Language Arts
Authors, works, characters, first lines, pen names, literary terms, movements and prizes — organized the way Scholars Bowl questions ask about them. Titles of books, plays and long poems are in italics; short poems and stories are in “quotes.” Every entry has a “learn more” link for deeper reading.
Literature questions usually start with an obscure clue (a minor character, a lesser-known work, a biographical detail) and end with the famous title or character (“who was the author of The Scarlet Letter”). Learn at least one famous character and one famous line for every author below — that is what lets you buzz before the giveaway.
American Literature: Colonial & Romantic (1600s–1860s)
↑ topColonial & Revolutionary era
| Author | Movement / notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612–1672) | Puritan poet, Massachusetts Bay; first published poet in the English colonies | The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650); “To My Dear and Loving Husband” (1678); “Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666”; “The Author to Her Book” | The Tenth Muse was published in London by her brother-in-law without her knowledge — “The Author to Her Book” compares the book to an ill-dressed child. | author · Poetry Foundation |
| Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) | Puritan/Calvinist preacher; First Great Awakening | “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (sermon, 1741); Personal Narrative; Freedom of the Will (1754) | Preached “Sinners” at Enfield, Connecticut; God holds you over the pit of hell “much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire.” Died of a smallpox inoculation soon after becoming president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton). | author · Sinners |
| Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) | Enlightenment; printer, scientist, diplomat | Silence Dogood letters (1722); Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732–1758); “The Way to Wealth” (1758); Autobiography (published after his death) | Pen names Silence Dogood and Richard Saunders (“Poor Richard”). Aphorisms: “Early to bed and early to rise…”; the Autobiography includes his list of 13 virtues. | author · Poor Richard · Autobiography |
| Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784) | Enslaved poet in Boston, born in West Africa | Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773); “On Being Brought from Africa to America” | First African American woman to publish a book of poetry; wrote a poem to George Washington, who invited her to visit. | author |
| Thomas Paine (1737–1809) | Revolutionary pamphleteer (English-born) | Common Sense (Jan. 1776); The American Crisis (1776–83); Rights of Man (1791); The Age of Reason | The Crisis opens “These are the times that try men’s souls”; “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot.” | author · Common Sense · The Crisis |
Early national & Romantic fiction
| Author | Movement / notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Washington Irving (1783–1859) | First American author famous in Europe; New York | A History of New York (1809); The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20) containing “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”; Tales of the Alhambra (1832) | Pen names Diedrich Knickerbocker and Geoffrey Crayon. Rip sleeps 20 years in the Catskills and misses the Revolution. Sleepy Hollow: schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, rival Brom Bones, Katrina Van Tassel, the Headless Horseman. | author · Rip Van Winkle · Sleepy Hollow |
| James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) | Frontier romance; first major American novelist | The Spy (1821); the Leatherstocking Tales: The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), The Deerslayer (1841) | Hero Natty Bumppo, a.k.a. Hawkeye / Leatherstocking / Deerslayer / Pathfinder. In Mohicans: Chingachgook, his son Uncas (the “last”), villain Magua, sisters Cora and Alice Munro; French and Indian War, Fort William Henry. | author · Last of the Mohicans · Leatherstocking Tales |
| Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) | Dark Romanticism; Gothic; inventor of the detective story | “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839); “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841); “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843); “The Gold-Bug” (1843); “The Raven” (1845); “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846); “Annabel Lee” (1849); only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) | Detective C. Auguste Dupin (the killer in “Rue Morgue” is an orangutan). “The Raven”: “Once upon a midnight dreary…”, lost Lenore, “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’” “Amontillado”: Montresor walls up Fortunato. Roderick and Madeline Usher. Married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm; died mysteriously in Baltimore (hence the Baltimore Ravens). | author · The Raven · Tell-Tale Heart · Rue Morgue |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) | Dark Romanticism; Puritan New England; Salem, MA | Twice-Told Tales (1837); “Young Goodman Brown” (1835); “The Minister’s Black Veil”; “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; “The Birth-Mark”; The Scarlet Letter (1850); The House of the Seven Gables (1851); The Blithedale Romance (1852) | Scarlet Letter: Hester Prynne, her daughter Pearl, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale (Pearl’s father), and Hester’s husband Roger Chillingworth; introduced by “The Custom-House.” He added the “w” to his name to distance himself from ancestor John Hathorne, a Salem witch-trial judge. Blithedale satirizes Brook Farm. | author · Scarlet Letter · Young Goodman Brown |
| Herman Melville (1819–1891) | Dark Romanticism; sailor-novelist; died obscure | Typee (1846); Omoo (1847); Moby-Dick (1851); “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853); Benito Cereno (1855); The Confidence-Man (1857); Billy Budd (published 1924) | “Call me Ishmael.” The Pequod: Captain Ahab (ivory leg), Queequeg (harpooner, coffin becomes a life buoy), first mate Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, Fedallah. Moby-Dick is dedicated to Hawthorne. Bartleby the copyist answers everything with “I would prefer not to.” | author · Moby-Dick · Bartleby |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) | Abolitionist sentimental novel | Uncle Tom’s Cabin (serialized 1851–52 in The National Era; book 1852); A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853); Dred (1856) | Written in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Characters: Uncle Tom, Eliza (crosses the ice of the Ohio River), Little Eva St. Clare, Topsy, cruel Simon Legree. Best-selling novel of the 19th century; Lincoln allegedly called her “the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war” (likely apocryphal). | author · Uncle Tom’s Cabin |
| Frederick Douglass (c. 1818–1895) | Slave narrative; abolitionist orator | Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845); My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881); speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852) | Born Frederick Bailey in Talbot County, Maryland; learned to read in Baltimore; fought back against the “slave-breaker” Edward Covey; escaped in 1838 disguised as a sailor. Founded the newspaper The North Star (Rochester, 1847). | author · Narrative |
Poe’s detective is Dupin (Paris), not Holmes; Doyle openly borrowed from him. Poe’s only completed novel is Arthur Gordon Pym; Hawthorne’s Pearl is a child, not a jewel; and Melville’s whale is “Moby Dick” but the book title is hyphenated Moby-Dick. learn more
Transcendentalists
| Author | Movement / notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) | Leader of Transcendentalism; Concord, MA; former Unitarian minister | Nature (1836); “Concord Hymn” (1837); “The American Scholar” (1837); “Divinity School Address” (1838); Essays: First Series (1841) incl. “Self-Reliance” and “The Over-Soul” | “I become a transparent eyeball” (Nature). “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” (“Self-Reliance”). “Concord Hymn”: “the shot heard round the world.” Oliver Wendell Holmes called “The American Scholar” America’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence.” | author · Self-Reliance · Nature |
| Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) | Transcendentalist; naturalist; Emerson’s protégé | A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849); “Resistance to Civil Government,” a.k.a. “Civil Disobedience” (1849); Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) | Moved to a cabin on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond on July 4, 1845; stayed two years, two months, two days. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”; “a different drummer.” Jailed one night (1846) for refusing to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican War; the essay influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. | author · Walden · Civil Disobedience |
| Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) | Transcendentalist editor and feminist | Editor of The Dial (1840–42); Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) | Drowned in a shipwreck off Fire Island, NY, in 1850 (Thoreau searched the beach for her manuscript). | author |
Romantic-era poets
| Author | Movement / notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Walt Whitman (1819–1892) | Father of American free verse; Brooklyn; Civil War nurse | Leaves of Grass (1855; revised through the 1891–92 “deathbed edition”) incl. “Song of Myself,” “I Hear America Singing,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; Drum-Taps (1865); Lincoln elegies “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865) | “I celebrate myself, and sing myself”; “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”; “I am large, I contain multitudes.” Self-published the first edition; Emerson wrote him: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” Uses long cataloguing lines and anaphora. | author · Leaves of Grass · O Captain! |
| Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) | Reclusive poet of Amherst, MA | ~1,800 poems, fewer than a dozen published in her lifetime; first collection 1890. “Because I could not stop for Death –”; “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –”; “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –”; “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”; “There’s a certain Slant of light”; “Success is counted sweetest”; “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” | Dashes, slant rhyme, odd capitalization, and hymn (common) meter. Poems are untitled and known by first lines or by Johnson/Franklin numbers. Corresponded with Thomas Wentworth Higginson. In “Because I could not stop for Death,” Death drives a carriage carrying her and Immortality. | author · Because I could not stop · Poetry Foundation |
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) | Fireside Poet; Harvard professor; most popular American poet of his day | “A Psalm of Life” (1838); “The Wreck of the Hesperus”; “The Village Blacksmith”; Evangeline (1847); The Song of Hiawatha (1855); The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858); “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860; in Tales of a Wayside Inn, 1863) | Evangeline (expulsion of the Acadians) is in dactylic hexameter; Hiawatha (“By the shores of Gitche Gumee”; Minnehaha, Nokomis) is in trochaic tetrameter borrowed from the Finnish Kalevala. “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Translated Dante; the only American with a bust in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner. | author · Hiawatha · Paul Revere’s Ride |
| William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) | Fireside Poet; newspaper editor | “Thanatopsis” (1817); “To a Waterfowl” | Wrote the first version of “Thanatopsis” (“a view of death”) as a teenager. | author · Thanatopsis |
| John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) | Fireside Poet; Quaker abolitionist | Snow-Bound (1866); “Barbara Frietchie” (1863) | “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, / But spare your country’s flag,” she said (“Barbara Frietchie”). | author |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809–1894) | Fireside Poet; physician | “Old Ironsides” (1830); “The Chambered Nautilus”; The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table | “Old Ironsides” helped save the USS Constitution from scrapping. Father of the Supreme Court justice. | author |
“Fireside Poets” (a.k.a. Schoolroom Poets) = Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. “Dark Romantics” = Poe, Hawthorne, Melville (reacting against Transcendentalist optimism). Fireside Poets · Dark Romanticism
American Literature: Realism, Naturalism & Modernism (1865–1945)
↑ topRealists, naturalists & regionalists
| Author | Movement / notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mark Twain (1835–1910) | Realism, humor, local color; grew up in Hannibal, Missouri; pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens | “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865); The Innocents Abroad (1869); Roughing It (1872); The Gilded Age (1873, with Charles Dudley Warner); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); The Prince and the Pauper (1881); Life on the Mississippi (1883); Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/85); A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889); Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) | “Mark twain” = riverboat call for two fathoms (12 ft) of water. Huck and the escaped slave Jim raft down the Mississippi; con men “the Duke” and “the King”; feuding Grangerfords and Shepherdsons; Huck: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” Hemingway: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Born and died in years of Halley’s Comet. The Gilded Age named the era. | author · Huck Finn · Tom Sawyer |
| Henry James (1843–1916) | Psychological realism; the “international theme” (Americans in Europe); became a British subject in 1915 | The American (1877); Daisy Miller (1878); The Portrait of a Lady (1881); The Bostonians (1886); The Turn of the Screw (1898); The Wings of the Dove (1902); The Ambassadors (1903); The Golden Bowl (1904) | Portrait: Isabel Archer marries the cold Gilbert Osmond, manipulated by Madame Merle; cousin Ralph Touchett. Turn of the Screw: a governess at Bly, children Miles and Flora, ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. Ambassadors: Lambert Strether — “Live all you can.” Brother of psychologist William James. | author · Portrait of a Lady · Turn of the Screw |
| Edith Wharton (1862–1937) | Novel of manners; Old New York society; friend of Henry James | The House of Mirth (1905); Ethan Frome (1911); The Custom of the Country (1913); The Age of Innocence (1920) | First woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1921, Age of Innocence: Newland Archer, Countess Ellen Olenska, May Welland). House of Mirth: Lily Bart. Ethan Frome: Starkfield, Massachusetts; wife Zeena, cousin Mattie Silver; the sledding “smash-up.” | author · Age of Innocence · Ethan Frome |
| Stephen Crane (1871–1900) | Naturalism / impressionism; war correspondent | Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893); The Red Badge of Courage (1895); The Black Riders (poems, 1895); “The Open Boat” (1897); “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” and “The Blue Hotel” (1898) | Red Badge: Henry Fleming, “the youth,” flees battle (unnamed, based on Chancellorsville) and gets his “red badge” from a blow by a fellow Union soldier. Wrote it without having seen war. Died of tuberculosis at 28 in Badenweiler, Germany. | author · Red Badge · The Open Boat |
