Prolific Authors Trivia Quiz

Answer: Maine

Three made-up Maine towns that appear in several works are Castle Rock ("Cujo", "The Dark Half", "Needful Things"), Jerusalem's Lot ("Salem's Lot", "Doctor Sleep") and Derry ("It", "Dreamcatcher", "11/22/63"). Another example of a fictitious Maine town is Chester's Mill, isolated from the rest of the world in "Under the Dome".

Answer: P G Wodehouse

Great characters all, and then we have not even mentioned his most famous creations: Jeeves and Wooster. P G Wodehouse's last completed novel, "Aunts Aren't Gentlemen", was published in 1974, one year before the great man died at the age of 94.

Answer: 4

The Famous Five books detail the adventures of three siblings (Julian, Dick and Anne), their cousin (Georgina, aka George) and George's dog (Timmy). I read as many of these books as I could get my hands on when I was around ten-eleven years old. Perhaps the greatest appeal to children is that the four of them could take care of themselves with no grownups around.

Answer: Elephant

The mechanical elephant pulls a house on wheels. The story is set in India in mid-19th century.

Together with H G Wells, Jules Verne is often named as the first science fiction writer. He lived in an era where there was much faith in technology's possibilities to create a better world. As is often the case with Sci Fi writers, he extrapolated the existing technology, which is why steam power features frequently as in the case of "The Steam House". Did you know that in "From the Earth to the Moon", the rocket cannon was placed in Florida, the same place as used by the Apollo program a hundred years later?

Answer: Tom Cruise

Perhaps not great literature, but I eagerly await each new Jack Reacher paperback. In the books, Reacher is 6 feet 5 inches tall, so the casting of 5 feet 7 inches tall Tom Cruise came as a bit of a surprise.

Answer: The longest running play in history

In 2012, it passed two notable milestones: sixty years and 25 000 performances. If you have seen it, you would have been asked not to reveal the ending. (I have not seen it, and do not know how it ends.) The short story on which the play is based is still not published in the UK, awaiting the cancellation of the show.

Agatha Christie's most lasting legacies have to be her unlikely sleuth Miss Marple and the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

Answer: Romance

Dame Barbara Cartland, who died in 2001 almost 99 years old, was one of Britain's most prolific authors. In 1983 alone, she wrote 23 books--a world record--and she was more than eighty years old at the time. Sources vary in their opinions, but she has sold more than one billion copies, perhaps as many as two billion.

Answer: Pulp fiction

Pulp fiction was most popular in the first half of the 20th century. The books provided cheap and easy reading to the masses. Quentin Tarantino chose to name is 1994 film "Pulp Fiction" since the storylines he used were reminiscent of the stories in old detective novels.

Nowadays, that sort of books seem to have disappeared. One could argue that authors like Stephen King and Lee Child, topics of earlier questions, are the natural successors: not as prolific, but with better quality, they are first of all providers of entertainment.

Answer: The pros and cons of suicide

Hamlet is a tortured soul indeed, and the play lets the audience know much about his internal dialogue. For the time, that was an unusual way to write a play; most plays were more action-driven.

Shakespeare is often credited with inventing a lot of words and phrases. The truth is probably that he was the first to put them in writing that outlived him and so his works are the earliest reference. Shakespeare lived at a time when the English language evolved a lot. But he did have a vocabulary that was bigger than what most of us have and his cultural influence is second to none.

Answer: one

Yes: the books mentioned as part of the question were not only these authors' most famous novels, they were their only novels.