I was trying to think of something a bit more fun and lighthearted than my usual fare to post while many of us are hunkered down at home for the foreseeable future. After mulling over a few different ideas I decided to throw this literary pub quiz together. The quiz is out of 50 and the points are awarded as described in each section. To see the answers simply hover over the question (or scroll to the bottom of the page for a PDF version of the whole quiz).

Enjoy, and make sure to let me know how you do!

Closed Captions (10 Points)

What are the oft-omitted sub-titles of the following texts? 1 point each.

  1. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
  2. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
  3. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
  4. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
  5. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five
  6. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela
  7. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousands Leagues Under the Seas
  8. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty
  9. J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
  10. Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard

Small Type, Big Screen (30 Points)

Name the author of the original work and the director of its big-screen adaptation. 1 point for the author and another for the director.

  1. A Clockwork Orange
  2. The Fellowship of the Ring
  3. Sense and Sensibility
  4. Trainspotting
  5. To Kill A Mockingbird
  6. Gone Girl
  7. Inherent Vice
  8. Little Women
  9. The Wizard of Oz
  10. The Princess Bride
  11. No Country for Old Men
  12. Metropolis
  13. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
  14. 12 Years a Slave
  15. Strangers on a Train

Oooh, Shiny! (5 Points)

Bits and bobs of literary prize trivia. 1 point each.

  1. Name one of the four authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice.
  2. Name one of only 4 Black authors to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  3. The Booker Prize is named after Booker, McConnell Ltd, a company famous for what?
  4. The World Fantasy Award changed their trophy to a tree and moon after outcry about the racism of which famous author whose bust previously adorned the award?
  5. Where do the annually awarded science fiction and fantasy Hugo Awards get their name from?

You Don’t Say? (5 Points)

Minutiae and oddities of the literary world. 1 point each.

  1. Who is the most adapted novelist in film and television history?
  2. Douglas Adams does not refer to his five-book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy collection as a series or pentalogy. Instead, he describes it as what?
  3. Charlotte Brontë’s early writing, including her first novel, The Professor, were initially submitted to publishers under what nom de plume?
  4. What is the longest novel ever published?
  5. Which famous writer of detective fiction was a staunch spiritualist, and in 1920 penned an article defending the veracity of the Cottingley Fairies?

If you would rather print a version off or for some reason the hover text isn’t working, you can download a (slightly dated) PDF copy of the quiz right here.