Author Anagrams Trivia Quiz

Answer: William Shakespeare

Other appropriate anagrams of Shakespeare's name are "We all make his praise" and "A weakish speller, am I?" And Hamlet's celebrated line "Frailty, thy name is woman!" can be turned into "It's a whim of male tyranny!"

Answer: William Congreve

Congreve's first play, "The Old Bachelor," was written when he was 23 years old, and was a great success: it had incidental music by Henry Purcell. It was followed by "The Double Dealer," "Love for Love," and finally "The Way of the World." For the remaining 29 years of his life he wrote very little, probably because of poor health.

His leading female roles were written for Anne Bracegirdle, the leading actress of the day and probably his mistress (Congreve never married).

Answer: Thomas Paine

After an unsuccessful early life in England, Paine was persuaded by Benjamin Franklin to emigrate to Philadelphia, where he took up journalism and espoused the cause of independence. His "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis" did much to strengthen revolutionary feeling in America. Returning to England, he published "The Rights of Man," a defence of the principles of the French Revolution which caused him to be tried and sentenced to banishment for treason, but he had been warned of his impending arrest and had escaped to France.

He fell foul of the French revolutionaries by refusing to support the execution of King Louis XVI. Returning to America, he lived out his last years as a virtual outcast: his uncompromisingly radical views alienated the men he had supported.

After his death, William Cobbett brought his bones to England with a view to erecting a monument to him, but the bones were lost and no one knows where Paine's remains now lie.

Answer: Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle first came to notice with a biography of Friedrich Schiller and translations of Goethe and other German authors. His best known work is probably his three-volume "History of the French Revolution," published in 1837. In his early years he had radical political sympathies, expressed in "Chartism" and "Past and Present." Later he lost faith in democracy and yearned for the rule of a benevolent despot.

The house at 24 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, where he lived for nearly half a century, is open to the public.

Answer: Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Oxford Companion to American Literature summarizes Emerson's philosophy as "the great doctrine of a higher individualism, the spiritual nature of reality, the importance of self-reliance, the obedience to instinct, the obligation of optimism and hope, and the existence of a unifying Over-Soul which explains the many diverse phenomena of life." He is probably best remembered for saying that "If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door."

Answer: William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray's life was not one of the happiest. His father died when he was three years old; at nine he was sent to a boarding school which he detested; his wife suffered an incurable mental breakdown after four years of marriage, and he nursed a hopeless passion for a friend's wife.

His best known work is almost certainly "Vanity Fair."

Answer: William Butler Yeats

Among Yeats's early works are collections of Irish folk tales, including "The Celtic Twilight." As a young man he was deeply involved in the Irish cultural revival. His poem "Easter 1916" commemorates the men who were executed after the unsuccessful nationalist rising in that year. He served as a Senator of the Irish Free State in the 1920s and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Answer: Gertrude Stein

In her "Lectures in America," published in 1935, Ms Stein compares her repetitive style with the technique of motion pictures, in which each frame is only slightly different from the one before, but each frame advances the action.

Answer: Agatha Christie

Beginning with "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" in 1920, Ms Christie produced 66 detective novels as well as many short stories, more than a dozen plays and two volumes of verse. Under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott she wrote six romantic novels. The play "The Mousetrap," her own adaptation of her novelette "Three Blind Mice," has (at the time of writing) run for more than fifty years in the West End.

Answer: Ernest Hemingway

In the words of the Oxford Companion to American Literature, Hemingway "expressed the feelings of a war-wounded people disillusioned by the loss of faith and hope, and so thoroughly defeated by the collapse of former values that ... they could turn only to a stoic acceptance of primal emotions."

Answer: Henry Miller

Miller's early works, "Tropic of Cancer," "Tropic of Capricorn" and "Black Spring" were published in France while he was living there in the 1930s, but were too sexually explicit to be published in the US until the 1960s. For Miller, however, "more obscene than anything is inertia." He is widely seen as an important influence on the later Beat movement.

Answer: Elmer Rice

Rice's first successful play, "On Trial," used a flashback technique to present scenes that are described by witnesses at a trial: it also used a revolving stage. Later successes included "Street Scene," for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and "Judgment Day," about the burning of the Reichstag.

Answer: Dylan Thomas

Thomas is best known for his radio play "Under Milk Wood," which in its final form was broadcast posthumously in 1954 with Richard Burton as a memorable narrator. His early death, on a lecture tour of the USA, was hastened by alcoholism: according to some, his last words were "I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record."

Answer: Kingsley Amis

"Lucky Jim," published in 1954, was Amis's first novel (he had previously published two volumes of poetry), and it brought him immediate success. Although he is generally associated with this kind of satirical comedy, he also produced work in other genres, including "The Anti-Death League" (a spy story incorporating speculation about the existence of God), "The Green Man" (a novel of the supernatural) and "The Riverside Villas Murder" (a venture into the classic detective story mode).

Answer: Gore Vidal

Vidal's novels are often seen as falling into two categories - the historical works such as "Julian," "Burr" and "Lincoln," and the satirical works which he called "inventions," such as "Myra Breckinridge" and "Live from Golgotha." He has also written essays, TV plays, film scripts and (under the pseudonym Edgar Box) three murder mysteries.