| Jack London (1876–1916) | Naturalism; adventure; socialist; Klondike Gold Rush | The Call of the Wild (1903); The Sea-Wolf (1904); White Fang (1906); The Iron Heel (1908); “To Build a Fire” (1908); Martin Eden (1909) | Call of the Wild: Buck, a St. Bernard–Scotch shepherd mix stolen from California, becomes a Yukon sled dog and joins a wolf pack. White Fang reverses the journey (wild wolf-dog becomes tame). Sea-Wolf: Captain Wolf Larsen. | author · Call of the Wild · To Build a Fire |
| Kate Chopin (1850–1904) | Local color (Louisiana Creole and Cajun); proto-feminist | “Désirée’s Baby” (1893); Bayou Folk (1894); “The Story of an Hour” (1894); The Awakening (1899) | The Awakening: Edna Pontellier, summering on Grand Isle, falls for Robert Lebrun, befriends pianist Mademoiselle Reisz, and finally swims out into the Gulf. “Story of an Hour”: Louise Mallard dies of “joy that kills” when her husband turns out to be alive. | author · The Awakening · Story of an Hour |
| O. Henry (1862–1910) | Short stories with twist endings; pen name of William Sydney Porter | Cabbages and Kings (1904); The Four Million (1906); “The Gift of the Magi” (1905); “The Ransom of Red Chief” (1907); “The Last Leaf”; “After Twenty Years”; “The Cop and the Anthem” | “Gift of the Magi”: Della sells her hair to buy a watch chain; Jim sells his watch to buy her combs. Cabbages and Kings coined “banana republic.” Wrote stories while in an Ohio prison for bank embezzlement. The O. Henry Award honors short stories. | author · Gift of the Magi |
| Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) | Naturalism; Indiana-born | Sister Carrie (1900); Jennie Gerhardt (1911); The Financier (1912); An American Tragedy (1925) | Sister Carrie: Carrie Meeber rises to stardom as her lover Hurstwood sinks to suicide. An American Tragedy: Clyde Griffiths lets pregnant Roberta drown, based on the real 1906 Chester Gillette–Grace Brown case. | author · Sister Carrie · American Tragedy |
| Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) | Muckraker; socialist | The Jungle (1906); Oil! (1927); Boston (1928); Dragon’s Teeth (1942; Pulitzer 1943) | The Jungle: Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus in Chicago’s Packingtown stockyards; led to the 1906 Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act. “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” First serialized in the socialist paper Appeal to Reason of Girard, Kansas. Oil! was adapted as There Will Be Blood. | author · The Jungle |
| Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) | Satirist of small-town Midwest; Sauk Centre, Minnesota | Main Street (1920); Babbitt (1922); Arrowsmith (1925); Elmer Gantry (1927); Dodsworth (1929); It Can’t Happen Here (1935) | First American Nobel laureate in literature (1930). Refused the 1926 Pulitzer for Arrowsmith. Main Street: Carol Kennicott in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Babbitt: realtor George F. Babbitt of Zenith (“babbitt” = conformist businessman). Elmer Gantry: hypocritical evangelist. | author · Main Street · Babbitt |
| Willa Cather (1873–1947) | Prairie / frontier novelist; born in Virginia, raised in Red Cloud, Nebraska | O Pioneers! (1913); The Song of the Lark (1915); My Ántonia (1918); One of Ours (1922; Pulitzer 1923); A Lost Lady (1923); Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) | Great Plains immigrant life — the region next door to Kansas. O Pioneers!: Alexandra Bergson tames the Nebraska land. My Ántonia: narrated by Jim Burden about Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda. Archbishop: Bishop Jean Marie Latour in New Mexico. The first two plus Song of the Lark = her “Prairie Trilogy.” | author · My Ántonia · O Pioneers! |
Sinclair Lewis (Main Street, Babbitt, Nobel 1930) ≠ Upton Sinclair (The Jungle). Also don’t confuse Henry James (novelist) with his brother William James (psychologist who coined “stream of consciousness”). William James
Modernist fiction & drama
| Author | Movement / notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) | Lost Generation; coined “the Jazz Age”; born St. Paul, Minnesota; wife Zelda Sayre | This Side of Paradise (1920); The Beautiful and Damned (1922); Tales of the Jazz Age (1922, incl. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”); The Great Gatsby (1925); Tender Is the Night (1934); The Last Tycoon (unfinished, 1941) | Gatsby: narrator Nick Carraway; Jay Gatsby (born James Gatz) of West Egg loves Daisy Buchanan of East Egg; brutish Tom Buchanan; golfer Jordan Baker; Myrtle and George Wilson; the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock; the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg over the valley of ashes. Ends: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Tender: psychiatrist Dick Diver. | author · Great Gatsby |
| Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) | Lost Generation; terse “iceberg theory” style; Oak Park, Illinois; Key West; Cuba; died Ketchum, Idaho | In Our Time (1925); The Sun Also Rises (1926); A Farewell to Arms (1929); “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927); “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940); The Old Man and the Sea (1952); A Moveable Feast (1964) | Nobel 1954; Pulitzer 1953. Sun Also Rises: wounded Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn, bullfights at Pamplona; epigraph “You are all a lost generation” (Gertrude Stein). Farewell: ambulance driver Frederic Henry and nurse Catherine Barkley (WWI Italy). Bell Tolls: Robert Jordan blows up a bridge in the Spanish Civil War; title from John Donne. Old Man: Cuban fisherman Santiago, the boy Manolin, a giant marlin eaten by sharks. Recurring hero Nick Adams. | author · Sun Also Rises · Old Man and the Sea |
| William Faulkner (1897–1962) | Southern Renaissance; stream of consciousness; Oxford, Mississippi (home “Rowan Oak”) | The Sound and the Fury (1929); As I Lay Dying (1930); “A Rose for Emily” (1930); Light in August (1932); Absalom, Absalom! (1936); Go Down, Moses (1942, incl. “The Bear”); A Fable (1954); The Reivers (1962) | Fictional Yoknapatawpha County (county seat Jefferson). Nobel 1949; two Pulitzers. Sound and the Fury (title from Macbeth): Compson brothers Benjy (intellectually disabled narrator), Quentin, Jason, sister Caddy, servant Dilsey. As I Lay Dying: the Bundrens haul mother Addie’s coffin to Jefferson; 15 narrators; “My mother is a fish” (Vardaman). “A Rose for Emily”: Emily Grierson kept Homer Barron’s corpse. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” | author · Sound and the Fury · As I Lay Dying · Rose for Emily |
| John Steinbeck (1902–1968) | Social realism; Salinas Valley, California; Great Depression | Tortilla Flat (1935); Of Mice and Men (1937); The Red Pony (1937); The Grapes of Wrath (1939; Pulitzer 1940); Cannery Row (1945); The Pearl (1947); East of Eden (1952); Travels with Charley (1962) | Nobel 1962. Of Mice and Men (title from Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse”): George Milton and big Lennie Small dream of a farm; Curley’s wife; Candy’s old dog; Crooks. Grapes of Wrath (title from “Battle Hymn of the Republic”): the Joad family (Tom, Ma, ex-preacher Jim Casy, Rose of Sharon) flee the Oklahoma Dust Bowl for California. East of Eden: Trask brothers Cal and Aron; “timshel” (“thou mayest”). The Pearl: pearl diver Kino. | author · Grapes of Wrath · Of Mice and Men |
| John Dos Passos (1896–1970) | Lost Generation; experimental collage novels | Three Soldiers (1921); Manhattan Transfer (1925); U.S.A. trilogy: The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), The Big Money (1936) | U.S.A. mixes narratives with “Newsreel” collages, “Camera Eye” stream-of-consciousness passages, and short biographies of real Americans. | author · U.S.A. |
| Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) | Raised in China by missionary parents; born West Virginia | The Good Earth (1931; Pulitzer 1932); Sons (1932); A House Divided (1935) — the House of Earth trilogy | Nobel 1938, the first American woman to win it. Good Earth: peasant farmer Wang Lung and his wife O-Lan, who finds jewels during a riot. | author · Good Earth |
| Thornton Wilder (1897–1975) | Novelist and playwright | The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927); Our Town (1938); The Skin of Our Teeth (1942); The Matchmaker (1954, basis of Hello, Dolly!) | Only writer to win Pulitzers for both fiction (Bridge) and drama (Our Town, Skin of Our Teeth). Bridge: a rope bridge in Peru collapses in 1714 killing five; Brother Juniper investigates why. Our Town: Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire; the Stage Manager; Emily Webb and George Gibbs; minimal scenery; Emily revisits her 12th birthday after death. | author · Our Town · Bridge of San Luis Rey |
Modernist poets
| Author | Movement / notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Robert Frost (1874–1963) | New England pastoral (born in San Francisco); traditional meter | A Boy’s Will (1913); North of Boston (1914; “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “After Apple-Picking”); Mountain Interval (1916; “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches”); New Hampshire (1923; “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay”) | Record four Pulitzers for poetry. “Good fences make good neighbors”; “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”; “And miles to go before I sleep.” Recited “The Gift Outright” at JFK’s 1961 inauguration. First books published in England. | author · Road Not Taken · Stopping by Woods |
| T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) | High Modernism; born St. Louis, became a British citizen in 1927 | “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915); The Waste Land (1922); “The Hollow Men” (1925); Ash-Wednesday (1930); Murder in the Cathedral (1935, play about Thomas Becket); Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939); Four Quartets (1943) | Nobel 1948. “Let us go then, you and I”; “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Waste Land: “April is the cruellest month,” five sections, ends “Shantih shantih shantih,” dedicated to Ezra Pound (“il miglior fabbro”). “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” Practical Cats became the musical Cats. Coined “objective correlative.” | author · Waste Land · Prufrock |
| Ezra Pound (1885–1972) | Founder of Imagism; “Make it new”; born Hailey, Idaho | “In a Station of the Metro” (1913); Cathay (1915, incl. “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”); Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920); The Cantos (1915–1962) | “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Edited Eliot’s Waste Land. Made pro-Mussolini radio broadcasts in WWII; held 12 years at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington instead of being tried for treason. | author · Station of the Metro |
| Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) | Modernist; imagination vs. reality; insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut | Harmonium (1923; “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man”); “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1934); The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937); Collected Poems (Pulitzer 1955) | “I placed a jar in Tennessee.” “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.” | author · Thirteen Ways |
| William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) | Imagist / Objectivist; pediatrician in Rutherford, New Jersey | “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923, in Spring and All); “This Is Just to Say” (1934); Paterson (1946–58); Pictures from Brueghel (Pulitzer 1963) | “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow”; “I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox.” Motto: “No ideas but in things.” | author · Red Wheelbarrow |
| Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) | Chicago Renaissance; free verse; born Galesburg, Illinois | Chicago Poems (1916; “Chicago,” “Fog”); Cornhuskers (1918); Rootabaga Stories (1922); The People, Yes (1936); Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1939) | “Hog Butcher for the World… City of the Big Shoulders.” “The fog comes / on little cat feet.” Won Pulitzers for both poetry and history (his Lincoln biography). | author · Chicago Poems |
| E. E. Cummings (1894–1962) | Experimental typography and syntax | The Enormous Room (1922, novel of his WWI detention in France); Tulips and Chimneys (1923); “in Just-”; “Buffalo Bill ’s / defunct”; “anyone lived in a pretty how town”; “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in” | Lowercase letters, broken words, parentheses, and odd spacing. He usually signed his name with capitals; the all-lowercase “e. e. cummings” is mostly a publishers’ convention. | author · Poetry Foundation |
| Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) | Chicago Renaissance; born in Garnett, Kansas | Spoon River Anthology (1915) | Free-verse epitaphs spoken by the dead of a fictional Illinois town’s cemetery. | author · Spoon River |
| Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) | Traditional forms; fictional Tilbury Town, Maine | “Richard Cory” (1897); “Miniver Cheevy” (1910); Collected Poems (1921, first poetry Pulitzer 1922) | Richard Cory, envied by the town, “Went home and put a bullet through his head.” Three Pulitzers. | author · Richard Cory |
Harlem Renaissance authors
| Author | Movement / notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Langston Hughes (1901–1967) | Harlem Renaissance; jazz poetry; born Joplin, Missouri; childhood in Lawrence, Kansas (see Kansas) | “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921); The Weary Blues (1926; incl. “Mother to Son,” “I, Too”); essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926); Not Without Laughter (1930); Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951; incl. “Harlem”); Jesse B. Semple (“Simple”) stories | “I’ve known rivers: / I’ve known rivers ancient as the world.” “I, too, sing America. / I am the darker brother.” “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” — source of Hansberry’s title. “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair” (“Mother to Son”). | author · Speaks of Rivers · Dream Deferred |
| Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) | Harlem Renaissance; folklorist/anthropologist (studied under Franz Boas); raised in Eatonville, Florida | Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934); Mules and Men (1935); Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Tell My Horse (1938); Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939); Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) | Their Eyes: Janie Crawford tells her friend Pheoby about three husbands — Logan Killicks, Joe “Jody” Starks (mayor of Eatonville), and Tea Cake, whom she must shoot after a rabid dog bites him during a hurricane. Died poor; Alice Walker revived her reputation and marked her grave (1973). | author · Their Eyes |
| Countee Cullen (1903–1946) | Harlem Renaissance; traditional forms (sonnets, ballads) | Color (1925; “Incident,” “Yet Do I Marvel,” “Heritage”); Copper Sun (1927); The Ballad of the Brown Girl (1927); One Way to Heaven (1932, novel) | “Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!” “Heritage”: “What is Africa to me?” “Incident”: a child called a slur in Baltimore. Married W. E. B. Du Bois’s daughter Yolande (1928). | author · Poetry Foundation |
| Claude McKay (1889–1948) | Jamaican-born; Harlem Renaissance | “If We Must Die” (1919); Harlem Shadows (1922); Home to Harlem (1928) | “If We Must Die” (a sonnet responding to the Red Summer of 1919) is often called the opening of the Harlem Renaissance. | author |
| Jean Toomer (1894–1967) | Harlem Renaissance | Cane (1923) | Experimental mix of poems, sketches, and drama about Black life in rural Georgia and the urban North. | author · Cane |
| Nella Larsen (1891–1964) | Harlem Renaissance | Quicksand (1928); Passing (1929) | Passing: Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, who “passes” as white; Clare falls from a window. | author · Passing |
| James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) | Poet, NAACP leader | “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900, music by brother J. Rosamond Johnson); The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); God’s Trombones (1927) | “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is known as the Black national anthem. | author |
More quiz-worthy Americans (1865–1945)
| Author | Known for | Quiz clue | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ambrose Bierce (1842–c. 1914) | “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890); The Devil’s Dictionary (1906/1911) | Peyton Farquhar’s escape from hanging is imagined in the instant before his neck snaps. Bierce vanished in revolutionary Mexico. | author · Owl Creek |
| William Dean Howells (1837–1920) | The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) | “Dean of American Letters,” champion of realism, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Twain’s friend. | author |
| Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) | “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892); Herland (1915) | A woman confined for a “rest cure” sees a woman trapped behind the wallpaper. | author · Yellow Wallpaper |
| Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) | “We Wear the Mask” (1895); “Sympathy” (1899) | “I know why the caged bird sings” comes from “Sympathy” — Maya Angelou’s title. | author |
| Frank Norris (1870–1902) | McTeague (1899); The Octopus (1901) | Naturalist; McTeague is an unlicensed San Francisco dentist; The Octopus = the railroad vs. wheat farmers. | author |
| Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) | Winesburg, Ohio (1919) | Linked stories of small-town “grotesques” seen by young reporter George Willard; mentor to Hemingway and Faulkner. | author · Winesburg |
| Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) | Three Lives (1909); Tender Buttons (1914); The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) | Paris salon at 27 rue de Fleurus; “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”; the “lost generation” remark. The Autobiography is really her own memoir written in her partner’s voice. | author |
| Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) | “Renascence” (1912); “First Fig”; The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver (Pulitzer 1923) | “My candle burns at both ends; / It will not last the night.” | author |
| Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) | Look Homeward, Angel (1929); You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) | Eugene Gant of Altamont (= Asheville, NC); editor Maxwell Perkins (also Fitzgerald’s and Hemingway’s) cut his huge manuscripts. | author |
| Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) | All the King’s Men (1946; Pulitzer 1947) | Governor Willie Stark (modeled on Huey Long) narrated by Jack Burden. Only person to win Pulitzers for fiction and poetry; first official U.S. Poet Laureate (1986). | author · All the King’s Men |
| Margaret Mitchell (1900–1949) | Gone with the Wind (1936; Pulitzer 1937) | Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes, plantation Tara; “Tomorrow is another day.” Her only novel. | author · Gone with the Wind |
| Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) / Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) | Hard-boiled detective fiction: The Maltese Falcon (1930) / The Big Sleep (1939) | Hammett’s detective is Sam Spade; Chandler’s is Philip Marlowe (Los Angeles). | Hammett · Chandler |
Marlowe the detective (Chandler) ≠ Marlow the narrator of Heart of Darkness (Conrad) ≠ Christopher Marlowe the playwright. Philip Marlowe
American Literature: Contemporary (1945–present)
↑ topPostwar & contemporary fiction
| Author | Movement / notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| J. D. Salinger (1919–2010) | Postwar fiction; recluse in Cornish, New Hampshire | The Catcher in the Rye (1951); Nine Stories (1953; incl. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”); Franny and Zooey (1961); Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963) | Catcher: Holden Caulfield, expelled from Pencey Prep, wanders New York; hates “phonies”; red hunting hat; asks where the Central Park ducks go in winter; little sister Phoebe; dead brother Allie’s baseball mitt; title from a misheard Robert Burns lyric. Later works follow the Glass family (Seymour Glass dies in “Bananafish”). | author · Catcher in the Rye |
| Harper Lee (1926–2016) | Southern fiction; Monroeville, Alabama | To Kill a Mockingbird (1960; Pulitzer 1961); Go Set a Watchman (written earlier, published 2015) | Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s; narrator Scout (Jean Louise) Finch, brother Jem, lawyer father Atticus defends Tom Robinson against Bob and Mayella Ewell; reclusive Boo (Arthur) Radley; cook Calpurnia; friend Dill (modeled on childhood friend Truman Capote). “It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” Lee helped Capote research In Cold Blood in Kansas. | author · Mockingbird |
| Ralph Ellison (1913–1994) | Born Oklahoma City; named for Ralph Waldo Emerson; studied music at Tuskegee | Invisible Man (1952; National Book Award 1953); Shadow and Act (essays, 1964); Juneteenth (posthumous, 1999) | Unnamed narrator lives underground lit by 1,369 light bulbs; the “battle royal”; college president Dr. Bledsoe; trustee Mr. Norton; Jim Trueblood; Liberty Paints’ “Optic White”; the Brotherhood; Ras the Exhorter; Tod Clifton. “I am an invisible man.” | author · Invisible Man |
| Richard Wright (1908–1960) | Social protest novel; born near Natchez, Mississippi; later expatriate in Paris | Uncle Tom’s Children (1938); Native Son (1940); Black Boy (memoir, 1945); The Outsider (1953) | Native Son: Bigger Thomas, a chauffeur in Chicago, accidentally smothers Mary Dalton; lawyer Boris Max defends him. First book by a Black American selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. | author · Native Son · Black Boy |
| James Baldwin (1924–1987) | Novelist and essayist; Harlem-born, lived much of his life in France | Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); Notes of a Native Son (1955); Giovanni’s Room (1956); “Sonny’s Blues” (1957); Another Country (1962); The Fire Next Time (1963); If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) | Go Tell It: 14-year-old John Grimes and his Pentecostal stepfather in Harlem (semi-autobiographical). Fire Next Time: two essays, “My Dungeon Shook” (letter to his nephew) and “Down at the Cross.” “Sonny’s Blues”: a jazz-pianist brother. | author · Go Tell It · Fire Next Time |
| Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) | Science fiction / fantasy; grew up in Waukegan, Illinois | The Martian Chronicles (1950; incl. “There Will Come Soft Rains”); The Illustrated Man (1951); “A Sound of Thunder” (1952); Fahrenheit 451 (1953); Dandelion Wine (1957); Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) | Fahrenheit 451 (the temperature at which paper burns): fireman Guy Montag burns books; neighbor Clarisse McClellan; wife Mildred; Captain Beatty; the Mechanical Hound; professor Faber; book people memorize whole books. “Sound of Thunder”: a time traveler steps on a butterfly. | author · Fahrenheit 451 · Martian Chronicles |
| Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) | Satire, dark humor, sci-fi; Indianapolis; WWII POW who survived the firebombing of Dresden | Player Piano (1952); The Sirens of Titan (1959); Mother Night (1961); “Harrison Bergeron” (1961); Cat’s Cradle (1963); Slaughterhouse-Five (1969); Breakfast of Champions (1973) | Slaughterhouse-Five (subtitle The Children’s Crusade): Billy Pilgrim “has come unstuck in time,” is abducted by Tralfamadorians; refrain “So it goes.” Cat’s Cradle: ice-nine and the religion Bokononism. Recurring hack sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout. “Harrison Bergeron”: Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers enforces equality. | author · Slaughterhouse-Five · Harrison Bergeron |
| Joseph Heller (1923–1999) | Black comedy; WWII bombardier | Catch-22 (1961); Something Happened (1974); Closing Time (1994, sequel) | Bombardier Yossarian on the island of Pianosa; Colonel Cathcart keeps raising the required missions; Milo Minderbinder’s syndicate; Major Major Major Major; Snowden’s death (“Man was matter”). Catch-22: you can be grounded for insanity, but asking to be grounded proves you’re sane. | author · Catch-22 |
| Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) | Southern Gothic; devout Catholic; Milledgeville, Georgia; raised peacocks; died of lupus | Wise Blood (1952); A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955); The Violent Bear It Away (1960); Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) | “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: a grandmother and family meet the escaped convict the Misfit (“She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”). “Good Country People”: a Bible salesman steals Hulga’s wooden leg. Wise Blood: Hazel Motes founds the Church Without Christ. “Revelation”: Mrs. Turpin. | author · Good Man |
| Toni Morrison (1931–2019) | Born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio; Random House editor | The Bluest Eye (1970); Sula (1973); Song of Solomon (1977); Tar Baby (1981); Beloved (1987; Pulitzer 1988); Jazz (1992); Paradise (1997) | Nobel 1993 — first Black woman to win. Beloved: Sethe, who killed her baby daughter to save her from slavery, is haunted at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, by Beloved; daughter Denver; Paul D; based on Margaret Garner. Bluest Eye: Pecola Breedlove prays for blue eyes; narrated by Claudia MacTeer. Song of Solomon: Milkman Dead. | author · Beloved · Bluest Eye |
| Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023) | Southern Gothic → Western; violent, sparse prose with little punctuation | Blood Meridian (1985); Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), Cities of the Plain (1998); No Country for Old Men (2005); The Road (2006; Pulitzer 2007) | Blood Meridian: “the kid,” the hairless giant Judge Holden, the Glanton gang scalp-hunting. The Road: unnamed father and son in post-apocalyptic America “carrying the fire.” No Country (title from Yeats): hitman Anton Chigurh, Sheriff Bell, Llewelyn Moss. Horses: John Grady Cole. | author · The Road · Blood Meridian |
| Philip Roth (1933–2018) | Jewish American life; Newark, New Jersey | Goodbye, Columbus (1959); Portnoy’s Complaint (1969); The Ghost Writer (1979); American Pastoral (1997; Pulitzer 1998); The Human Stain (2000); The Plot Against America (2004) | Alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. American Pastoral: Seymour “Swede” Levov, whose daughter bombs a post office. Plot Against America: alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh becomes president. | author · American Pastoral |
| John Updike (1932–2009) | Suburban realism; New Yorker regular | Rabbit tetralogy: Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981; Pulitzer), Rabbit at Rest (1990; Pulitzer); “A & P” (1961); The Centaur (1963); The Witches of Eastwick (1984) | Ex-basketball star Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom of Brewer, Pennsylvania. “A & P”: cashier Sammy quits over three girls in bathing suits. One of four authors with two fiction Pulitzers (with Booth Tarkington, Faulkner, Colson Whitehead). | author · Rabbit, Run |
| Saul Bellow (1915–2005) | Chicago; Canadian-born Jewish American | The Adventures of Augie March (1953); Henderson the Rain King (1959); Herzog (1964); Humboldt’s Gift (1975; Pulitzer) | Nobel 1976. “I am an American, Chicago born” (opening of Augie March). Herzog writes unsent letters to famous people. | author |
Beats & postwar poets
| Author | Movement / notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) | Beat Generation (he coined the term); French-Canadian family, Lowell, Massachusetts | The Town and the City (1950); On the Road (1957); The Dharma Bums (1958); The Subterraneans (1958); Big Sur (1962) | On the Road is a roman à clef typed on a 120-foot scroll: Sal Paradise (Kerouac), Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), Carlo Marx (Ginsberg), Old Bull Lee (Burroughs). “Spontaneous prose.” Dharma Bums: Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder). | author · On the Road |
| Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) | Beat poet | Howl and Other Poems (1956; incl. “A Supermarket in California”); Kaddish (1961); The Fall of America (1973) | “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.” Dedicated to Carl Solomon; first read at the Six Gallery, San Francisco (1955). Publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights) won the 1957 obscenity trial. “Kaddish” mourns his mother Naomi. | author · Howl |
| Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) | Confessional poetry; married British poet Ted Hughes | The Colossus (1960); The Bell Jar (1963, as “Victoria Lucas”); Ariel (1965; “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Tulips,” “Morning Song”); The Collected Poems (Pulitzer 1982) | First poet to win a Pulitzer posthumously. Bell Jar: Esther Greenwood, a guest editor at a New York magazine, breaks down. “Dying / Is an art, like everything else” (“Lady Lazarus”). “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” | author · Bell Jar · Ariel |
| Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) | Born in Topeka, Kansas; raised in Chicago’s Bronzeville | A Street in Bronzeville (1945); Annie Allen (1949; Pulitzer 1950); Maud Martha (novel, 1953); The Bean Eaters (1960; incl. “We Real Cool”) | First Black author to win a Pulitzer Prize. “We Real Cool” — “The Pool Players. / Seven at the Golden Shovel.” — “We real cool. We / Left school. We // Lurk late…” Illinois Poet Laureate from 1968. | author · We Real Cool |
| Maya Angelou (1928–2014) | Memoirist and poet; born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis | I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969; first of seven autobiographies); And Still I Rise (1978; “Still I Rise,” “Phenomenal Woman”); “On the Pulse of Morning” (1993) | Caged Bird (title from Paul Laurence Dunbar): childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, with her grandmother “Momma” and brother Bailey. Read “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. “You may shoot me with your words… But still, like air, I’ll rise.” | author · Caged Bird |
| Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) | Precise, descriptive poet | North & South (1946); “The Fish”; Geography III (1976; “One Art”) | “One Art” is a villanelle: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Pulitzer 1956. | author |
| Robert Lowell (1917–1977) | Confessional poetry pioneer; Boston Brahmin | Lord Weary’s Castle (1946; Pulitzer); Life Studies (1959); “For the Union Dead” (1964) | Life Studies prompted critic M. L. Rosenthal to coin “confessional.” Taught Plath and Anne Sexton. | author |
Major American playwrights
| Author | Movement / notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) | Father of American drama; Provincetown Players; expressionism and realism | Beyond the Horizon (1920); The Emperor Jones (1920); Anna Christie (1921); The Hairy Ape (1922); Desire Under the Elms (1924); Strange Interlude (1928); Mourning Becomes Electra (1931); Ah, Wilderness! (1933); The Iceman Cometh (1946); Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) | Only American playwright to win the Nobel (1936); record four drama Pulitzers. Long Day’s Journey (posthumous, autobiographical): the Tyrone family — morphine-addicted mother Mary. Mourning Becomes Electra resets Aeschylus’s Oresteia after the Civil War. Iceman: salesman Hickey at Harry Hope’s saloon. Born in a Broadway hotel, died in a Boston hotel. | author · Long Day’s Journey |
| Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) | Southern Gothic drama; born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi | The Glass Menagerie (1944); A Streetcar Named Desire (1947; Pulitzer); Summer and Smoke (1948); Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955; Pulitzer); Sweet Bird of Youth (1959); The Night of the Iguana (1961) | Menagerie (a “memory play”): narrator Tom Wingfield, mother Amanda, fragile sister Laura and her glass unicorn, gentleman caller Jim O’Connor. Streetcar: Blanche DuBois (lost estate Belle Reve) visits sister Stella and brutish Stanley Kowalski in New Orleans (Elysian Fields); suitor Mitch; “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Cat: Maggie, Brick, Big Daddy, “mendacity.” | author · Streetcar · Glass Menagerie |
| Arthur Miller (1915–2005) | Social drama; “tragedy of the common man”; married Marilyn Monroe (1956) | All My Sons (1947); Death of a Salesman (1949; Pulitzer); The Crucible (1953); A View from the Bridge (1955) | Salesman: Willy Loman, wife Linda (“Attention must be paid”), sons Biff and Happy, brother Ben, neighbor Charley and son Bernard; Willy kills himself for the insurance. Crucible: Salem witch trials as an allegory of McCarthyism — John Proctor, Abigail Williams, Reverend Hale, Judge Danforth, Tituba. Miller was convicted of contempt for refusing to name names to HUAC (overturned). | author · Salesman · Crucible |
| Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) | Chicago; died of cancer at 34 | A Raisin in the Sun (1959); The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964); To Be Young, Gifted and Black (posthumous) | First play by a Black woman on Broadway; title from Langston Hughes’s “Harlem.” The Younger family — Walter Lee, his mother Lena (“Mama”), sister Beneatha, wife Ruth, son Travis — receive a $10,000 insurance check and buy a house in white Clybourne Park despite Karl Lindner’s buyout offer; Mama’s houseplant. | author · Raisin in the Sun |
| Edward Albee (1928–2016) | Theatre of the Absurd (American branch) | The Zoo Story (1959); Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962); A Delicate Balance (1966); Three Tall Women (1991) | Virginia Woolf: George and Martha savage each other in front of young guests Nick and Honey; their imaginary son. Three drama Pulitzers. | author · Virginia Woolf |
| August Wilson (1945–2005) | Pittsburgh (Century) Cycle — ten plays, one per decade of the 20th century | Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984); Fences (1985; Pulitzer 1987); Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986); The Piano Lesson (1987; Pulitzer 1990) | Fences: former Negro Leagues player Troy Maxson, now a garbage man, and son Cory. Most set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. | author · Fences |
Williams’s Tom Wingfield (Glass Menagerie) ≠ Steinbeck’s Tom Joad. Miller’s Crucible is set in 1692 Salem but is “about” 1950s McCarthyism — questions often say “an allegory for the Red Scare.” McCarthyism
More quiz-worthy contemporary Americans
| Author | Known for | Quiz clue | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Truman Capote (1924–1984) | Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948); Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958); “A Christmas Memory” (1956); In Cold Blood (1966) | Born Truman Streckfus Persons in New Orleans. Holly Golightly (Tiffany’s). In Cold Blood = Holcomb, Kansas murders — see Kansas Connections. | author · Tiffany’s |
| Ken Kesey (1935–2001) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) | Narrated by “Chief” Bromden; rebel Randle McMurphy vs. Nurse Ratched in an Oregon mental hospital. | author · Cuckoo’s Nest |
| Alice Walker (b. 1944) | The Color Purple (1982; Pulitzer 1983) | Epistolary: Celie writes letters to God and exchanges letters with her sister Nettie; Shug Avery; “Mister.” First Black woman to win the fiction Pulitzer. | author · Color Purple |
| S. E. Hinton (b. 1948) | The Outsiders (1967) | Written as a teenager in Tulsa, Oklahoma: greasers vs. Socs; Ponyboy Curtis, Johnny Cade (“Stay gold, Ponyboy” — from Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”), Dallas Winston. | author · The Outsiders |
| John Knowles (1926–2001) | A Separate Peace (1959) | Gene Forrester jounces a tree limb and his friend Phineas (“Finny”) falls, at the Devon School during WWII. | author · Separate Peace |
| Tim O’Brien (b. 1946) | The Things They Carried (1990) | Linked Vietnam War stories; Lt. Jimmy Cross carries letters from Martha; blurs fact and fiction (“story-truth” vs. “happening-truth”). | author · Things They Carried |
| N. Scott Momaday (1934–2024) | House Made of Dawn (1968; Pulitzer 1969) | Kiowa author; first Native American to win the Pulitzer; launched the “Native American Renaissance.” | author |
| Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954) | The House on Mango Street (1984) | Vignettes narrated by Esperanza Cordero in a Chicago Latino neighborhood. | author · Mango Street |
| Amy Tan (b. 1952) | The Joy Luck Club (1989) | Four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American daughters; a mahjong club in San Francisco. | author · Joy Luck Club |
| Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937) | V. (1963); The Crying of Lot 49 (1966); Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) | Reclusive postmodernist. Lot 49: Oedipa Maas and the secret postal system Trystero (W.A.S.T.E.). Gravity’s Rainbow: V-2 rockets; “A screaming comes across the sky.” | author |
| Eudora Welty (1909–2001) / Carson McCullers (1917–1967) | Welty: “A Worn Path,” “Why I Live at the P.O.,” The Optimist’s Daughter (Pulitzer 1973). McCullers: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), The Member of the Wedding (1946) | Both Southern writers. “A Worn Path”: elderly Phoenix Jackson walks to town for her grandson’s medicine. Lonely Hunter: deaf-mute John Singer. | Welty · McCullers |
| E. B. White (1899–1985) | Stuart Little (1945); Charlotte’s Web (1952); The Elements of Style (with William Strunk Jr.) | Charlotte the spider writes “SOME PIG” in her web to save Wilbur; Fern Arable; the rat Templeton. | author · Charlotte’s Web |
| Colson Whitehead (b. 1969) | The Underground Railroad (2016; Pulitzer 2017); The Nickel Boys (2019; Pulitzer 2020) | The Underground Railroad imagined as a literal railroad; runaway Cora. | author |
Ancient & Medieval Classics
↑ topGreek
| Author / work | Date & type | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homer | c. 8th century BC; oral epic in dactylic hexameter; legendary blind bard (Chios or Smyrna claimed) | Iliad (24 books); Odyssey (24 books); the Homeric Hymns are attributed to him | Iliad (“Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles”): in the 10th year of the Trojan War, Agamemnon takes Achilles’ prize Briseis; Achilles sulks; Hector kills Patroclus; Achilles kills Hector and drags his body; King Priam ransoms it; ends with Hector’s funeral. (No Trojan Horse in the Iliad.) Odyssey (“Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways”): Telemachus searches for his father (books 1–4); Calypso; the Phaeacians (Nausicaa); flashback of the Lotus-Eaters, Cyclops Polyphemus (“Nobody”), Aeolus, Circe, the Underworld (Tiresias), Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of Helios; home to Ithaca as a beggar; dog Argos; nurse Eurycleia sees his scar; Penelope’s shroud trick and the bow contest; slaughter of the suitors. Epithets: “rosy-fingered Dawn,” “wine-dark sea,” “grey-eyed Athena.” | Homer · Iliad · Odyssey |
| Hesiod | c. 700 BC; Boeotian farmer-poet inspired by the Muses on Mount Helicon | Theogony; Works and Days | Theogony: genealogy of the gods from Chaos and Gaia; Kronos castrates Ouranos; Zeus defeats the Titans; Prometheus and Pandora. Works and Days: farming advice to his lazy brother Perses; the Five Ages of Man (Golden, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, Iron). | Hesiod · Theogony · Works and Days |
| Sappho | c. 630–570 BC; lyric poet of Lesbos | Fragments; “Ode to Aphrodite” (the only complete poem); Fragment 31 (“He seems to me equal to the gods”) | Plato reportedly called her the “Tenth Muse.” Sapphic stanza. Catullus 51 adapts Fragment 31. Legend: leapt from the Leucadian cliff for love of Phaon. | Sappho |
| Aeschylus (c. 525–456 BC) | “Father of tragedy” — added a second actor; fought at Marathon | The Persians (472 BC, oldest surviving play); Seven Against Thebes; The Suppliants; Oresteia (458 BC): Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides; Prometheus Bound (authorship disputed) | The Oresteia is the only surviving complete Greek trilogy: Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon (and Cassandra) in the bath; Orestes avenges him by killing his mother; the Furies pursue Orestes until Athena’s court on the Areopagus acquits him and the Furies become the Eumenides (“Kindly Ones”). Legend says an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head. His epitaph mentions only Marathon. | Aeschylus · Oresteia |
| Sophocles (c. 497–406 BC) | Added the third actor; 7 surviving plays of about 120 | Ajax; Antigone (c. 441 BC); Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BC); Electra; Women of Trachis; Philoctetes (409 BC); Oedipus at Colonus (401 BC, posthumous) | Oedipus Rex: Oedipus solved the Sphinx’s riddle, unknowingly killed his father Laius at a crossroads and married his mother Jocasta; the blind prophet Tiresias; plague in Thebes; Oedipus blinds himself with Jocasta’s brooches. Aristotle’s model tragedy. Antigone: buries her brother Polynices against King Creon’s decree; sealed in a tomb, she hangs herself; Creon’s son Haemon and wife Eurydice also die; sister Ismene. | Sophocles · Oedipus Rex · Antigone |
| Euripides (c. 480–406 BC) | Psychological realism; strong female characters; frequent deus ex machina; most surviving plays (about 18) | Alcestis (438 BC); Medea (431 BC); Hippolytus (428 BC); The Trojan Women (415 BC); Electra; Helen; Iphigenia in Tauris; Cyclops (the only complete satyr play); The Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis (posthumous) | Medea: abandoned by Jason, Medea kills his new bride (Glauce/Creusa) with a poisoned robe, murders her own children, and escapes in the chariot of the sun god Helios. Bacchae: King Pentheus spies on Dionysus’s worshippers and is torn apart by his own mother Agave. Mocked by Aristophanes in The Frogs; died in Macedonia. | Euripides · Medea · Bacchae |
| Aristophanes (c. 446–386 BC) | Old Comedy; 11 surviving plays; political satire | The Acharnians (425 BC); The Knights (424); The Clouds (423); The Wasps (422); Peace (421); The Birds (414); Lysistrata (411); The Frogs (405); Assemblywomen; Wealth | Clouds: Strepsiades enrolls in Socrates’ “Thinkery” (Plato’s Apology blames the play for Socrates’ bad reputation). Birds: Cloudcuckooland. Lysistrata: Greek women hold a sex strike to end the Peloponnesian War. Frogs: Dionysus goes to Hades to bring back Euripides, but a contest makes him choose Aeschylus; chorus “Brekekekex koax koax.” Appears as a character in Plato’s Symposium. | Aristophanes · Lysistrata · The Frogs |
Sophocles’ three Theban plays (Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone) are not a trilogy — they were written decades apart, and Antigone came first. The only surviving true trilogy is Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Theban plays
Roman
| Author | Dates & notes | Key works | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) | 70–19 BC; born near Mantua; patron Maecenas; Augustan Age | Eclogues (c. 39–38 BC; Fourth Eclogue read as “Messianic”); Georgics (29 BC; farming, bees, Orpheus and Eurydice); Aeneid (12 books, unfinished at his death) | “Arma virumque cano” — “I sing of arms and the man.” Aeneas flees burning Troy carrying his father Anchises and leading son Ascanius (Iulus); loses wife Creusa; Juno’s hostility; Dido of Carthage kills herself when he leaves (Book 4); the Cumaean Sibyl guides him through the Underworld (Book 6); war in Latium against Turnus over Lavinia; ends abruptly with Aeneas killing Turnus. Laocoön: “I fear Greeks even bearing gifts.” Virgil asked that the Aeneid be burned; Augustus refused. Dante’s guide in the Inferno. | Virgil · Aeneid |
| Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) | 43 BC–AD 17/18; exiled by Augustus in AD 8 to Tomis on the Black Sea (modern Constanța, Romania) for “a poem and a mistake” | Amores; Heroides (letters from mythical heroines); Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love); Metamorphoses (AD 8, 15 books); Fasti; Tristia (exile poems) | Metamorphoses: about 250 myths of transformation — Apollo and Daphne (laurel), Echo and Narcissus, Pyramus and Thisbe (source of the play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Arachne, Daedalus and Icarus, Midas, Pygmalion, Baucis and Philemon, Phaethon; ends with Julius Caesar’s deification and Ovid’s boast of immortal fame. | Ovid · Metamorphoses |
| Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) | 65–8 BC; son of a freedman; fought for Brutus at Philippi; Maecenas gave him his Sabine farm | Satires; Epodes; Odes (4 books); Epistles; Ars Poetica; Carmen Saeculare (17 BC) | Phrases: “Carpe diem” (seize the day, Odes 1.11); “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (Odes 3.2 — Wilfred Owen’s “old Lie”); “the golden mean”; “Exegi monumentum aere perennius” (“I have built a monument more lasting than bronze”). Ars Poetica coined “in medias res” and noted that even “good Homer nods.” | Horace · Ars Poetica |
| Others to know | Plautus — comedies like Menaechmi (twins; source of The Comedy of Errors) and Pot of Gold. Terence — “I am human; nothing human is alien to me.” Catullus — love poems to “Lesbia”; “Odi et amo” (“I hate and I love”). Lucretius — De rerum natura (Epicurean atomism). Seneca the Younger — Stoic letters; bloody closet dramas that influenced Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Petronius — Satyricon (Trimalchio’s feast). Juvenal — Satires: “bread and circuses,” “Who will guard the guards themselves?” Apuleius — The Golden Ass (Lucius turned into a donkey; Cupid and Psyche). Plutarch (Greek, Roman era) — Parallel Lives, Shakespeare’s source for the Roman plays. | Plautus · Catullus · De rerum natura · Juvenal · Golden Ass · Parallel Lives | ||
Epics & medieval classics
| Work | Date / language | Plot & characters | Quiz clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Epic of Gilgamesh | Mesopotamian; Sumerian poems c. 2100 BC; Standard Babylonian version on 12 tablets attributed to Sîn-lēqi-unninni | Gilgamesh, two-thirds god king of Uruk, befriends the wild man Enkidu (civilized by Shamhat); they kill Humbaba, guardian of the Cedar Forest, and the Bull of Heaven after Gilgamesh spurns Ishtar; Enkidu dies; Gilgamesh seeks immortality from Utnapishtim, survivor of the Flood; a snake steals the plant of youth. | Oldest surviving great work of literature. Tablets found in the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh; George Smith announced the Flood tablet (Tablet XI) in 1872, startling Victorians with its parallels to Noah. | Gilgamesh |
| Beowulf | Old English; composed c. 700–1000; one manuscript (Cotton Vitellius A.xv), scorched in the 1731 Ashburnham House fire; 3,182 lines | The Geat hero Beowulf comes to the Danish king Hrothgar’s mead-hall Heorot and kills the monster Grendel (descendant of Cain), then Grendel’s mother in her underwater lair; 50 years later, as king of the Geats, he fights a dragon and dies, aided only by Wiglaf. | Opens “Hwæt!” and with the ship funeral of Scyld Scefing. Alliterative verse with a caesura in each line; kennings like “whale-road” (sea) and “bone-house” (body); the boastful Unferth. Tolkien’s 1936 lecture made it literature; Seamus Heaney’s 1999 translation begins “So.” John Gardner’s Grendel (1971) retells it from the monster’s view. | Beowulf · Grendel |
| The Song of Roland (La Chanson de Roland) | Old French chanson de geste, c. 1100; best manuscript at Oxford; assonant laisses; possibly by “Turoldus” | Charlemagne’s rearguard is ambushed at Roncevaux Pass (778) after Roland’s stepfather Ganelon betrays them to the Saracens; Roland refuses to blow his horn (the oliphant) until too late; Archbishop Turpin fights beside him; Charlemagne returns to avenge them; Ganelon is torn apart by four horses. | “Roland is brave, and Oliver is wise.” Roland’s sword is Durendal. (Historically the attackers were Basques.) Roland = Italian “Orlando” (Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso). Part of the “Matter of France.” | Song of Roland |
| Nibelungenlied | Middle High German, c. 1200, anonymous | Dragon-slayer Siegfried, invulnerable except where a linden leaf fell between his shoulders, helps Burgundian king Gunther (at Worms) win the warrior-queen Brünhild and marries Gunther’s sister Kriemhild; Hagen of Tronje kills Siegfried and sinks the Nibelung treasure in the Rhine; Kriemhild marries Etzel (Attila the Hun) and takes bloody revenge on the Burgundians. | Wagner’s Ring cycle draws more on the Norse versions (the Völsunga saga and the Eddas), where Siegfried is “Sigurd.” | Nibelungenlied |
| Sir Gawain and the Green Knight | Middle English, late 14th century, by the anonymous “Pearl Poet” | At Camelot a Green Knight offers a beheading game; Gawain beheads him, and the knight picks up his head; a year later Gawain is tested at Bertilak’s castle and keeps a green girdle. | Alliterative verse with “bob and wheel” stanza endings; Gawain’s shield bears the pentangle. | Gawain |
| Other world classics | Mahabharata (India; longest epic; Pandavas vs. Kauravas; contains the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna’s advice to Arjuna). Ramayana (Valmiki; Rama rescues Sita from the demon Ravana with Hanuman’s help). The Tale of Genji (Japan, c. 1010, by court lady Murasaki Shikibu; often called the first novel). One Thousand and One Nights (Scheherazade tells stories to King Shahryar to delay her execution; Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad). Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda (Norse myth); Njáls saga (Iceland). Popol Vuh (K’iche’ Maya). Epic of Sundiata (Mali). Piers Plowman (William Langland). Everyman (morality play). | Mahabharata · Ramayana · Genji · 1001 Nights · Prose Edda · Popol Vuh | ||
Shakespeare
↑ topLife & theater
- William Shakespeare (1564–1616): baptized April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon; traditionally born and died on April 23 (St. George’s Day). Buried in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford (“curst be he that moves my bones”). learn more
- Married Anne Hathaway (1582; she was 26, he 18); children Susanna and twins Hamnet and Judith — Hamnet died at 11 (1596). His will famously left Anne his “second-best bed.” learn more
- Rival Robert Greene sneered at him as an “upstart crow” (1592). Acting company: the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, renamed the King’s Men when James I became patron (1603). learn more
- The Globe Theatre: built 1599 in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames from the timbers of The Theatre (Shoreditch); an open-air “wooden O” (Henry V prologue); “groundlings” stood in the yard. Burned down in 1613 when a cannon fired during Henry VIII set the thatch alight; rebuilt 1614; closed by the Puritans in 1642. A reconstruction, Shakespeare’s Globe, opened in 1997 (thanks to American actor Sam Wanamaker). The company also used the indoor Blackfriars theatre from 1609. Globe · modern Globe
- First Folio (1623): compiled by fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell; 36 plays (18 printed for the first time, e.g. Macbeth, The Tempest); Droeshout engraving; Ben Jonson’s tribute “He was not of an age, but for all time!” and “Sweet Swan of Avon.” learn more
- Authorship question: fringe theories credit Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (“Oxfordians”), Francis Bacon, or Christopher Marlowe. Scholars overwhelmingly accept Shakespeare. learn more
Tragedies
| Play (approx. date) | Setting & key characters | Famous lines & clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Titus Andronicus (c. 1591–92) | Rome; general Titus, Goth queen Tamora, Aaron the Moor, mutilated daughter Lavinia | Bloodiest play; Tamora unknowingly eats her sons baked in a pie. Revenge tragedy in the style of Seneca. | learn more |
| Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) | Verona; Montagues vs. Capulets; Mercutio, Tybalt, Benvolio, Friar Laurence, the Nurse, Count Paris | Prologue is a sonnet: “Two households, both alike in dignity… A pair of star-cross’d lovers.” “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” (= why are you Romeo). “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet.” Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech and “A plague o’ both your houses!” Friar’s sleeping potion; Friar John’s letter is delayed by plague. | learn more |
| Julius Caesar (1599) | Rome; Brutus, Cassius, Mark Antony, Casca, Portia, Calpurnia, a soothsayer | “Beware the ides of March.” “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves.” Cassius has “a lean and hungry look.” “Et tu, Brute?” Antony’s funeral oration: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears… Brutus is an honourable man.” Brutus and Cassius die at Philippi; Antony calls Brutus “the noblest Roman of them all.” Caesar dies in Act III — Brutus is the tragic hero. | learn more |
| Hamlet (c. 1600–01) | Elsinore, Denmark; Prince Hamlet, uncle-stepfather King Claudius, mother Gertrude, counselor Polonius, his children Ophelia and Laertes, friend Horatio, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Ghost, Norway’s Fortinbras | Longest play. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Marcellus). “Frailty, thy name is woman!” Polonius: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be… to thine own self be true.” “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” — the play-within-a-play The Mousetrap (The Murder of Gonzago). Hamlet stabs Polonius behind the arras; Ophelia drowns; gravedigger scene: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.” Poisoned sword and cup; “The rest is silence.” | learn more |
| Othello (c. 1603–04) | Venice and Cyprus; the Moorish general Othello, wife Desdemona, ensign Iago, lieutenant Michael Cassio, Iago’s wife Emilia, Roderigo, Desdemona’s father Brabantio | Iago, passed over for promotion, convinces Othello that Desdemona loves Cassio using her lost handkerchief. “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; / It is the green-eyed monster.” Othello smothers Desdemona, then kills himself: “one that loved not wisely but too well.” | learn more |
| King Lear (c. 1605–06) | Ancient Britain; Lear, daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia; the Fool; Earl of Kent; subplot of the Earl of Gloucester with sons Edgar (disguised as “Poor Tom”) and Edmund the bastard | Cordelia refuses to flatter: “Nothing, my lord.” “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!” On the heath in a storm: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” Gloucester is blinded (“Out, vile jelly!”). Lear enters carrying the dead Cordelia: “Never, never, never, never, never.” | learn more |
| Macbeth (c. 1606) | Scotland; Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, the three witches (Weird Sisters), King Duncan, sons Malcolm and Donalbain, Banquo and son Fleance, Macduff, a drunken Porter | Shortest tragedy; actors call it “the Scottish play.” “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” “Double, double toil and trouble; / Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” Banquo’s ghost at the banquet. Lady Macbeth sleepwalks: “Out, damned spot!” “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow… a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” Prophecies: Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane; Macduff was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripp’d.” | learn more |
| Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606–07) | Rome and Egypt; Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Octavius Caesar, Enobarbus | Enobarbus: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety.” Defeat at Actium; Cleopatra dies by the bite of an asp. | learn more |
| Others: Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida | Coriolanus: proud Roman general scorns the plebeians, joins the enemy Volscians, is persuaded by his mother Volumnia to spare Rome. Timon: generous Athenian turns misanthrope. Troilus: cynical Trojan War love story (a “problem play”). | Coriolanus · Timon · Troilus |
The “big four” tragedies are Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. If a question mentions a handkerchief, think Othello; a skull, Hamlet; a storm on a heath, Lear; a moving forest, Macbeth.
Comedies
| Play (approx. date) | Setting & key characters | Famous lines & clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Comedy of Errors (c. 1594) | Ephesus; two sets of twins — masters Antipholus of Syracuse and of Ephesus, servants Dromio and Dromio | Shortest play; based on Plautus’s Menaechmi. | learn more |
| The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1590–92) | Padua; Petruchio “tames” Katherina (Kate); her sister Bianca’s suitors | Framed by an “induction” in which drunken tinker Christopher Sly is tricked into thinking he is a lord. Basis of Kiss Me, Kate and 10 Things I Hate About You. | learn more |
| The Two Gentlemen of Verona; Love’s Labour’s Lost (early 1590s) | Two Gentlemen: Valentine and Proteus; Launce’s dog Crab. LLL: the King of Navarre and lords swear off women for three years of study. | LLL contains the longest word in Shakespeare: “honorificabilitudinitatibus.” | Two Gentlemen · LLL |
| A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96) | Athens and a nearby wood; Duke Theseus and Hippolyta; lovers Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius, Helena; fairy king Oberon, queen Titania, and Puck (Robin Goodfellow); the “rude mechanicals” led by Nick Bottom and Peter Quince | “The course of true love never did run smooth.” Puck’s love-potion mix-ups; Bottom is given a donkey’s head and Titania falls for him. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” The mechanicals perform “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Mendelssohn’s incidental music includes the “Wedding March.” | learn more |
| The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596–97) | Venice and Belmont; merchant Antonio, his friend Bassanio, moneylender Shylock and daughter Jessica, heiress Portia | Shylock’s bond: a “pound of flesh.” Portia’s suitors choose among gold, silver, and lead caskets (lead wins). “Hath not a Jew eyes?… If you prick us, do we not bleed?” Portia, disguised as the lawyer Balthazar: “The quality of mercy is not strain’d.” | learn more |
| Much Ado About Nothing (c. 1598–99) | Messina; sparring Beatrice and Benedick (“a kind of merry war”); Hero and Claudio; villain Don John; constable Dogberry | Don John tricks Claudio into shaming Hero at the altar; friends trick Beatrice and Benedick into falling in love; Dogberry’s malapropisms. | learn more |
| As You Like It (c. 1599) | Forest of Arden; Rosalind (disguised as the boy Ganymede), Orlando, Celia, melancholy Jaques, the fool Touchstone | Jaques: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” — the “seven ages of man.” | learn more |
| Twelfth Night, or What You Will (c. 1601) | Illyria; shipwrecked Viola (disguised as Cesario) and twin Sebastian; Duke Orsino; Countess Olivia; steward Malvolio; Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Maria; the fool Feste | “If music be the food of love, play on.” Malvolio is tricked by a forged letter into wearing yellow, cross-gartered stockings: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” | learn more |
| The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597–1601) | Windsor; Sir John Falstaff woos two wives at once | Legend says Elizabeth I wanted to see Falstaff in love. Falstaff is dumped in the Thames in a laundry basket. | learn more |
| “Problem plays”: All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure (c. 1603–05) | All’s Well: Helena pursues the reluctant Bertram. Measure: Vienna; Duke Vincentio disguises himself as a friar; hypocritical deputy Angelo demands novice Isabella’s virtue to spare her brother Claudio. | Both use the “bed trick.” Term “problem play” coined by F. S. Boas (1896). | All’s Well · Measure |
Histories
| Play | Key characters & events | Famous lines & clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| King John | John, Philip the Bastard, young Arthur | “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily.” | learn more |
| Richard II | Richard deposed by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) | John of Gaunt: “This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle… This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” Written entirely in verse. | learn more |
| Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 | Prince Hal carouses with fat knight Sir John Falstaff at the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap (Mistress Quickly); rebel Hotspur (Henry Percy) killed by Hal at Shrewsbury | Falstaff: “The better part of valour is discretion.” Part 2: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” The new King Henry V rejects Falstaff: “I know thee not, old man.” | Part 1 · Part 2 |
| Henry V | Battle of Agincourt (1415); Fluellen; wooing Princess Katherine of France | Chorus: “O for a Muse of fire” and “this wooden O.” “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.” St. Crispin’s Day speech: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” | learn more |
| Henry VI, Parts 1–3 | Wars of the Roses; Joan la Pucelle (Joan of Arc); Jack Cade’s rebellion | Dick the Butcher (Part 2): “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Plucking of red and white roses in the Temple garden (Part 1). | Part 1 · Part 2 · Part 3 |
| Richard III (c. 1592–93) | Hunchbacked Richard of Gloucester murders his way to the throne (the princes in the Tower); killed at Bosworth by Richmond (Henry VII) | Opens: “Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York.” “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” | learn more |
| Henry VIII (1613, with John Fletcher) | Cardinal Wolsey’s fall; Katherine of Aragon; birth of Elizabeth | A cannon shot during a 1613 performance burned down the Globe. | learn more |
The “first tetralogy” = Henry VI 1–3 + Richard III; the “second tetralogy” or “Henriad” = Richard II, Henry IV 1–2, Henry V. Falstaff appears in Henry IV 1–2 and Merry Wives; his death is reported in Henry V.
