Question 1
Which English poet settled in the Lake District, first at a tiny cottage in Grasmere, composed much of his verse aloud while walking many thousands of miles over the fells, and produced a landmark 1798 collection jointly with a close friend from whom he later became estranged?
Question 2
Which American writer, orphaned young and raised but never adopted by a Richmond merchant, got himself expelled from West Point on purpose, married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia, and lived in poverty and drink while inventing the detective story and shaping the modern tale of horror?
Question 3
Which French writer, a protege of Flaubert who published around three hundred short stories in barely a decade, made a grim joke of eating lunch at the restaurant in the newly built Eiffel Tower because it was the one place in Paris from which he could not see the thing?
Question 4
Which English writer, the daughter of two radical philosophers, ran away at 16 with a married poet, and two years later, during a wet summer by Lake Geneva, won a ghost-story contest with a tale begun as a waking nightmare that became one of the most famous novels ever written?
Question 5
Which French writer, the grandson of an enslaved woman from Saint-Domingue and a French nobleman, ran what amounted to a fiction factory, employing a team of collaborators, and was taken to court over how much of the work was really his?
Question 6
Which French philosopher and writer declined the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964, saying a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution, the only person ever to refuse it of his own free will?
Question 7
Which American writer worked for years as a book editor at a major New York publisher, championing Black authors, while raising two sons alone and writing her own fiction in the hours before dawn?
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