Pick the Book They Didn't Write! Quiz

Answer: Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman

"The Wrongs of Woman" (1798), a gothic novel about a woman imprisoned in a madhouse by her husband, was written by philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), though published posthumously. Although fiction, it is meant to be a sequel to her well-known political treatise "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792). She sought to make her ideas more popular and accessible, and she wanted to disabuse women of the romantic fantasies promoted in sentimentalist literature of the time.

"Persuasion" (1818) was also published posthumously for Austen, though "Sense and Sensibility" (1811) and "Emma" (1815) brought her success in life. Although sometimes Jane Austen is imagined to be a Victorian author, both she and Wollstonecraft belong in the Late Georgian era, a time of great changes in politics, architecture, fashion, culture, etc. not only in Britain but around the world. They were contemporaries of authors Sir Walter Scott and Goethe.

Answer: Silas Marner

Under the pseudonym George Eliot, editor and critic Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) wrote "Silas Marner" (1861), a novel about ostracism and persecution but also love and hope in the South Midlands of England.

Both Eliot and Dickens criticized Victorian society in their works. "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1844), "Barnaby Rudge" (1841), and "Nicholas Nickleby" (1838) were among Dickens' picaresque novels (centered on roguish characters), and like many of his other works were originally published serialized in a literary magazine.

Answer: Doctor Zhivago

To say Dostoyevsky had a dark soul is an understatement. "Crime and Punishment" (1866) recounts an ex-student's cold-blooded murder of a pawnbroker to prove his "great man" theory. His magnum opus "The Brothers Karamazov" (1880) is full of death and anti-Catholicism. When Dostoyevsky sought a positive, beautiful protagonist, all he could invent was "The Idiot" (1869).

"Dr. Zhivago" (1957), about a physician's struggles during the end of czarist Russia and the beginning of the Soviet Union, was written almost a century later by Boris Pasternak. It was first published in Italy (in Russian) because the Soviet government found it threatening. In fact, the CIA used the novel as a "weapon" in the Cold War to promote discontent in the USSR!

Answer: On the Banks of Plum Creek

Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957) wrote "On the Banks of Plum Creek" (1937) as the fourth in her nine "Little House" series of books for children. It recounts the real-life travels of the Ingalls family from the Kansas prairie to Plum Creek, near Walnut Grove, Minnesota, when Laura was between seven and nine years old.

"O Pioneers!" (1913), "The Song of the Lark" (1915), and "My Ántonia" (1918) comprise Willa Cather's Great Plains Trilogy. Cather grew up in Nebraska and was a nonconformist who wore men's clothes, and later moved back east to New York. Established as a major writer in the 1910s-20s, she won the Pulitzer for "One of Ours" (1922), but during the Great Depression the critics dismissed her writing as old-fashioned as compared to contemporaries Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. Cather was later redeemed and elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943.

Answer: The Monogram Murders

All of these are novels featuring the Belgian expatriate, Hercule Poirot, the little detective with the egg-shaped head and magnificent mustaches. "The Monogram Murders" (2014), however, was written by Sophie Hannah, decades after Christie's death in 1976. Although some Christie fans were offended, others were delighted, and Hannah contends that the family of the late whodunnit wordsmith actually asked her to write the book -- which she did while vacationing at Christie's holiday home. The new book takes place in 1929.

"Mrs. McGinty's Dead" (1952) is a village mystery featuring fictional mystery-writer Ariadne Oliver along with Poirot. "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" (1920) is the first mystery in which Poirot appears; "Curtain" (1975) is the last.

Answer: The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner (1897-1962) of Mississippi used stream of consciousness and contrasting points of view throughout his Southern Gothic novel "The Sound and the Fury" (1929), about the downfall of a family. Its title comes from the line in Shakespeare's "Macbeth", that life "is a tale // Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, // Signifying nothing."

"The Beautiful and Damned" (1923) and "The Great Gatsby" (1925) are two of Fitzgerald's novels that portray the excess and decadence of the Jazz Age in Manhattan and Long Island, respectively. "Tender Is the Night", which takes place in Europe, is unusual in that the original 1934 publication, serialized in "Scribner's Magazine", used flashbacks. Then in 1951, journalist Malcolm Cowley published a revised, chronological version based on Fitzgerald's notes.

Answer: I, Robot

Russian-born Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) introduced his Three Laws of Robotics in "I, Robot" (1950), a collection of nine short stories that one reads as a novel. (In fact, he invented the term "robotics", though not the term "robot".) Best known as a sci-fi writer, Asimov also dabbled in mystery and wrote non-fiction works on religion and on science.

Contemporary Ray Bradbury rejected the "science fiction author" label and insisted he wrote horror and fantasy. "Fahrenheit 451" (1953) and "The Martian Chronicles" (1950) are set in the future, whereas "Dandelion Wine" (1957) is set in Bradbury's childhood past. He got his start writing comedy for George Burns and Gracie Allen's radio program -- at the tender age of 14!

Answer: The Color Purple

Alice Walker (b. 1944) received a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for "The Color Purple" (1983), which details the tribulations of Celie and other black women in rural Georgia in the 1930s in rather explicit terms, in Celie's letters to God.

In addition to the Pulitzer, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison share the honor of having their books banned from various school libraries throughout the U.S.A. for the usual reasons of sex and violence. "Beloved" (1987), in which a runaway slave named Sethe kills her own daughter, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. "The Bluest Eye" is Morrison's first novel and deals with themes of racism, beauty standards, and incest. "Song of Solomon" (1977), about the life of a black man in Michigan, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.

Answer: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad)

"Cien años de soledad" (1967) as it is known in Spanish, exemplifies the prominence of magical realism in the Latin American Boom of the 1960s-70s. In this novel about many generations of the Buendía family, Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) artfully blends the fantastic with the realistic by relating extraordinary events in a mundane fashion.

Isabel Allende also embraced magical realism in "La casa de los espíritus" (1982), her debut novel, and "La ciudad de las bestias" (2002). "Paula" (1994), however, is more of an epistolary memoir written to her comatose daughter, although it does incorporate elements from her first novel (which began as a letter to her grandfather). In 2007, "Latino Leaders Magazine" called Allende the third-most influential Latino leader in the world. She received the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

Answer: The Edible Woman

"The Edible Woman" (1969) is the first novel by Canadian poet and businesswoman Margaret Atwood (b. 1939). This protofeminist work, critical of consumerist culture, centers on a market researcher who stops eating and nearly loses her mind when it seems her controlling lover is metaphorically cannibalizing her.

Many novels by John Grisham are suspenseful books about the legal profession, as he practiced criminal law for nearly ten years, only stopping after "The Firm" (1991) became a bestseller. He continued to write opinions about legal issues such as the death penalty and the systemic problem of wrongful convictions in the U.S.A., a cause célèbre of his. "The Firm", "The Pelican Brief" (1992), and "The Runaway Jury" (1996) have all been made into Hollywood movies.