• 1. 
    Who is Allen Stewart Konigsberg better known as?

  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • Junot Díaz
  • Bob Dylan
  • Woody Allen
  • 2. 
    What 19th-century poet wrote The Song of Hiawatha?

  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • Emily Dickinson
  • Walt Whitman
  • James Fenimore Cooper
  • 3. 
    The novel Death Comes for the Archbishop recounts the story of French Catholic missionaries in the southwestern United States. Who wrote it?

  • Laura Ingalls Wilder
  • Lucy Maud Montgomery
  • Willa Cather
  • Louisa May Alcott
  • 4. 
    Who is the main character of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter?

  • Arthur Dimmesdale
  • Roger Chillingworth
  • Hester Prynne
  • Pearl
  • 5. 
    What writer of the Harlem Renaissance studied anthropology at Columbia University and did fieldwork in the American South?

  • Langston Hughes
  • Claude McKay
  • W.E.B. Du Bois
  • Zora Neale Hurston
  • 6. 
    Whose novel Wise Blood, published in 1952, explored the “religious consciousness without a religion”?

  • Dorothy Parker’s
  • Edna Ferber’s
  • Flannery O’Connor’s
  • Margaret Mitchell’s
  • 7. 
    Which of these writers perished in 1850, at age 40, in a shipwreck off the coast of New York?

  • Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Anne Bradstreet
  • Louisa May Alcott
  • Margaret Fuller
  • 8. 
    Who created the amateur detective Ezekiel (“Easy”) Rawlins?

  • Sue Grafton
  • Patricia Highsmith
  • Walter Mosley
  • Ralph Ellison
  • 9. 
    What was the pen name of William Sidney Porter?

  • Vernon Lee
  • Amanda Cross
  • Saki
  • O. Henry
  • 10. 
    The novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1932. Who wrote it?

  • Edith Wharton
  • Pearl Buck
  • Eudora Welty
  • Margaret Mitchell
  • 11. 
    Which American writer is considered the originator of the modern detective story?

  • Herman Melville
  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Mark Twain
  • 12. 
    Who created the mythical Mississippi community Yoknapatawpha County, which depicted the transformation and decadence of the American South?

  • Truman Capote
  • William Faulkner
  • Tennessee Williams
  • Flannery O’Connor
  • 13. 
    Whose first two novels were The Natural and The Assistant?

  • Stephen King
  • Miguel de Cervantes
  • Bernard Malamud
  • George Sand
  • 14. 
    Which writer helped create the local-colour school in American fiction?

  • Sam Lawson
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Edward Eggleston
  • Bret Harte
  • 15. 
    Who directed the movie Shaft, wrote the novel The Learning Tree, and was the first African American to be staff photographer for Life magazine?

  • Huddie Ledbetter
  • Gordon Parks
  • Harry Belafonte
  • James Van Der Zee
  • 16. 
    Who wrote the children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are?

  • Edward Lear
  • Maurice Sendak
  • Robert McCloskey
  • Edward Gorey
  • 17. 
    What novelist created the lawyer-detective Perry Mason?

  • Ian Fleming
  • Erle Stanley Gardner
  • Josephine Bell
  • Agatha Christie
  • 18. 
    What author and Merry Prankster was a subject of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?

  • Gary Snyder
  • Ken Kesey
  • Frank Zappa
  • Angela Davis
  • 19. 
    The title of a novel published in 1961 entered the English language as a reference to a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem. What’s the novel?

  • The Tommyknockers
  • Fish or Cut Bait
  • Catch-22
  • Nineteen Eighty-four
  • 20. 
    What biochemist wrote the Foundation trilogy?

  • Octavia E. Butler
  • Isaac Asimov
  • Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Robert A. Heinlein
  • 21. 
    Who wrote the autobiographical Black Boy?

  • Langston Hughes
  • James Baldwin
  • Malcolm X
  • Richard Wright
  • 22. 
    Who presented her philosophy of objectivism in the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged?

  • Gertrude Stein
  • Joyce Carol Oates
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Ayn Rand
  • 23. 
    Who considered a story’s structure his main concern and stated that plot, character, and theme are “the true enemies of the novel”?

  • Ha Jin
  • John Hawkes
  • Lillian Hellman
  • Mark Twain
  • 24. 
    Who wrote the children’s classic Hans Brinker?

  • Frances Hodgson Burnett
  • Louisa May Alcott
  • Mary Mapes Dodge
  • Maurice Sendak
  • 25. 
    Which novelist is known for his depiction of the Jazz Age?

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Henry James
  • William Faulkner
  • Sandra Cisneros
  • 26. 
    Which of these works by Norman Mailer was hailed at its publication as one of the finest American novels to come out of World War II?

  • Tough Guys Don’t Dance
  • An American Dream
  • The Naked and the Dead
  • The Armies of the Night
  • 27. 
    Who wrote The Member of the Wedding (1946)?

  • Carson McCullers
  • Gwendolyn Brooks
  • Eudora Welty
  • Carl Hiaasen
  • 28. 
    Who wrote the first book released by a major publisher to portray Orthodox Judaism in the United States?

  • Chaim Potok
  • Saul Bellow
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • Thomas Pynchon
  • 29. 
    The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved are novels by which writer?

