Woman walks into a bookstore and asks: “Where’s Thomas Wolfe?” Guy behind the counter looks blank. “Sony. He doesn’t work here.” Not funny, especially if you’re looking for some help in bookworm-ing your way through the vastness of a literary superstore. To see if , local booksellers practice what they preach, we gave the following literary-trivia quiz to teams from four great bookstotes-Barnes & Noble on Belt Line, Borders, Taylors at North Park, and Half-Price Books on Northwest Highway. Resident bibliophiles bad 50 minutes to answer all the questions, garnering two points for each question answered without reference books and one point for each answer requiring help. No partial credit. Try your hand, then see the answers at the bottom of the page.
1. Name the four novels in John Updike’s tetralogy, about Harry Angstrom. (Hint: all four titles share one word in common.)
2. George Orwell, Edgar Box, and Joseph Novak are the pseudonyms, respectively, of which authors?
3. Name the novel that served as the basis for the Civil War movie Gettysburg. And name its author.
4. In Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, what foodstuff inspires the narrator’s long journey into the past.7 (Hint: a Dallas restaurant chain)
5. Was it Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, or H. G. Wells who wrote the novel invisible Man? (Hint: the author , died in the 1990s.)
6. Name the American writer whose detective novels all have a color in the title-blue, tan, yellow, purple, etc. And name his fictional detective.
7. Identify this writer: Born in North Carolina, he went to Texas at age 19 to live on a sheep ranch, and then became an Austin bank teller. He left the state abruptly, spent some time in Honduras, but eventually returned to Texas where he was convicted of embezzlement and sent to an Ohio prison.
8. Name at least one of the novels in which the characters Charles Wallace and his sister Meg appear.
9. What writer lived in Key West with too many café with too many toes?
10. What Pulitzer Prize-winning novel gave the world Ignatius, the overweight hot dog vendor?
11. Was it Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, or some other Russian who wrote Fathers and Sons7.
12. Who is the most recent American author to win the Nobel Prize for literature?
13. Name the American writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. (Hint: think Louisiana.)
14. The British writers C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley both died on one of the most famous dates in American history. Give the day, month, and year. (Hint: think Dallas
15. A character in a Jack Kerouac novel shares a last name with Sherlock Holmes’ greatest enemy. What is it?
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