There’s nothing quite like curling up with a good book and losing yourself in another world. If you’re an avid reader, check out these fun literature trivia questions and answers and see just how well-read you really are!
40 Literature Trivia Questions
Challenge your literary knowledge with these 40 literature trivia questions and answers. How many will you get right?
1. What was the name of Sherlock Holmes’ arch enemy?
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Professor Moriarty.
2. What is the name of the villain who commands a gang of boy pickpockets in Charles Dicken’s “Oliver Twist”?
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Fagin.
3. What was the colorful surname of the family who took in Paddington Bear?
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Brown.
4. In Edward Lear’s poem, what was the color of the boat in which the Owl and the Pussycat went to sea?
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Pea-green.
5. Which author wrote the spy novel “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”?
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John Le Carre.
6. Which Irish poet, born in 1865, was instrumental in the founding of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin?
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William Butler Yeats.
7. What is the name of the dead court jester in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”?
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Yorick.
8. How many lines does a Haiku poem have?
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Three.
9. Which leading English poet of World War One was killed in action one week before the end of the war?
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Wilfred Owen.
10. In Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”, the pilgrims are travelling to visit the shrine of which saint?
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Saint Thomas Becket.
11. The author Daniel Handler is best known for his children’s books published under which pseudonym?
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Lemony Snicket.
12. Which Russian author wrote the classic novel “Anna Karenina”?
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Leo Tolstoy.
13. Atticus Finch is the name of the narrator’s father in which classic novel, first published in 1960?
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To Kill a Mockingbird.
14. In the novel by Cervantes, what is the name of the simple farmer who Don Quixote recruits to be his squire?
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Sancho Panza.
15. Which Charlotte Bronte novel was first published in October, 1847 under the pen name “Currer Bell”?
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Jane Eyre.
16. What nationality is the author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, famed for his 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”?
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Colombian.
17. Which French novelist wrote the seven volume novel “In Search of Lost Time” (often also translated as “Remembrance of Times Past”)?
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Marcel Proust.
18. Which James Joyce novel chronicles a day in the life of Leopold Bloom?
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Ulysses.
19. Holden Caulfield is the antihero of which 1945 classic book?
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Catcher in the Rye.
20. In Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, what is the name of the pompous clergyman who marries Elizabeth’s elder sister Charlotte?
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Mr. Collins.
21. Which war novel follows the life of Captain John Yossarian?
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Catch-22.
22. How is the author Eric Arthur Blair better know?
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George Orwell.
23. Charles Marlow is the narrator of which Joseph Conrad novella?
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Heart of Darkness.
24. Which George Eliot novel is set in a fictitious Midlands town in the UK between 1829 and 1832?
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Middlemarch.
25. Which F. Scott Fitzgerald novel follows the lives of characters living in the fictitious Long Island towns of West Egg and East Egg during the summer of 1922?
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The Great Gatsby.
26. What is the name of Captain Ahab’s whaling ship in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”?
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Pequod.
27. Humbert Humbert is the protagonist and narrator of which controversial novel?
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Lolita.
28. In William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, what is the name of the King of the Fairies?
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Oberon.
29. Which former Prime Minister of Great Britain was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953?
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Winston Churchill.
30. In Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels”, what is the name of the island inhabited by tiny people that Gulliver is washed up on after his first voyage is shipwrecked?
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Lilliput.
31. Which 1996 novel by Nicholas Sparks begins with an old man called Noah Calhoun reading to a woman in a nursing home?
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The Notebook.
32. What was Mark Twain’s sequel to “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”?
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
33. What was the name of the first book in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” series?
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Little House in the Big Woods.
34. Which American author wrote the novel “The Color Purple”?
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Alice Walker.
35. Which semi-autobiographical novel by James Baldwin tells the story of John Grimes, a Harlem teenager in the 1930s?
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Go Tell It on the Mountain.
36. What is the name of Emily Bronte’s only completed novel?
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Wuthering Heights.
37. Which American writer and poet’s only novel was “The Bell Jar”?
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Sylvia Plath.
38. “Leaves of Grass”, first published in 1855, is a poetry collection by which American poet?
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Walt Whitman.
39. Which writer was the author of the 1976 book “Roots: The Saga of an American Family”?
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Alex Haley.
40. Snowball and Napoleon are pigs who appear in which George Orwell novel?
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Animal Farm.
More Trivia Questions
If you enjoyed these literature trivia questions and answers, be sure to check out the rest of LaffGaff for lots more free trivia questions, including these:
