Literary Prizes, First Lines & Bookish Facts Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which 1877 novel opens: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way?

Question 2

Which figure, better known for other work entirely, won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature, cited for his mastery of historical and biographical description and for brilliant oratory in defending human values?

Question 3

Which 1952 novella opens: He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish?

Question 4

Which library, refounded at Oxford in 1602 by a returning diplomat, is one of a handful in Britain and Ireland legally entitled to claim a free copy of every book published there, and has never lent a volume, not even to a king who asked?

Question 5

Which institution, founded in 1800 to serve American legislators and rebuilt with Thomas Jefferson's own book collection after the British burned the first one, is now the largest library in the world by shelf space and the closest thing the United States has to a national library?

Question 6

Which American writer published a single novel in 1960, a story of childhood and a racially charged trial in a small Alabama town, won the Pulitzer Prize, and then published nothing else for fifty-five years?

Question 7

Which French award, given since 1903 by a ten-member academy that meets over lunch at a Paris restaurant, is the most coveted in the language despite a cash value of only about ten euros, because it reliably turns the winning novel into a huge bestseller?

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About Literary Prizes, First Lines & Bookish Facts

This quiz is the last in the Literature and Books set, and it is about the book world itself: the prizes that crown novels, the opening lines readers know by heart, and the lore of publishing, libraries, censorship, hoaxes and records. Eighty questions, each describing a prize, quoting a first sentence, or setting out a fact, and asking you to name it from four choices, then explaining it. Only world-level material is used.

The first pack covers the five great prizes, the Nobel, the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Women's Prize and the Prix Goncourt, and the most famous openings in fiction, from Call me Ishmael and It is a truth universally acknowledged to the clocks striking thirteen and the colonel facing the firing squad.

The second pack widens to more awards and prize stories, the National Book Award, the International Booker, the Cervantes and Jnanpith and Miles Franklin prizes, Alfred Nobel's change of heart, Sartre's refusal, Pasternak's forced decline, Churchill's win, the Tolstoy snub, the posthumous Pulitzer for A Confederacy of Dunces, and Max Brod's disobedience, then into book history and craft, the Gutenberg Bible, the incunable, the Penguin paperback, samizdat, the blurb, the roman a clef, the epistolary novel, in medias res, the pen name, the three-decker, the Bodleian and Library of Congress, Dewey and the ISBN, more first lines, and the great censorship episodes.

The third pack is records, hoaxes and one-book authors: the most translated books, Ossian and the Hitler Diaries and Ern Malley, Romain Gary's double Goncourt, Harper Lee, Margaret Mitchell, Emily Bronte, Anna Sewell and the reclusive Salinger, the anonymous campaign novel, the longest novel, the book written without the letter e, the epigraph and dedication and colophon, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the November novel challenge, the Booker of Bookers, and the rediscovery of Stoner.

The wrong answers are always other prizes, books or terms of the same kind. Many questions carry a picture: where the answer is one of several works by a single writer, that writer's portrait appears, since it fits every option equally; elsewhere a neutral object, old books, a library, a quill, a typewriter, sits behind the question without pointing anywhere. Where a first line belongs to a book named elsewhere in the set, the question here asks only which book the words open, a different test, and the prizes and facts are almost all fresh ground. Between them the eight quizzes in this set now run from the classic novel and the writing life through Shakespeare, poetry, children's and young-adult books, science fiction and fantasy and crime fiction to the machinery of the book trade itself. Quotations, dates and attributions have been checked against standard reference works.