Quiz Category · Literature
Literature
Novels, authors, poetry, and literary history.
Test your familiarity with the books, writers, and movements that define world literature.
Most literature quizzes settle for matching famous novels to their authors and then call it a day. A better one expects you to do something closer to the work of a serious reader: notice which century a novel belongs to, recognise a translator, place a poem inside a movement, and remember that a writer is more than their best-known book. The catalog here covers world literature across the long sweep — the Greek epics and Sanskrit classics, medieval narrative, the European novel from Cervantes to Tolstoy, the American renaissance, modernism, Latin American magic realism, postcolonial writing — and Indian literature treated with its own seriousness: the Bhakti poets, Tagore and Premchand, the post-Independence English-language novel, Sahitya Akademi laureates across regional languages, and contemporary writers translated into English in the last two decades. Easy rounds cover the names every reading list returns to. Medium rounds expect knowledge of opening lines, narrators, settings, and the second novels of writers known for their first. Hard rounds reach for the year of publication, the original publisher, the title in the source language, and the lesser-known book that won a major prize. The category rewards readers who keep records — anyone who notes what they finish, and why.
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10 questions per round24 literature questions with answers
Across easy, medium and hard · reveal each answer to check yourself-
01 Who wrote 'Pride and Prejudice'? easy
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The correct answer is B. Jane Austen.
Jane Austen, published in 1813. It appeared anonymously, credited only to 'the author of Sense and Sensibility' — Austen's name was not attached to her novels publicly until after her death.
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02 What is the first book in the Harry Potter series? easy
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The correct answer is C. Philosopher's Stone.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997), retitled Sorcerer's Stone in the United States. The first print run was around 500 copies, most of which went to libraries.
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03 Who wrote '1984'? easy
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The correct answer is C. George Orwell.
George Orwell, published in 1949, the year before he died. The title is widely thought to invert 1948, the year he finished the manuscript, though Orwell never confirmed it.
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04 What is the longest novel ever written? easy
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The correct answer is D. Artamène.
Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–53), at roughly two million words across ten volumes. It was published under the name of Georges de Scudéry but is generally credited to his sister Madeleine.
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05 Who wrote 'The Great Gatsby'? easy
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The correct answer is B. F. Scott Fitzgerald.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, in 1925. It sold poorly in his lifetime — he died in 1940 believing himself a failure — and only became a fixture after cheap editions were distributed to American troops in the 1940s.
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06 What is the pen name of Samuel Clemens? easy
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The correct answer is A. Mark Twain.
Mark Twain, a riverboat call meaning two fathoms of depth: 'mark twain' signalled water safe enough to pass. Clemens had worked as a Mississippi steamboat pilot before writing.
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07 Who wrote 'To Kill a Mockingbird'? easy
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The correct answer is A. Harper Lee.
Harper Lee, published in 1960. It was her only published novel until Go Set a Watchman appeared in 2015 — an earlier draft of the same material, released to considerable controversy.
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08 Which Charles Dickens novel is the best-selling novel of all time? easy
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The correct answer is D. A Tale of Two Cities.
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09 Who wrote 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'? medium
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The correct answer is C. Gabriel García Márquez.
Gabriel García Márquez, in 1967. He wrote it in about eighteen months, reportedly selling household possessions to keep going, and it became the defining work of Latin American magical realism.
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10 What is the opening line of 'A Tale of Two Cities'? medium
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The correct answer is B. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times' — the start of a single sentence that runs on for over a hundred words, pairing opposites to set up a novel about two cities and two fates.
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11 Who wrote 'The Brothers Karamazov'? medium
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The correct answer is B. Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, completed in 1880, four months before his death. It was his last novel, and he had intended it as the first part of a larger work he never began.
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12 What is the name of the fictional language in '1984'? medium
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The correct answer is B. Newspeak.
Newspeak, designed to shrink vocabulary until dissenting thought becomes literally unsayable. Orwell appended an essay on its principles, written in the past tense — implying the regime eventually fell.