  • Ralph Ellison
  • James Baldwin
  • Toni Morrison
  • Lorraine Hansberry
  • 30. 
    Who wrote the autobiographical volumes Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn?

  • Emily Dickinson
  • Stephen King
  • James Baldwin
  • Henry Miller
  • 31. 
    Which of these writers was initially known as an interpreter of New Orleans culture but was rediscovered in the late 20th century because of her concerns about the freedom of women?

  • Amy Tan
  • Alice Walker
  • Willa Cather
  • Kate Chopin
  • 32. 
    Who wrote Leaves of Grass?

  • Louise Erdrich
  • Phillis Wheatley
  • Walt Whitman
  • Robert Frost
  • 33. 
    The author of The Devil’s Dictionary disappeared in Mexico in 1913, his final fate unknown. Who was he?

  • Zane Grey
  • Ambrose Bierce
  • Mark Twain
  • Nathanael West
  • 34. 
    Who wrote a series of books about her Midwestern childhood, notably Little House on the Prairie, that became a successful television series in the 1970s and ’80s?

  • Louisa May Alcott
  • Laura Ingalls Wilder
  • Toni Morrison
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • 35. 
    Which of the following did Saul Bellow write?

  • The Naked and the Dead
  • Seize the Day
  • Leaves of Grass
  • Beloved
  • 36. 
    Which river in North America is the setting for the novel Huckleberry Finn?

  • Monongahela River
  • Arkansas River
  • Mississippi River
  • Missouri River
  • 37. 
    Who first achieved fame with Goodbye, Columbus and was later awarded the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral?

  • Philip Roth
  • Tennessee Williams
  • Amiri Baraka
  • Suzan-Lori Parks
  • 38. 
    What short-story writer from Jackson, Mississippi, produced the memoir One Writer’s Beginnings from a series of lectures she gave at Harvard?

  • Flannery O’Connor
  • Eudora Welty
  • Zelda Fitzgerald
  • Carson McCullers
  • 39. 
    Which of these authors is known for the rags-to-riches formula he followed in more than 100 books?

  • Herman Melville
  • Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • Mark Twain
  • Horatio Alger
  • 40. 
    Which American-born novelist’s fundamental theme dwelt on the clash between the innocence and exuberance of the New World and the corruption and wisdom of the Old World?

  • Kate Chopin
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Henry James
  • William Faulkner
  • 41. 
    Which novel by Robert Penn Warren, about the rise and fall of Willie Stark, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947?

  • At Heaven’s Gate
  • The Thin Man
  • All the King’s Men
  • The Sound and the Fury
  • 42. 
    Which novel by John Updike features a former star athlete who is unable to recapture success when bound by marriage and small-town life and flees responsibility?

  • Trust Me
  • Bech: A Book
  • Pigeon Feathers
  • Rabbit, Run
  • 43. 
    Who wrote Life Among the Piutes, released in 1883 and among the few works by Native Americans published at that time?

  • Sherman Alexie
  • Sarah Winnemucca
  • Metacom
  • Paula Gunn Allen
  • 44. 
    Who was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

  • Eugene O’Neill
  • Sinclair Lewis
  • Ernest Hemingway
  • William Faulkner
  • 45. 
    Who wrote the novels Home to Harlem and Banjo?

  • Claude McKay
  • Richard Wright
  • James Baldwin
  • Zora Neale Hurston
  • 46. 
    Who wrote the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”?

  • Robert Penn Warren
  • Ernest Hemingway
  • Thomas Wolfe
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • 47. 
    In which work by J.D. Salinger is Holden Caulfield a character?

  • Franny and Zooey
  • Seymour: An Introduction
  • The Catcher in the Rye
  • Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
  • 48. 
    Who wrote the novel The House of the Seven Gables, which fictionalizes the legend of a curse placed on the author’s family?

  • Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Louisa May Alcott
  • Sylvia Townsend Warner
  • Stephen King
  • 49. 
    Who wrote the short story “Rip Van Winkle”?

  • William Cullen Bryant
  • Horace Greeley
  • Robert Penn Warren
  • Washington Irving
  • 50. 
    Who wrote the novel The Bell Jar?

  • Gwendolyn Brooks
  • Sylvia Plath
  • William Carlos Williams
  • Henry Miller
  • 51. 
    Which of John Steinbeck’s works is about the complex bond between two migrant labourers?

  • Of Mice and Men
  • Tortilla Flat
  • Cup of Gold
  • The Grapes of Wrath
  • 52. 
    Who, writing under the name Genêt, was the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker magazine for nearly half a century?

  • Ernest Hemingway
  • Josephine Baker
  • Janet Flanner
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • 53. 
    Whose novels were known as the Leatherstocking Tales?

  • Margaret Fuller’s
  • James Fenimore Cooper’s
  • Herman Melville’s
  • Ida Tarbell’s
  • 54. 
    Which writer named his estate near Hollywood Tarzana, after his most popular character?

  • Edgar Rice Burroughs
  • Horatio Alger
  • Robert Frost
  • Petroleum V. Nasby
  • 55. 
    Who was sometimes known in the United States as the “Jewish Mark Twain”?

  • Isaac Bashevis Singer
  • Sholem Aleichem
  • Woody Allen
  • Chaim Grade
Report Question
warning
access_time
  Time