Romances (late plays)
| Play | Key characters & plot | Famous lines & clues | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pericles, Prince of Tyre (c. 1607–08) | Pericles loses and regains wife Thaisa and daughter Marina; narrated by the medieval poet Gower | Co-written (probably with George Wilkins); left out of the First Folio. | learn more |
| Cymbeline (c. 1609–10) | Ancient Britain; Imogen (Innogen), husband Posthumus, villain Iachimo | Dirge “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun.” | learn more |
| The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610–11) | Sicilia and Bohemia; jealous King Leontes, wife Hermione, lost daughter Perdita, King Polixenes and son Florizel, rogue Autolycus, Paulina | Most famous stage direction: “Exit, pursued by a bear” (Antigonus). Hermione’s “statue” comes to life. Gives landlocked Bohemia a seacoast. | learn more |
| The Tempest (c. 1610–11) | A remote island; exiled Duke of Milan and magician Prospero, daughter Miranda, spirit Ariel, enslaved Caliban (son of the witch Sycorax), Prince Ferdinand, King Alonso, usurping brother Antonio, counselor Gonzalo, jester Trinculo, drunken butler Stephano | Miranda: “O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!” (Huxley’s title). Prospero: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on.” He drowns his book and breaks his staff — read as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. Observes the unities of time and place. | learn more |
| The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1613–14) | Palamon and Arcite (from Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale) | Co-written with John Fletcher. | learn more |
Sonnets & poems
- 154 sonnets, published 1609 by Thomas Thorpe, dedicated to the mysterious “Mr. W. H.,” “the onlie begetter.” Sonnets 1–126 address the Fair Youth (1–17 are “procreation sonnets”); 127–152 address the Dark Lady; 78–86 mention a Rival Poet. learn more
- Form: three quatrains and a couplet in iambic pentameter, rhymed abab cdcd efef gg; the “turn” (volta) often comes at line 9 or the closing couplet. learn more
- Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate.” learn more
- Sonnet 29: “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.” Sonnet 73: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold.” Sonnet 55: “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments.” Sonnet 29 · Sonnet 73
- Sonnet 116: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments.” learn more
- Sonnet 130: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” — a parody of Petrarchan praise. learn more
- Narrative poems: Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), both dedicated to the Earl of Southampton; “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” learn more
“Wherefore art thou Romeo?” means why, not where. “Brave new world” is from The Tempest, not a Huxley original; “the sound and the fury” is Macbeth, not a Faulkner original; “Something wicked this way comes” (Bradbury’s title) is also Macbeth. learn more
Famous First Lines
↑ topA first line read aloud is often the very first clue. If you recognize it, buzz immediately — moderators read it slowly on purpose.
| Opening line | Work | Author | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| “Call me Ishmael.” | Moby-Dick (1851) | Herman Melville | learn more |
| “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” | A Tale of Two Cities (1859) | Charles Dickens | learn more |
| “Marley was dead: to begin with.” | A Christmas Carol (1843) | Charles Dickens | learn more |
| “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” | Pride and Prejudice (1813) | Jane Austen | learn more |
| “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich…” | Emma (1815) | Jane Austen | learn more |
| “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” | Jane Eyre (1847) | Charlotte Brontë | learn more |
| “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” | Anna Karenina (1878) | Leo Tolstoy | learn more |
| “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man.” | Notes from Underground (1864) | Fyodor Dostoevsky | learn more |
| “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind…” | Don Quixote (1605) | Miguel de Cervantes | learn more |
| “Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark…” | Inferno (Divine Comedy) | Dante Alighieri | learn more |
| “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles…” | Iliad | Homer | learn more |
| “I sing of arms and the man…” (“Arma virumque cano”) | Aeneid | Virgil | learn more |
| “Hwæt!” (“Listen!” / “So.”) | Beowulf | Anonymous | learn more |
| “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote…” | The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer | learn more |
| “Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree…” | Paradise Lost (1667) | John Milton | learn more |
| “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary…” | “The Raven” (1845) | Edgar Allan Poe | learn more |
| “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.” | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) | Mark Twain | learn more |
| “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” | The Great Gatsby (1925) | F. Scott Fitzgerald | learn more |
| “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.” | The Sun Also Rises (1926) | Ernest Hemingway | learn more |
| “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” | The Old Man and the Sea (1952) | Ernest Hemingway | learn more |
| “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.” | The Sound and the Fury (1929) | William Faulkner | learn more |
| “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” | Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) | Zora Neale Hurston | learn more |
| “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like…” | The Catcher in the Rye (1951) | J. D. Salinger | learn more |
| “I am an invisible man.” | Invisible Man (1952) | Ralph Ellison | learn more |
| “It was a pleasure to burn.” | Fahrenheit 451 (1953) | Ray Bradbury | learn more |
| “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.” | To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) | Harper Lee | learn more |
| “It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.” | Catch-22 (1961) | Joseph Heller | learn more |
| “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas…” | In Cold Blood (1966) | Truman Capote | learn more |
| “All this happened, more or less.” | Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) | Kurt Vonnegut | learn more |
| “A screaming comes across the sky.” | Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) | Thomas Pynchon | learn more |
| “124 was spiteful.” | Beloved (1987) | Toni Morrison | learn more |
| “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.” | Lolita (1955) | Vladimir Nabokov | learn more |
| “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” | The Metamorphosis (1915) | Franz Kafka | learn more |
| “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” | The Trial (1925) | Franz Kafka | learn more |
| “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” (“Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.”) | The Stranger (1942) | Albert Camus | learn more |
| “For a long time, I went to bed early.” | Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time) | Marcel Proust | learn more |
| “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” | Ulysses (1922) | James Joyce | learn more |
| “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay…” | Finnegans Wake (1939) — the book’s last line loops back to this one | James Joyce | learn more |
| “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” | Mrs Dalloway (1925) | Virginia Woolf | learn more |
| “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” | Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) | George Orwell | learn more |
| “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” | The Hobbit (1937) | J. R. R. Tolkien | learn more |
| “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” | Rebecca (1938) | Daphne du Maurier | learn more |
| “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” | The Go-Between (1953) | L. P. Hartley | learn more |
| “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” | One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) | Gabriel García Márquez | learn more |
| “Where’s Papa going with that ax?” | Charlotte’s Web (1952) | E. B. White | learn more |
| “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky…” | “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) | T. S. Eliot | learn more |
| “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land…” | The Waste Land (1922) | T. S. Eliot | learn more |
| “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…” | “Howl” (1956) | Allen Ginsberg | learn more |
| “Whose woods these are I think I know.” | “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923) | Robert Frost | learn more |
Famous Characters
↑ topCharacter questions often name a minor figure first (a pet, a servant, a rival) — e.g. “Crooks and Candy” → Of Mice and Men; “Templeton” → Charlotte’s Web. The “Clue” column gives the detail most often used.
American literature
| Character | Work | Author | Clue | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hester Prynne | The Scarlet Letter | Hawthorne | Wears a scarlet “A”; daughter Pearl; lover Dimmesdale | learn more |
| Ishmael / Captain Ahab | Moby-Dick | Melville | Narrator / ivory-legged captain of the Pequod | learn more |
| Natty Bumppo (Hawkeye) | Leatherstocking Tales | Cooper | Frontier scout; friend of Chingachgook | learn more |
| Ichabod Crane | “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” | Irving | Schoolmaster chased by the Headless Horseman | learn more |
| Simon Legree | Uncle Tom’s Cabin | Stowe | Cruel plantation owner who has Tom beaten to death | learn more |
| Huckleberry Finn & Jim | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Twain | Raft down the Mississippi; Jim escapes slavery | learn more |
| Isabel Archer | The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James | American heiress trapped in marriage to Gilbert Osmond | learn more |
| Henry Fleming | The Red Badge of Courage | Stephen Crane | “The youth” who flees battle | learn more |
| Edna Pontellier | The Awakening | Kate Chopin | Swims into the Gulf off Grand Isle | learn more |
| Buck | The Call of the Wild | Jack London | Stolen dog who joins a wolf pack in the Yukon | learn more |
| Jurgis Rudkus | The Jungle | Upton Sinclair | Lithuanian immigrant in Chicago’s meatpacking plants | learn more |
| George F. Babbitt | Babbitt | Sinclair Lewis | Conformist realtor in Zenith | learn more |
| Ántonia Shimerda | My Ántonia | Willa Cather | Bohemian immigrant girl on the Nebraska prairie; narrator Jim Burden | learn more |
| Jay Gatsby / Daisy Buchanan / Nick Carraway | The Great Gatsby | Fitzgerald | Green light; West Egg vs. East Egg; Nick narrates | learn more |
| Jake Barnes / Lady Brett Ashley | The Sun Also Rises | Hemingway | Lost Generation expatriates at Pamplona | learn more |
| Santiago | The Old Man and the Sea | Hemingway | Cuban fisherman; the boy Manolin; a marlin | learn more |
| Benjy, Quentin, Jason & Caddy Compson | The Sound and the Fury | Faulkner | Four sections; servant Dilsey | learn more |
| Tom Joad | The Grapes of Wrath | Steinbeck | Paroled son; Dust Bowl migrants; Ma Joad, Jim Casy | learn more |
| George Milton & Lennie Small | Of Mice and Men | Steinbeck | Migrant workers dreaming of a farm; Lennie loves soft things | learn more |
| Janie Crawford | Their Eyes Were Watching God | Hurston | Three husbands; Tea Cake; hurricane | learn more |
| Emily Webb / the Stage Manager | Our Town | Thornton Wilder | Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire | learn more |
| Bigger Thomas | Native Son | Richard Wright | Chauffeur who kills Mary Dalton | learn more |
| Holden Caulfield | The Catcher in the Rye | Salinger | Red hunting hat; “phonies”; sister Phoebe | learn more |
| Atticus, Scout & Jem Finch; Boo Radley | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | Atticus defends Tom Robinson in Maycomb | learn more |
| Guy Montag | Fahrenheit 451 | Bradbury | Book-burning fireman who rebels | learn more |
| Yossarian | Catch-22 | Heller | Bombardier on Pianosa who wants out | learn more |
| Billy Pilgrim | Slaughterhouse-Five | Vonnegut | “Unstuck in time”; Tralfamadorians; Dresden | learn more |
| Willy Loman | Death of a Salesman | Arthur Miller | Failing salesman; sons Biff and Happy | learn more |
| John Proctor / Abigail Williams | The Crucible | Arthur Miller | Salem witch trials | learn more |
| Blanche DuBois / Stanley Kowalski | A Streetcar Named Desire | Tennessee Williams | “Kindness of strangers”; New Orleans | learn more |
| Amanda, Tom & Laura Wingfield | The Glass Menagerie | Tennessee Williams | Glass unicorn; gentleman caller | learn more |
| Walter Lee Younger | A Raisin in the Sun | Lorraine Hansberry | Insurance money; Clybourne Park | learn more |
| Sethe | Beloved | Toni Morrison | Haunted at 124 Bluestone Road | learn more |
| Randle McMurphy / Nurse Ratched | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Ken Kesey | Narrated by Chief Bromden | learn more |
| Ponyboy Curtis | The Outsiders | S. E. Hinton | Greaser; “Stay gold” | learn more |
| Humbert Humbert | Lolita | Nabokov | Unreliable narrator; rival Clare Quilty | learn more |
| Newt Winger | The Learning Tree | Gordon Parks | Grows up in Cherokee Flats, Kansas | learn more |
British & Irish literature
| Character | Work | Author | Clue | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Wife of Bath | The Canterbury Tales | Chaucer | Five husbands; women want “sovereignty” | learn more |
| Christian | The Pilgrim’s Progress | Bunyan | Journeys to the Celestial City | learn more |
| Robinson Crusoe & Friday | Robinson Crusoe | Defoe | Castaway for 28 years | learn more |
| Lemuel Gulliver | Gulliver’s Travels | Swift | Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, Houyhnhnms | learn more |
| Elizabeth Bennet & Mr. Darcy | Pride and Prejudice | Austen | Pemberley; Wickham; Mr. Collins | learn more |
