American Literature Quiz 1

Posted in art and literature quizzes

  1. 'A Farewell to Arms' is based on Hemingway's own experience as what in World War I?
  2. What is a novel by Herman Melville and an opera by Benjamin Britten?
  3. In which Tennessee Williams play do you meet Big Daddy?
  4. Holden Caulfield appears in which, once controversial, novel?
  5. Where are most of Pearl S. Buck's novels set?
  6. What is the setting for Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea'?
  7. Who wrote 'The Maltese Falcon'?
  8. In which Arthur Miller play do you meet Willy Loman?
  9. Who wrote,'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'?
  10. Where were Robert Frost's poems first published?
  11. Which dramatist wrote 'Long Day's Journey Into Night'?
  12. Which poet spent time in a US mental hospital after supporting Mussolini and the Fascists in World War II?
  13. Who died at the age of 44 with his novel 'The Last Tycoon' unfinished?
  14. Who coined the phrase 'the lost generations'?
  15. Whose most famous novel is 'The Carpetbaggers'?
  16. Which US-born novelist lived much of his life in France and England and became a British citizen in 1915?
  17. Who wrote the short story 'I Robot' in 1950?
  18. Who wrote the 'Leatherstocking' tales of frontier life with their hero Natty Bumpo?
  19. Whose novels are about social conditions in his native California?
  20. Who wrote plays with a political theme such as 'The Little Foxes'?
  21. Whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens?
  22. Which character appears in all nine of Raymond Chandler's novels?
  23. Against what is Hemingway's 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' set?
  24. Which US poet married Ted Hughes, later poet laureate?
  25. Which Norman Mailer novel is based on a protest march?
  26. Which Arthur Miller play is a comment on McCarthyism?
  27. Which screenplay did Miller write for his wife Marilyn Monroe?
  28. What is L. Frank Baum's most famous story?
  29. What type of writing is Paul Theroux associated with other than novels?
  30. Who wrote the story of Rip van Winkle?

ANSWERS

  1. Ambulance driver
  2. Billy Budd
  3. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
  4. Catcher In The Rye
  5. China
  6. Cuba
  7. Dashiel Hammett
  8. Death of a Salesman
  9. Edward Albee
  10. England
  11. Eugene O'Neill
  12. Ezra Pound
  13. F. Scott Fitzgerald
  14. Gertrude Stein
  15. Harold Robbins
  16. Henry James
  17. Isaac Asimov
  18. James Fenimore Cooper
  19. John Steinbeck
  20. Lillian Hellman
  21. Mark Twain
  22. Philip Marlowe
  23. Spanish Civil War
  24. Sylvia Plath
  25. The Armies of the Night
  26. The Crucible
  27. The Misfits
  28. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
  29. Travel
  30. Washington Irving