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13 Who wrote 'The Metamorphosis'? medium
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The correct answer is A. Franz Kafka.
Franz Kafka, published in 1915. He instructed his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts after his death; Brod ignored him, which is why The Trial and The Castle survive.
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14 What is the name of the narrator in 'The Great Gatsby'? medium
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The correct answer is C. Nick Carraway.
Nick Carraway, who tells the story while insisting on his own reliability — a claim the novel quietly undermines. He is Daisy's cousin and Gatsby's neighbour, positioned to see both worlds.
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15 Who wrote 'The Stranger' (L'Étranger)? medium
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The correct answer is B. Albert Camus.
Albert Camus, published in 1942. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 at 44, the second-youngest recipient, and died in a car crash three years later.
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16 What year was 'Ulysses' by James Joyce published? medium
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The correct answer is C. 1922.
1922, in Paris, after serialisation in an American magazine was halted on obscenity grounds. It was banned in the United States until a 1933 court ruling, and its events all take place on a single day: 16 June 1904.
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17 Who wrote 'Gravity's Rainbow'? hard
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The correct answer is B. Thomas Pynchon.
Thomas Pynchon, 1973. It shared the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer board overruled its own jury to give no prize at all that year. Pynchon sent a comedian to collect the award on his behalf.
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18 What is the name of the protagonist in 'The Trial' by Kafka? hard
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The correct answer is B. Josef K..
Josef K., arrested and prosecuted without ever learning the charge. The truncated surname is deliberate — he is given barely more identity than the process allows him.
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19 Who wrote 'The Sound and the Fury'? hard
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The correct answer is B. William Faulkner.
William Faulkner, 1929. Its first section is narrated by a man with severe cognitive disability and moves between time periods without warning, which is why it is so often described as difficult.
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20 What is the first line of 'Lolita' by Vladimir Nabokov? hard
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The correct answer is A. Lolita, light of my life.
'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.' Nabokov wrote in his third language; English was neither his first nor his second, after Russian and French.
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21 Who wrote 'Infinite Jest'? hard
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The correct answer is C. David Foster Wallace.
David Foster Wallace, 1996 — over a thousand pages including nearly 400 endnotes, several with footnotes of their own, which forces a physical back-and-forth as you read.
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22 What is the name of the fictional island in 'Lord of the Flies'? hard
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The correct answer is A. It's unnamed.
It is never named. Golding leaves it deliberately unplaced so the island reads as anywhere, and the boys' collapse into violence as a general case rather than a local one.
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23 Who wrote 'The Master and Margarita'? hard
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The correct answer is B. Mikhail Bulgakov.
Mikhail Bulgakov, who worked on it until his death in 1940. It could not be published in the Soviet Union until 1966, and then only in censored form — the complete text appeared abroad first.
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24 What is the original language of 'The Odyssey'? hard
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The correct answer is B. Ancient Greek.
Ancient Greek, composed in Homeric dialect around the 8th century BC. It was oral poetry before it was written down, built on repeated formulas that helped performers hold it in memory.
The full literature pool runs to 300 questions — 100 questions per difficulty across easy, medium and hard. Each round you play is shuffled fresh, so the same ten never come up twice in a row. Pick a difficulty above to start a timed round, or scroll on for related categories.
Frequently asked questions
About the literature quiz- Which literature does the quiz cover?
- Classical and modern English literature, Indian literature in English and translation, and world literature broadly. Major authors, prize winners (Booker, Nobel, Pulitzer), and the canonical works appear throughout.
- Is the literature quiz English-only?
- The questions are in English, but the works covered include translated literature — Russian classics, Spanish-language giants (García Márquez), Japanese fiction, and significant works from the Indian subcontinent's many languages.
- Are poetry questions included?
- Yes — major poets (Tennyson, Frost, Tagore, Plath), poetic forms, and well-known poems appear, especially at medium and hard.
- Are contemporary works covered?
- Yes — the set includes major literary fiction from the last 30-40 years. Booker winners and Pulitzer fiction recipients are well-represented.