| Victor Frankenstein & the Creature | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | Framed by Robert Walton’s Arctic letters | learn more |
| Jane Eyre & Edward Rochester | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | Thornfield; Bertha Mason in the attic | learn more |
| Heathcliff & Catherine Earnshaw | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë | Yorkshire moors; narrators Lockwood and Nelly Dean | learn more |
| Ebenezer Scrooge | A Christmas Carol | Dickens | “Bah! Humbug!”; three spirits; Tiny Tim | learn more |
| Pip, Estella & Miss Havisham | Great Expectations | Dickens | Stopped clocks and rotting wedding cake; convict Magwitch | learn more |
| Sydney Carton | A Tale of Two Cities | Dickens | “It is a far, far better thing that I do…” | learn more |
| Becky Sharp | Vanity Fair | Thackeray | Scheming social climber | learn more |
| Dorothea Brooke | Middlemarch | George Eliot | Marries the dry scholar Casaubon | learn more |
| Tess Durbeyfield | Tess of the d’Urbervilles | Hardy | Alec and Angel; arrested at Stonehenge | learn more |
| Long John Silver | Treasure Island | Stevenson | One-legged pirate cook with parrot Captain Flint | learn more |
| Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde | Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde | Stevenson | Lawyer Utterson investigates | learn more |
| Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson | Holmes stories | Conan Doyle | 221B Baker Street; Moriarty | learn more |
| Dorian Gray | The Picture of Dorian Gray | Wilde | His portrait ages instead of him | learn more |
| Lady Bracknell | The Importance of Being Earnest | Wilde | “A handbag?” | learn more |
| Mowgli | The Jungle Book | Kipling | Raised by wolves; Baloo, Bagheera, Shere Khan | learn more |
| Kurtz (and Marlow) | Heart of Darkness | Conrad | “The horror! The horror!” | learn more |
| Eliza Doolittle & Henry Higgins | Pygmalion | Shaw | Flower girl taught to speak like a lady | learn more |
| Leopold & Molly Bloom; Stephen Dedalus | Ulysses | Joyce | June 16, 1904 — Bloomsday | learn more |
| Clarissa Dalloway | Mrs Dalloway | Woolf | Party preparations; Septimus Warren Smith | learn more |
| Winston Smith / Big Brother | Nineteen Eighty-Four | Orwell | Ministry of Truth; Room 101 | learn more |
| Napoleon, Snowball & Boxer | Animal Farm | Orwell | Pigs and a loyal cart-horse | learn more |
| John the Savage / Bernard Marx | Brave New World | Huxley | Soma; World Controller Mustapha Mond | learn more |
| Bilbo & Frodo Baggins; Gollum | The Hobbit / The Lord of the Rings | Tolkien | The One Ring; “my precious” | learn more |
| Aslan | The Chronicles of Narnia | C. S. Lewis | The lion who dies for Edmund and rises again | learn more |
| Ralph, Piggy & Jack | Lord of the Flies | Golding | The conch; Piggy’s glasses | learn more |
| Vladimir & Estragon | Waiting for Godot | Beckett | Wait for Godot, who never comes | learn more |
| Hercule Poirot | Many novels | Agatha Christie | Belgian detective; “little grey cells” | learn more |
| Stevens (the butler) | The Remains of the Day | Ishiguro | Darlington Hall; Miss Kenton | learn more |
European & classical literature
| Character | Work | Author | Clue | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Odysseus / Penelope / Telemachus | Odyssey | Homer | Ten-year voyage home to Ithaca | learn more |
| Achilles / Hector | Iliad | Homer | Wrath of Achilles; Hector’s body ransomed by Priam | learn more |
| Oedipus | Oedipus Rex | Sophocles | Kills his father, marries his mother, blinds himself | learn more |
| Medea | Medea | Euripides | Kills her children to punish Jason | learn more |
| Aeneas / Dido | Aeneid | Virgil | Trojan founder of Rome; Carthaginian queen | learn more |
| Beatrice | Divine Comedy | Dante | Guides Dante through Paradise | learn more |
| Don Quixote & Sancho Panza | Don Quixote | Cervantes | Tilts at windmills; horse Rocinante; Dulcinea | learn more |
| Tartuffe | Tartuffe | Molière | Religious hypocrite who fools Orgon | learn more |
| Candide & Dr. Pangloss | Candide | Voltaire | “Best of all possible worlds”; cultivate our garden | learn more |
| Faust & Mephistopheles | Faust | Goethe | Scholar’s wager with the devil; Gretchen | learn more |
| Werther | The Sorrows of Young Werther | Goethe | Lovesick for Lotte; suicide | learn more |
| Jean Valjean & Javert | Les Misérables | Hugo | Prisoner 24601; Bishop’s candlesticks; Cosette | learn more |
| Quasimodo & Esmeralda | The Hunchback of Notre-Dame | Hugo | Bell-ringer; Claude Frollo | learn more |
| d’Artagnan | The Three Musketeers | Dumas père | Joins Athos, Porthos, Aramis; Milady de Winter | learn more |
| Edmond Dantès | The Count of Monte Cristo | Dumas père | Château d’If; Abbé Faria; revenge | learn more |
| Julien Sorel | The Red and the Black | Stendhal | Ambitious carpenter’s son | learn more |
| Emma Bovary | Madame Bovary | Flaubert | Bored provincial wife; arsenic | learn more |
| Captain Nemo | Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas | Verne | Submarine Nautilus | learn more |
| Phileas Fogg & Passepartout | Around the World in Eighty Days | Verne | Wager at the Reform Club; Detective Fix | learn more |
| Meursault | The Stranger | Camus | Kills an Arab on an Algiers beach | learn more |
| Gregor Samsa | The Metamorphosis | Kafka | Wakes as a giant insect | learn more |
| Josef K. | The Trial | Kafka | Arrested for an unnamed crime | learn more |
| Hans Castorp | The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann | Seven years in a Davos sanatorium | learn more |
| Paul Bäumer | All Quiet on the Western Front | Remarque | German WWI soldier; mentor Kat | learn more |
| Oskar Matzerath | The Tin Drum | Günter Grass | Stops growing at 3; glass-shattering scream | learn more |
| Eugene Onegin & Tatyana | Eugene Onegin | Pushkin | Rejected letter; duel with Lensky | learn more |
| Chichikov | Dead Souls | Gogol | Buys dead serfs | learn more |
| Bazarov | Fathers and Sons | Turgenev | The nihilist | learn more |
| Raskolnikov & Sonya | Crime and Punishment | Dostoevsky | Axe murder of a pawnbroker; Porfiry Petrovich | learn more |
| Alyosha, Ivan & Dmitri Karamazov | The Brothers Karamazov | Dostoevsky | Patricide; “The Grand Inquisitor” | learn more |
| Prince Myshkin | The Idiot | Dostoevsky | Saintly, epileptic prince | learn more |
| Anna Karenina & Vronsky; Levin | Anna Karenina | Tolstoy | Train; parallel Levin–Kitty plot | learn more |
| Pierre Bezukhov, Natasha Rostova & Prince Andrei | War and Peace | Tolstoy | Napoleon’s invasion; Borodino | learn more |
| Yuri Zhivago & Lara | Doctor Zhivago | Pasternak | Physician-poet in the Revolution | learn more |
| Woland & Behemoth | The Master and Margarita | Bulgakov | The devil and a giant talking cat in Moscow | learn more |
| Nora Helmer | A Doll’s House | Ibsen | Forged loan; slams the door | learn more |
| Hedda Gabler | Hedda Gabler | Ibsen | Burns Løvborg’s manuscript; father’s pistols | learn more |
| Siddhartha | Siddhartha | Hesse | Brahmin’s son; ferryman Vasudeva | learn more |
| Mother Courage | Mother Courage and Her Children | Brecht | Canteen wagon in the Thirty Years’ War | learn more |
| Zorba | Zorba the Greek | Kazantzakis | Life-loving miner on Crete | learn more |
| Aureliano Buendía | One Hundred Years of Solitude | García Márquez | Macondo; firing squad; discovering ice | learn more |
Pen Names
↑ top| Pen name | Real name | Known for | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mark Twain | Samuel Langhorne Clemens | Huckleberry Finn; name = riverboat call for 2 fathoms | learn more |
| O. Henry | William Sydney Porter | “The Gift of the Magi” | learn more |
| Dr. Seuss (also Theo. LeSieg) | Theodor Seuss Geisel | The Cat in the Hat (1957); Green Eggs and Ham (1960, using only 50 different words on a bet) | learn more |
| Silence Dogood; Richard Saunders | Benjamin Franklin | Newspaper letters; Poor Richard’s Almanack | learn more |
| Diedrich Knickerbocker; Geoffrey Crayon | Washington Irving | A History of New York; The Sketch Book | learn more |
| Publius | Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay | The Federalist Papers | learn more |
| Ellery Queen | Cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee | Detective novels; also the detective’s name | learn more |
| Victoria Lucas | Sylvia Plath | The Bell Jar (first edition) | learn more |
| Richard Bachman | Stephen King | The Long Walk, The Running Man | learn more |
| Lemony Snicket | Daniel Handler | A Series of Unfortunate Events | learn more |
| Ayn Rand | Alisa Rosenbaum (Russian-born) | The Fountainhead (1943); Atlas Shrugged (1957; “Who is John Galt?”) | learn more |
| Nellie Bly | Elizabeth Cochran(e) | Journalist; Ten Days in a Mad-House; raced around the world in 72 days (1889–90) to beat Phileas Fogg | learn more |
| George Eliot | Mary Ann (Marian) Evans | Middlemarch, Silas Marner | learn more |
| George Orwell | Eric Arthur Blair | Animal Farm, 1984; named for the River Orwell | learn more |
| Lewis Carroll | Charles Lutwidge Dodgson | Oxford mathematician; Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) for Alice Liddell; Through the Looking-Glass (1871) | learn more |
| Currer, Ellis & Acton Bell | Charlotte, Emily & Anne Brontë | Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey | learn more |
| Boz | Charles Dickens | Sketches by Boz (1836) | learn more |
| Saki | Hector Hugh Munro | Witty short stories: “The Open Window,” “Sredni Vashtar” | learn more |
| Elia | Charles Lamb | Essays of Elia; with sister Mary, Tales from Shakespeare | learn more |
| Mary Westmacott | Agatha Christie | Six romance novels | learn more |
| Robert Galbraith | J. K. Rowling | Cormoran Strike detective novels | learn more |
| John le Carré | David Cornwell | Spy novels; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (George Smiley) | learn more |
| Rebecca West | Cicily Fairfield | Took her name from a heroine of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm | learn more |
| James Herriot | James Alfred Wight | Yorkshire vet memoirs: All Creatures Great and Small | learn more |
| Voltaire | François-Marie Arouet | Candide | learn more |
| Molière | Jean-Baptiste Poquelin | Tartuffe | learn more |
| Stendhal | Marie-Henri Beyle | The Red and the Black | learn more |
| George Sand | Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin | Novelist (Indiana); lover of Chopin; wore men’s clothes | learn more |
| Anatole France | Jacques Anatole François Thibault | Penguin Island; Nobel 1921 | learn more |
| Hergé | Georges Remi (initials “R.G.” reversed) | The Adventures of Tintin (Belgium) | learn more |
| Novalis | Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg | German Romantic; Hymns to the Night (1800); Heinrich von Ofterdingen — the “blue flower” | learn more |
| Emil Sinclair | Hermann Hesse | Demian (1919, first edition) | learn more |
| Maxim Gorky (“bitter”) | Alexei Maximovich Peshkov | The Lower Depths; Mother | learn more |
| Anna Akhmatova | Anna Gorenko | Requiem | learn more |
| V. Sirin | Vladimir Nabokov | His Russian-language novels | learn more |
| Sholem Aleichem | Solomon Rabinovich | Yiddish stories of Tevye the dairyman → Fiddler on the Roof | learn more |
| Italo Svevo | Aron Hector Schmitz | Zeno’s Conscience (1923); friend of Joyce in Trieste | learn more |
| Pablo Neruda | Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto | Chilean poet; Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair; Nobel 1971; name from Czech poet Jan Neruda | learn more |
| Gabriela Mistral | Lucila Godoy Alcayaga | Chilean poet; first Latin American Nobel laureate (1945) | learn more |
| Isak Dinesen | Karen Blixen | Out of Africa; Babette’s Feast | learn more |
| Multatuli (“I have suffered much”) | Eduard Douwes Dekker | Max Havelaar (1860), attacking Dutch colonialism in Java | learn more |
| Elena Ferrante | Unconfirmed (anonymous Italian author) | Neapolitan Novels | learn more |
Some famous authors simply changed or adapted names rather than using pen names: Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Johnson), Toni Morrison (born Chloe Wofford), Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams), Truman Capote (born Truman Streckfus Persons; took his stepfather’s surname), and Joseph Conrad (Józef Korzeniowski). Questions may still ask for the birth name. List of pen names
Literary Terms
↑ topMeter & verse forms
A foot is a unit of stressed (DUM) and unstressed (da) syllables; the number of feet per line gives the line name: monometer (1), dimeter (2), trimeter (3), tetrameter (4), pentameter (5), hexameter (6), heptameter (7), octameter (8). learn more
| Term | Definition | Example / clue | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Iamb (iambic) | da-DUM | “To be or not to be”; the most common English foot | learn more |
| Trochee (trochaic) | DUM-da | “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright”; Longfellow’s Hiawatha; Poe’s “The Raven” (trochaic octameter) | learn more |
| Anapest (anapestic) | da-da-DUM | “’Twas the night before Christmas”; limericks | learn more |
| Dactyl (dactylic) | DUM-da-da | “This is the / forest pri / meval” (Evangeline); dactylic hexameter is the meter of Homer and Virgil | learn more |
| Spondee | DUM-DUM (two stresses) | “Break, break, break” (Tennyson); used for emphasis, not whole poems | learn more |
| Iambic pentameter | Five iambs per line (10 syllables) | Shakespeare, Milton, most English sonnets: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” | learn more |
| Blank verse | Unrhymed iambic pentameter | Shakespeare’s plays, Marlowe, Paradise Lost, Frost’s “Mending Wall” | learn more |
| Free verse (vers libre) | No regular meter or rhyme | Whitman, Sandburg, W. C. Williams | learn more |
| Heroic couplet | Rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines | Pope, Dryden; Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales | learn more |
| Alexandrine | 12-syllable line (iambic hexameter in English) | Standard line of French classical drama (Racine, Molière); last line of the Spenserian stanza | learn more |
| Common meter / ballad meter | Alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter (8-6-8-6) | Emily Dickinson; hymns like “Amazing Grace”; folk ballads | learn more |
