Think you know everything under the sun about literature and books?
Are you a literature enthusiast? Do you have what it takes to answer our carefully curated literature trivia questions about books, authors, and characters across different storylines? If so, this article is perfect for you!
Here are 100+ literature trivia questions and answers that will test your knowledge of the great works of literature. From classic novels to modern fantasy, these questions cover all genres and eras of literature. Ready to put your skills to the test?
See how many of these literature trivia questions you can answer correctly!
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100 Literature Trivia Questions and Answers For Bookworms
A story conveying a moral lesson is called what?
Answer: A fable.
Who is the creator of the classic book characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn?
Answer: Mark Twain.
What are the names of the main characters in The Three Musketeers?
Answer: Athos, Porthos, and Aramis.
Which thoroughbred’s victory over War Admiral in a 1938 race is immortalized in a runaway bestseller that had sold six million copies as of 2010?
Answer: Sea Biscuit.
What Philip Roth novel about a black professor living as a white man was adapted into a 2003 film with Anthony Hopkins?
Answer: The Human Stain.
What film based on a book about segregated maids in Mississippi cast Octavia Spencer in an Academy Award-winning role?
Answer: The Help.
Whose recently unearthed manuscript, What Pet Should I Get, was published in 2015 for kids, 24 years after his death?
Answer: Dr. Seuss.
Who is the author of Tom Sawyer?
Answer: Mark Twain.
What master of the macabre wrote the first detective story in 1841, The Murders in the Rue Morgue?
Answer: Edgar Allen Poe.
What author of the 1971 book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first nonfiction bestseller by a black woman, died in 2014?
Answer: Maya Angelou.
What Athens-born media mogul argued that there’s more to life than the relentless pursuit of success in her 2014 book, Thrive?
Answer: Arianna Huffington.
What children’s book about a little girl at NYC’s Plaza Hotel is the subject of a 2015 HBO film short by Lena Dunham of Girls?
Answer: Eloise.
What hotel is Jack hired as caretaker of (and later possesses him) in Stephen King’s The Shining?
Answer: The Overlook Hotel.
In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, what does the monster allegedly need from his home country to stay healthy?
Answer: Dirt.
Frankenstein’s monster is often depicted as pyrophobic, fearing what?
Answer: Fire.
What three-word book sums up the 2010 Julia Roberts film about traveling to Italy, India, and Bali to find oneself?
Answer: Eat Pray Love.
What city is the post-apocalyptic setting for the three Divergent novels that star Shailene Woodley in the film adaptations?
Answer: Chicago.
Which author, a former pharmaceuticals salesman, published a romantic novel in 1995 called The Notebook?
Answer: Nicholas Sparks.
Who is the author of The Great Gatsby?
Answer: F. Scott Fitzgerald.
What Facebook COO started a national conversation about the challenges that working women face in her 2013 book, Lean In?
Answer: Sheryl Sandberg.
What early 20th-century British author of the novel Mrs. Dalloway is played by Nicole Kidman in the 2002 film The Hours?
Answer: Virginia Woolf.
Author Stephen King is said to have made many people coulrophobic, having a fear of what?
Answer: Clowns.
Holden Caulfield, an icon for teenage angst and rebellion, is a fictional character in which American literary classic?
Answer: The Catcher in the Rye.
Which book, first published in 1605, has sold more than 300 million copies worldwide?
Answer: Don Quixote.
Chronologically, this novel comes first in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series.
Answer: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Who wrote the original Alice in Wonderland, and what was the original title?
Answer: Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
In which state do Mark Twain’s characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn live?
Answer: Missouri.
Who wrote the international bestseller, The Alchemist?
Answer: Paulo Coelho.
Which story authored by Washington Irving has the character Ichabod Crane?
Answer: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
Who is the author of The Grapes of Wrath?
Answer: John Steinbeck.
What bestseller about a book-loving young girl in Nazi Germany was made into a 2014 film with Geoffrey Rush?
Answer: The Book Thief.
Who collaborated with his daughter Lucy, in 2007, to write the children’s book George’s Secret Key to the Universe?
