On the Road, Again? Trivia Quiz

Answer: It was printed on a scroll.

When "On the Road" was finally published in 1957, six years after Kerouac finished the novel, critical responses were all over the board. They ranged from "The New York Times" as "the most beautifully executed" expression of the Beat movement, all the way to "not a well made novel, nor a saleable one, nor even, I think, a good one." Contemporaries judge Kerouac's novel, accurately, as the epitome of the 50s and 60s counterculture movement in the US. Even the creation of the novel was abnormal. Kerouac printed the manuscript on one continuous scroll, eventually measuring 120 feet long. He claimed to have written the book in three weeks, directly onto the scroll. Sections of the manuscript were excised from the scroll in the six years between authorship and publication.

The novel is called a "roman a clef" because each character in it corresponds to a person in the real world, from Kerouac's experiences. The narrator of the novel, Sal Paradise, is a thinly-disguised depiction of Kerouac himself. Paradise meets Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), who introduces him to the Beat generation and takes him all over the US on a jazzed-up, drug-induced roller coaster ride. Another Beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, is represented in the novel as Moriarty's companion, Carlo Marx.

Ray Bradbury's sci-fi classic "Fahrenheit 451" actually was first published in "Playboy".

Answer: Black Like Me

"Black Like Me", appropriately enough, takes its title from a Langston Hughes poem. Hughes is probably the best-known author from the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural revival for African-Americans based in New York City in the 1920s.

Griffin, a white man living in Texas, felt powerless to have a positive effect on the racism he could see in his community, so he decided to take drastic action. He secured a deal with George Levitan, the owner of a magazine called "Sepia", to try something no one had done before. He made himself black. Using skin dye, various medications, and intensive UV light therapy, Griffin was able to pass as a black man.

When he did, the reaction was spontaneous and unmistakable. Griffin wrote about the racism of the South in 1960s as he wandered through Alabama and Mississippi, where Jim Crow laws and lynch mobs restricted African-American liberties. Eventually, he took to alternating using the medication and not using it, able to distinctly observe how he was treated while a member of each "race". Griffin mentions that the racism is twofold: African-Americans didn't treat their white counterparts with trust, either.

After Griffin published the article for "Sepia", he was immediately distrusted by white supremacist members of his community, who offered vengeful threats and disgusting attacks. By the memoir's end, Griffin mentions that he has decided to move to Mexico to escape it all.

Answer: The Call of the Wild

The difference between "The Call of the Wild" and the other road trip narratives on this list is that the protagonist, Buck, is a dog. Regardless of species, though, the novel served to make the fame of its author, Jack London. London later wrote critical exposes of the US, advocating socialist causes and criticizing its militarization. However, it is "The Call of the Wild", and its partner novel, "White Fang", for which the San Francisco-born author is best known today.

Buck is a content mutt living in the Santa Clara Valley when, in the novel's opening pages, he is stolen by a gardener and quickly transferred to the North. Demand for sled dogs is skyrocketing due to the recent discovery of gold in the Yukon, so settlements are springing up in the Klondike. Buck's spirit refuses to break, and, in a climactic scene, he defeats his rival Spitz in a fight for pack leadership. However, he is soon sold to some incompetent owners, and only through some good fortune is he able to survive when the humans fall through thin ice. In the novel's final chapter, Buck surrenders to the "call of the wild" and joins an actual wolf pack, his transformation to a wild animal complete. "White Fang" details the opposite transformation: a wolf is eventually transformed into a domestic dog.

Answer: As I Lay Dying

In the introduction to his novel "Sanctuary", William Faulkner made the dubious claim that he wrote "As I Lay Dying" in six weeks, didn't change a word, and got the book published in 1930.

Famously (or perhaps infamously), "As I Lay Dying" has fifteen narrators, many of them members of the Bundren family, who take a quest to bury the deceased matriarch Addie according to her wishes. We meet each member of the family through their narrations: the eldest son Cash, who is a carpenter; his younger brothers Jewel and Darl; and Vardaman, who, in the novel's shortest chapter, states, "My mother is a fish."

Faulkner, taking stream of consciousness to its (il)logical extreme, rarely explains directly what has happened, and allows the reader to draw his/her own conclusions. Addie isn't the pure matriarch the rest of the family idolizes, Jewel is illegitimate, and the father, Anse, is immediately ready to move on and remarry once the clan finally makes it to Jefferson.

The novel's title comes from Homer, a line that Agamemnon speaks to Odysseus mentioned in "The Odyssey".

Answer: Robert M. Pirsig

Robert Pirsig grew up as an incredibly precocious child interested in science, entering a university at the age of 16 as a student of chemistry. He tired of the curriculum, went on to study philosophy and journalism, had several nervous breakdowns, and then, in 1974, published his classic book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". It was an instantaneous bestseller.

The book doesn't have much to do with Zen Buddhism, and it really doesn't talk about motorcycles too often, either. It is a quest narrative, though. Through the narrative, Pirsig (under the pseudonym Phaedrus, derived from the works of Plato) explains his philosophical theory of values, which he calls Quality, to his son Chris.

Answer: Jim

Mark Twain's novel "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" contains some iconic scenes and is a classic children's novel. Its much darker sequel titled for Huckleberry Finn doesn't involve any fence-painting, but it does manage to be one of the great classics of American literature. And part of the reason is Jim.

Ignoring all the "n-wording" and racial slurs, "Huck Finn" is a progressive novel for its era--or, at least, the first 75% is. The plot centers on Huck, Tom Sawyer's rugged, resistant friend, growing up in an intensely racist society. Huck runs away from his abusive father Pap, coincidentally joining up with Jim, a slave with whom he is friendly. As they raft down the Mississippi, though, Huck realizes that they are moving South, straight into slave country. The two have some hilarious adventures; meanwhile, Twain reveals some gruesome truths about American culture. Through it, Huck recognizes the virtue in Jim, and the unlikely pair become very close.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn'." However, he also said that the last few chapters of the novel "[devolve] into little more than minstrel-show satire and broad comedy". The last few chapters, in which Jim is captured, rescued in a pathetically Romantic Tom Sawyer-laid plot, and finally set free, dilute Twain's anti-racist message from the earlier chapters.

Answer: Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy, born in 1933, has been a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature since the publication of "Blood Meridian" in 1985. The violent book set in the West was followed by his "Border Trilogy", consisting of "All the Pretty Horses", "The Crossing", and "Cities of the Plain". More recently, McCarthy has authored "No Country for Old Men", a 2005 book which was subsequently adapted into the Best Picture Oscar for 2007, and "The Road".

McCarthy isn't one for showy prose. His works are characterized by a sparse, lucid style reminiscent of Hemingway, but nearly always chock-full of violence. Curiously, he refrains from using apostrophes in his novels. "The Road" is no exception. A father and a son, convinced that they are the "good guys", wander about an apocalyptic wasteland with a shopping cart, trying to avoid cannibalistic, zombie-like survivors desperate for food. Nowhere does McCarthy explain how or why the Earth was turned into a vast wasteland, nor does he give his principal characters names. Yet the lack of specificity can be endearing, and the novel won its Pulitzer Prize in 2007 mainly because audiences could feel strong emotions about the two men's struggle, and, especially, the novel's tragic ending. (I'm not ruining this one, you can read the book if you're curious!)

Answer: All the King's Men

Robert Penn Warren once claimed that his 1946 novel "All the King's Men" was "never intended to be a book about politics."

Yeah, right.

The novel is a dramatic narrative about Willie Stark (known as "The Boss" in the book), a Southern boy who rises from humble roots to become an honest, then corrupt, politician. The novel's narrator is Jack Burden, a good-hearted historian-journalist who ends up working for Stark, alienating him from his childhood friends, the Stantons. Burden confronts Stark's obvious flaws and learns several unfortunate truths about his friends and family, one of which forces him to take the quintessential American road trip to California and think things over. There, he comes up with the novel's great philosophical idea: the so-called "Great Twitch." According to Jack, all actions have their logical consequences, and we have no say to impact them at all, until everything comes crashing down. This image gives the novel its title from the classic nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty."

Yet despite all the philosophical overtones, "All the King's Men" is today almost exclusively remembered as a political caricature of Huey Long, Depression-era governor and senator from Louisiana. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, though Warren is also well-known for his poetry, which earned him two more Pulitzer nods in 1958 and 1979.

Answer: John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck is best-known for the works he set during the Great Depression in California, chief among them "Of Mice and Men" and "The Grapes of Wrath". His other novels aren't slackers, though. In "Travels With Charley", a sort of travel guide to the US, the Nobel Laureate described his final trip around the States, accompanied by his trusty poodle Charley. Interestingly, the author had been suffering from the heart trouble which eventually ended his life in 1968, so the author was taking a pretty grand risk in travelling around the country in 1960.

Steinbeck claimed that the greatest book he ever wrote was his mammoth retelling of the book of Genesis, "East of Eden". The novel details several generations of the Trask family, including Aron and Caleb, the stand-ins for Abel and Cain. Still, he'll probably be best remembered for the 1939 tale of the hardy Joads and their trek to California, "The Grapes of Wrath".

Answer: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

If fiction was revolutionized in the 1950s with Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Salinger, then journalism got its turn in the 60s through the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe.

It's Wolfe who laid the tenets of New Journalism to perfection in his nonfiction account, "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test", which shares many aspects of its plot with "On the Road". Wolfe chronicled the journey of Ken Kesey, author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", as well as his gang of worshiping followers known as the Merry Pranksters. The novel gets its title from the LSD and other hallucinogens that the Merry Pranksters extensively utilized. Perhaps no book better personified the "hippie" counterculture of the late 60s than did "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test".