinrich Mann's "Der Untertan", Booth Tarkington's "The Magnificent Ambersons", Baroness Orczy's "The Man in Grey" and Edith Wharton's "The Marne" were also published in 1918.

Answer: "Night and Day" (Virginia Woolf)

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in south London in 1882, Virginia Woolf was one of the most important 'modernist' writers of the 20th century. A leading member of the intellectual "Bloomsbury Group" in the inter-war years, Woolf is best-known today for the novels she wrote during the 1920s, "Mrs. Dalloway", "To the lighthouse" and "Orlando". Suffering from mental illness now thought to be bipolar disorder, she committed suicide by drowning at the age of just 59 in 1941.

Other notable works published in 1919 include the three alternatives as well as Max Beerbohm's "Seven Men" (a collection of short stories), E.M. Hull's "The Sheik", Hermann Hesse's "Demian" (written under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair), Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" and P.G. Wodehouse's "My Man Jeeves" collection.