Answer: Steven Hawking.
The hero Beowulf faces a monster known by what name?
Answer: Grendel.
Which book features the characters of Scout and Atticus Finch?
Answer: To Kill A Mockingbird.
What poet wrote the following lines: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I… I took the one less traveled by”?
Answer: Robert Frost.
Who wrote the book The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?
Answer: Robert Louis Stevenson.
What Pakistani winner of the Nobel Peace Prize published her autobiography in 2013, when she was just 16 years old?
Answer: Malala Yousafzai (I Am Malala).
What tech genius authorized Walter Isaacson to write his biography, granting him 40 interviews before his death in 2011?
Answer: Steve Jobs.
Which of these mighty warriors was dipped in the River Styx as a baby, making him nearly invulnerable — Achilles, Hercules, Hermes, or Odysseus?
Answer: Achilles.
Icarus, using wings designed by his father, died because of what?
Answer: He flew too close to the sun.
Which author’s breakthrough book was described by Salman Rushdie as a ‘book so bad it makes bad books look good’?
Answer: Dan Brown.
What 1969 novel about an ocean liner capsized by a rogue wave was adapted for the screen three times, including a 2006 film starring Richard Dreyfuss?
Answer: The Poseidon Adventure.
Who is the author of The Handmaid’s Tale?
Answer: Margaret Atwood.
In what state was the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden, with 30 bronze statues of his characters, created in 2002?
Answer: Massachusetts (he was born in Springfield).
What book of 12 short stories by ex-Marine Phil Klay addresses the soul-sucking effects of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Answer: Redeployment.
What animal is named Richard Parker in The Life of Pi, a novel that was eventually made into a 2012 film?
Answer: Tiger.
In 1594, William Shakespeare joined the company of what London theatre?
Answer: The Globe Theatre.
Which Italian novel for children has been adapted into over 240 languages?
Answer: The Adventures of Pinocchio.
Which short adventure novel is about a sled dog named Buck?
Answer: Call of the Wild.
“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.” This is a quote from what bestselling book?
Answer: The Alchemist.
Which of Shakespeare’s plays features a sorcerer named Prospero?
Answer: The Tempest.
Prometheus faced eternal punishment for stealing what from the gods?
Answer: Fire.
What effect did Medusa’s gaze have on people?
Answer: It turned them to stone.
In what unusual way was Athena born?
Answer: She sprang out of Zeus’ head.
Which Dr. Seuss book uses no more than 50 different words–Yertle the Turtle, Green Eggs and Ham, or The Lorax?
Answer: Green Eggs and Ham.
Which NFL football team does Pat Solitano support in the 2008 book and 2012 movie, The Silver Linings Playbook?
Answer: Philidelphia Eagles.
What fictional tale is based on the real-life sinking of the Essex by a whale in 1820, as told in the nonfiction book, In the Heart of the Sea?
Answer: Moby Dick.
What book, about an 11-year-old girl who seeks out a parallel universe in her Victorian house, got an Oscar nomination for best-animated feature in 2010?
Answer: Coraline.
What 19th-century poet, who penned Paul Revere’s Ride, was immortalized on a 39-cent stamp in 2007?
Answer: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
What U.S. state has horror writer Stephen King set many of his novels and short stories in?
Answer: Maine.
Whose book The Minpins was published in 1991, a few months after the author’s death in 1990?
Answer: Roald Dahl.
What author became famous for his six-volume biography of Lincoln?
Answer: Carl Sandburg.
“Anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for.” This is a quote from what book?
Answer: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
What novel is set on a desert planet inhabited by giant sandworms?
Answer: Dune.
Who wrote Rip Van Winkle?
Answer: Washington Irving.
Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of The Hunger Games, has a younger sister–what is her name?
Answer: Primrose Everdeen.
This story, written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, follows a young prince who visits various planets in space and addresses themes of loneliness, friendship, love, and loss.
Answer: The Little Prince.
Because so few women in the Republic of Gilead are fertile, “handmaids” are enlisted to bear the children of the ruling class. This plot belongs to which bestselling novel?
Answer: The Handmaid’s Tale.
Who wrote Les Misérables?
Answer: Victor Hugo.
_____ by Marcus Pfister is a book about a unique fish with shimmering scales.
Answer: The Rainbow Fish.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” This famous first sentence opens which Dickens novel?
Answer: A Tale of Two Cities.
What dystopian novel by George Orwell told of life in a future totalitarian state dominated by “Big Brother”?
Answer: 1984.
In what language was Don Quixote originally written?
Answer: Spanish.
What writer had more than 70 different pen names?
Answer: Lauran Bosworth Paine.
What 2002 prize-winning novel by British writer Ian McEwan was made into an Oscar-nominated film with Keira Knightly and James McAvoy?
Answer: Atonement.
What bird, part jabber jay and part mockingbird, is the title of the third book in The Hunger Games series, released in 2010?
Answer: Mockingjay.
Who is the author of The Haunting of Hill House, a novel about a house rife with supernatural horrors?
Answer: Shirley Jackson.
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents” is the opening line from which classic novel?
Answer: Little Women.
At the beginning of Lord of the Flies, what are the kids’ only means of making fire?
Answer: Piggy’s glasses.
What classic book written by Oscar Wilde has to do with immortality?
Answer: The Picture of Dorian Gray.
In 2022, as a protest against the banning (and even burning) of books, a fireproof version of this novel was sold at auction.
Answer: The Handmaid’s Tale.
Alice Walker’s The Color Purple is controversial partly because protagonist Celie defies sexual conventions in what way?
Answer: She falls in love with a woman.
What children’s novel features the characters Tweedledee and Tweedledum?
Answer: Alice Through the Looking Glass.
George Orwell wrote this novel about Communist Russia. While it’s been a perennial influence in the States, a number of countries—including Cuba and North Korea—have banned it. What is this book?
Answer: Animal Farm.
In The Great Gatsby, what is the narrator’s relationship to Daisy?
Answer: They are cousins.
In The Scarlet Letter, how does everyone know Hester Prynne committed adultery?
Answer: She becomes pregnant while her husband is out at sea.
Which actor played the role of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, adapted from the book written by F. Scott Fitzgerald?
Answer: Leonardo DiCaprio.
Who wrote the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960?
Answer: Harper Lee.
Which famous character was visited by three ghosts on Christmas Day?
Answer: Ebenezer Scrooge.
What is the name of Jane Austen’s last unfinished novel?
Answer: Sanditon.
What is the general name of the style of book that uses a second-person perspective and turned the reader into the one deciding the outcome of the book?
Answer: Choose Your Own Adventure.
John Steinbeck penned which classroom classic about two migrant ranch workers who move from place to place in California in search of new job opportunities during the Great Depression in the United States?
Answer: Of Mice And Men.
Author Dalton Trumbo voluntarily suspended the publication of what WWI novel in the lead-up to WWII because of its anti-war message?
Answer: Johnny Got His Gun.
In Grapes of Wrath, immigrants travel to California from what dustbowl-ravaged state?
Answer: Oklahoma.
In San Francisco, a group of aging Chinese women meets regularly to trade familial stories while playing Mahjong. What book is this the plot of?
Answer: The Joy Luck Club.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, an authoritarian government controls people by doing what?
Answer: Burning books.
When Jacob Jankowski jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world filled with drifters and misfits at a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression. What novel is this plot from?
Answer: Water for Elephants.
What is the term used to describe a section or speech at the end of a book or play that serves as a comment on or a conclusion to what has happened?
Answer: An epilogue.
What is the term used to describe a long speech by one actor in a play or movie, or as part of a theatrical program?
Answer: A monologue.
A man is wrongly imprisoned for 13 years, where he plots revenge against those who betrayed him. He escapes the island and proceeds to transform himself into a wealthy man of power as part of his plan to exact revenge. What novel is this?
Answer: The Count of Monte Cristo.
And that about sums up our Literature Trivia Questions And Answers quiz. How was it–too easy? Too hard? Let us know in the comments!
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