1. Who is Allen Stewart Konigsberg better known as?

2. What 19th-century poet wrote The Song of Hiawatha?

3. The novel Death Comes for the Archbishop recounts the story of French Catholic missionaries in the southwestern United States. Who wrote it?

4. Who is the main character of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter?

5. What writer of the Harlem Renaissance studied anthropology at Columbia University and did fieldwork in the American South?

6. Whose novel Wise Blood, published in 1952, explored the “religious consciousness without a religion”?

7. Which of these writers perished in 1850, at age 40, in a shipwreck off the coast of New York?

8. Who created the amateur detective Ezekiel (“Easy”) Rawlins?

9. What was the pen name of William Sidney Porter?

10. The novel The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1932. Who wrote it?

11. Which American writer is considered the originator of the modern detective story?

12. Who created the mythical Mississippi community Yoknapatawpha County, which depicted the transformation and decadence of the American South?

13. Whose first two novels were The Natural and The Assistant?

14. Which writer helped create the local-colour school in American fiction?

15. Who directed the movie Shaft, wrote the novel The Learning Tree, and was the first African American to be staff photographer for Life magazine?

16. Who wrote the children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are?

17. What novelist created the lawyer-detective Perry Mason?

18. What author and Merry Prankster was a subject of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test?

19. The title of a novel published in 1961 entered the English language as a reference to a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem. What’s the novel?

20. What biochemist wrote the Foundation trilogy?

21. Who wrote the autobiographical Black Boy?

22. Who presented her philosophy of objectivism in the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged?

23. Who considered a story’s structure his main concern and stated that plot, character, and theme are “the true enemies of the novel”?

24. Who wrote the children’s classic Hans Brinker?

25. Which novelist is known for his depiction of the Jazz Age?

26. Which of these works by Norman Mailer was hailed at its publication as one of the finest American novels to come out of World War II?

27. Who wrote The Member of the Wedding (1946)?

28. Who wrote the first book released by a major publisher to portray Orthodox Judaism in the United States?

29. The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved are novels by which writer?

30. Who wrote the autobiographical volumes Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn?

31. Which of these writers was initially known as an interpreter of New Orleans culture but was rediscovered in the late 20th century because of her concerns about the freedom of women?

32. Who wrote Leaves of Grass?

33. The author of The Devil’s Dictionary disappeared in Mexico in 1913, his final fate unknown. Who was he?

34. Who wrote a series of books about her Midwestern childhood, notably Little House on the Prairie, that became a successful television series in the 1970s and ’80s?

35. Which of the following did Saul Bellow write?

36. Which river in North America is the setting for the novel Huckleberry Finn?

37. Who first achieved fame with Goodbye, Columbus and was later awarded the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral?

38. What short-story writer from Jackson, Mississippi, produced the memoir One Writer’s Beginnings from a series of lectures she gave at Harvard?

39. Which of these authors is known for the rags-to-riches formula he followed in more than 100 books?

40. Which American-born novelist’s fundamental theme dwelt on the clash between the innocence and exuberance of the New World and the corruption and wisdom of the Old World?

41. Which novel by Robert Penn Warren, about the rise and fall of Willie Stark, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1947?

42. Which novel by John Updike features a former star athlete who is unable to recapture success when bound by marriage and small-town life and flees responsibility?

43. Who wrote Life Among the Piutes, released in 1883 and among the few works by Native Americans published at that time?

44. Who was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

45. Who wrote the novels Home to Harlem and Banjo?

46. Who wrote the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”?

47. In which work by J.D. Salinger is Holden Caulfield a character?

48. Who wrote the novel The House of the Seven Gables, which fictionalizes the legend of a curse placed on the author’s family?

49. Who wrote the short story “Rip Van Winkle”?

50. Who wrote the novel The Bell Jar?

51. Which of John Steinbeck’s works is about the complex bond between two migrant labourers?

52. Who, writing under the name Genêt, was the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker magazine for nearly half a century?

53. Whose novels were known as the Leatherstocking Tales?

54. Which writer named his estate near Hollywood Tarzana, after his most popular character?

55. Who was sometimes known in the United States as the “Jewish Mark Twain”?