| Terza rima | Interlocking tercets: aba bcb cdc… | Dante’s Divine Comedy; Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” | learn more |
| Ottava rima | Eight lines rhymed abababcc | Ariosto, Tasso, Camões; Byron’s Don Juan; Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” | learn more |
| Rhyme royal | Seven lines of iambic pentameter rhymed ababbcc | Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde; Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece | learn more |
| Spenserian stanza | Eight lines of iambic pentameter + an alexandrine, rhymed ababbcbcc | The Faerie Queene; Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes”; Byron’s Childe Harold | learn more |
| Sprung rhythm | Counts only stressed syllables per line; any number of unstressed | Gerard Manley Hopkins (“The Windhover”) | learn more |
Poem types
| Term | Definition | Example / clue | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet | 14 lines: octave abbaabba + sestet (cdecde or cdcdcd); the turn (volta) comes at line 9 | Petrarch; Milton’s “When I consider how my light is spent”; Wordsworth; Donne’s Holy Sonnets | learn more |
| Shakespearean (English) sonnet | Three quatrains + a couplet: abab cdcd efef gg | Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets; introduced to English by Wyatt and Surrey (Surrey developed this form) | learn more |
| Spenserian sonnet | Linked quatrains: abab bcbc cdcd ee | Spenser’s Amoretti | learn more |
| Villanelle | 19 lines: five tercets + a quatrain, only two rhymes (aba); lines 1 and 3 alternate as refrains and end the poem as a couplet | Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night”; Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”; Theodore Roethke, “The Waking” | learn more |
| Sestina | Six stanzas of six lines + a three-line envoi (tornada); the same six end-words rotate in a fixed pattern (39 lines) | Invented by troubadour Arnaut Daniel; Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina”; Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte” | learn more |
| Haiku | Japanese: three phrases of 5-7-5 sound units (on), with a season word (kigo) and a “cutting word” (kireji) | Matsuo Bashō’s “old pond / frog jumps in / sound of water”; Buson, Issa; Shiki coined the term “haiku” | learn more |
| Tanka | Japanese 5-7-5-7-7 (31 syllables) | Classical court poetry (waka) | learn more |
| Limerick | Five anapestic lines rhymed AABBA | Popularized by Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense (1846) | learn more |
| Ode | Elevated lyric addressing a subject; Pindaric (strophe, antistrophe, epode), Horatian (regular stanzas), or irregular | Keats’s odes; Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”; Wordsworth’s “Intimations” ode | learn more |
| Elegy | Poem of mourning | Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; Milton’s “Lycidas” (pastoral elegy); Tennyson’s In Memoriam; Whitman’s “Lilacs” | learn more |
| Ballad | Narrative song-poem, usually in ballad meter with a refrain | “Sir Patrick Spens”; Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (literary ballad) | learn more |
| Dramatic monologue | A single speaker addresses a silent listener, revealing character unintentionally | Browning’s “My Last Duchess”; Tennyson’s “Ulysses”; Eliot’s “Prufrock” | learn more |
| Aubade / Epithalamion | A dawn poem of lovers parting / a wedding poem | Donne’s “The Sun Rising” / Spenser’s Epithalamion | aubade · epithalamion |
| Concrete (shape) poem | Typography forms a picture of the subject | George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” and “The Altar” | learn more |
| Ekphrasis | Poem describing a work of visual art | Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”; W. C. Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” | learn more |
Sound & figurative devices
| Term | Definition | Example / clue | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Caesura | A pause in the middle of a line | Central to Old English verse (Beowulf) | learn more |
| Enjambment | A sentence runs past the line break (opposite: end-stopped line) | “so much depends / upon” | learn more |
| Slant (half) rhyme | Near rhyme of similar sounds | Dickinson: “Soul / all” | learn more |
| Alliteration / Assonance / Consonance | Repeated initial consonants / repeated vowel sounds / repeated consonants anywhere | “Full fathom five”; “hear the mellow wedding bells” | alliteration · assonance |
| Onomatopoeia | Words that imitate sounds | Poe’s “The Bells” (“tintinnabulation”); “Brekekekex koax koax” | learn more |
| Anaphora | Repetition of a word or phrase at the start of successive lines/clauses | Whitman; Ginsberg’s “Howl” (“who…”); “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” | learn more |
| Apostrophe | Directly addressing an absent person, object, or idea | “Death, be not proud”; “O Captain! My Captain!” | learn more |
| Kenning | Compound metaphor replacing a noun (Old English / Norse) | “whale-road” = sea; “bone-house” = body | learn more |
| Synecdoche / Metonymy | Part for the whole / an associated thing for the thing | “All hands on deck” / “The pen is mightier than the sword”; “the Crown” | synecdoche · metonymy |
| Litotes | Understatement by negating the opposite | “not bad at all”; common in Beowulf | learn more |
| Zeugma | One word governs two others in different senses | Pope: Belinda might “stain her honour, or her new brocade” | learn more |
| Chiasmus | Reversed parallel structure (ABBA) | “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country” | learn more |
| Oxymoron / Paradox | Contradictory words together / a seemingly contradictory statement that holds truth | “O brawling love! O loving hate!” (Romeo and Juliet) / “Death, thou shalt die” | oxymoron · paradox |
| Conceit (metaphysical conceit) | An elaborate, far-fetched extended metaphor | Donne’s lovers as compass legs; “The Flea” | learn more |
| Pathetic fallacy | Attributing human emotions to nature (term coined by John Ruskin, 1856) | Storms during Lear’s madness | learn more |
| Objective correlative | T. S. Eliot’s term: objects/events that evoke a particular emotion in the reader | From his essay “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919) | learn more |
| Negative capability | Keats’s term: being “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” without reaching after fact | From an 1817 letter; he ascribed it to Shakespeare | learn more |
| Malapropism | Comic misuse of a similar-sounding word | Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals; Dogberry in Much Ado | learn more |
Drama & epic terms
| Term | Definition | Example / clue | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Epic conventions | Invocation of the Muse; opening in medias res; epic (Homeric) similes; stock epithets; catalogs (e.g., of ships); descent to the underworld (katabasis); divine intervention; a hero of national importance; elevated style | Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Paradise Lost; mock-epic uses them for trivial subjects (The Rape of the Lock) | learn more |
| In medias res | Starting “in the middle of things,” filling in the past by flashback (Horace’s phrase) | The Odyssey starts in year 10 of the journey | learn more |
| Epic (Homeric) simile | An extended comparison running for several lines | Common in Homer and Milton | learn more |
| Deus ex machina | “God from the machine”: an improbable outside force resolves the plot (originally a god lowered by crane) | Euripides (Medea’s dragon chariot); criticized by Aristotle | learn more |
| Hubris | Excessive pride or defiance of the gods | Oedipus; Creon; Icarus | learn more |
| Hamartia | The protagonist’s tragic flaw or error (Aristotle) | Othello’s jealousy; Macbeth’s ambition | learn more |
| Catharsis | The purging of pity and fear in the audience (Aristotle’s Poetics) | The goal of tragedy | learn more |
| Anagnorisis / Peripeteia | The moment of recognition / the reversal of fortune | Oedipus discovers who he is — and falls | anagnorisis · peripeteia |
| Nemesis | Retributive justice for hubris (named for the goddess) | learn more | |
| Three unities | Unity of action, time (one day), and place — a neoclassical rule derived from Aristotle | Racine; The Tempest | learn more |
| Stichomythia | Rapid alternating single lines of dialogue | Greek tragedy; Hamlet and Gertrude in the closet scene | learn more |
| Soliloquy / Aside / Monologue | Alone, speaking thoughts aloud / a brief remark only the audience hears / a long speech to other characters | “To be, or not to be” is a soliloquy | soliloquy · aside |
| Foil | A character who contrasts with another to highlight traits | Laertes and Fortinbras as foils to Hamlet | learn more |
| Dramatic / situational / verbal irony | Audience knows what a character doesn’t / outcome opposite of expectation / saying the opposite of what’s meant | Oedipus cursing the killer (himself); “The Gift of the Magi”; Antony’s “Brutus is an honourable man” | learn more |
| Chekhov’s gun | Every element introduced must pay off (a gun on the wall in Act 1 must go off) | Anton Chekhov | learn more |
| Freytag’s pyramid | Exposition → rising action → climax → falling action → dénouement (catastrophe in tragedy) | Gustav Freytag (1863), based on five-act drama | learn more |
| Play within a play / Fourth wall | A performance inside the drama / the imaginary wall between stage and audience | “The Mousetrap” in Hamlet; “Pyramus and Thisbe” / breaking it in Wilder’s Our Town or Brecht’s epic theatre | play within a play · fourth wall |
| Theatre of the Absurd | Plays showing a meaningless universe through illogical plots and circular dialogue (term by critic Martin Esslin, 1961) | Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, Albee, Stoppard | learn more |
Narrative & genre terms
| Term | Definition | Example / clue | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stream of consciousness | Narration imitating the unfiltered flow of a character’s thoughts (phrase coined by psychologist William James, 1890) | Joyce’s Ulysses (Molly Bloom), Woolf, Faulkner’s Benjy section | learn more |
| Free indirect discourse | Third-person narration that slips into a character’s voice | Austen, Flaubert, Woolf | learn more |
| Unreliable narrator | A narrator whose account can’t be trusted | Humbert Humbert; Stevens the butler; Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” narrator; Dr. Sheppard in Roger Ackroyd | learn more |
| Frame story | A story containing other stories | Canterbury Tales, Decameron, 1001 Nights, Frankenstein, Heart of Darkness | learn more |
| Bildungsroman | Coming-of-age novel tracing moral and psychological growth (German: “formation novel”) | Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Catcher in the Rye | learn more |
| Künstlerroman | A bildungsroman about the growth of an artist | Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | learn more |
| Picaresque | Episodic adventures of a lovable rogue (pícaro) of low birth | Lazarillo de Tormes, Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Huckleberry Finn, Augie March | learn more |
| Epistolary | Told through letters, diaries, or documents | Richardson’s Pamela, Goethe’s Werther, Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), Dracula, The Color Purple | learn more |
| Allegory | Characters and events systematically stand for abstract ideas or real events | The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Faerie Queene, Animal Farm, The Crucible, Everyman | learn more |
| Roman à clef | “Novel with a key”: real people under fictional names | On the Road, The Sun Also Rises, The Bell Jar | learn more |
| Satire (Horatian vs. Juvenalian) | Ridicule to expose folly — gentle and amused vs. bitter and angry | Pope / Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” | learn more |
| Mock-epic (mock-heroic) | Epic style applied to a trivial subject | The Rape of the Lock; Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe | learn more |
| Gothic novel | Gloomy castles, secrets, the supernatural, terror | Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764, the first); Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho; parodied in Northanger Abbey | learn more |
| Novel of manners | Examines the customs and behavior of a social class | Austen, Wharton, Henry James | learn more |
| Dystopia / Utopia | A nightmarish / ideal society (“utopia” coined by Thomas More, 1516: “no place”) | 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Zamyatin’s We, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale / More’s Utopia | dystopia · Utopia |
| Metafiction | Fiction that calls attention to its own fictionality | If on a winter’s night a traveler; Tristram Shandy; Pale Fire | learn more |
| Epiphany | A sudden moment of insight (Joyce’s term for it in Dubliners) | The boy’s realization at the end of “Araby” | learn more |
| Hero’s journey (monomyth) | Departure, initiation, return — Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) | Odysseus, Frodo, Luke Skywalker | learn more |
| Byronic hero | Brooding, rebellious, passionate, flawed hero | Childe Harold, Manfred, Heathcliff, Rochester | learn more |
| Fabliau / Chanson de geste | Bawdy comic tale in verse / Old French epic of heroic deeds | Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale / The Song of Roland | fabliau · chanson de geste |
| Doppelgänger | A ghostly double or alter ego | Dostoevsky’s The Double; Poe’s “William Wilson”; Jekyll and Hyde | learn more |
Blank verse (unrhymed, metered) ≠ free verse (no meter). Petrarchan sonnets turn after line 8; Shakespearean sonnets often save the turn for the final couplet. Volta
Literary Movements & Prizes
↑ topMovements
| Movement | Dates / place | Traits | Members & key works | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metaphysical poets | 17th-c. England | Witty conceits, argument, paradox (label from Samuel Johnson) | Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw | learn more |
| Cavalier poets | 17th-c. England, royalist | Elegant lyrics of love and carpe diem | Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace (“Stone walls do not a prison make”), John Suckling, Thomas Carew | learn more |
| Neoclassicism / Augustan Age | c. 1660–1780, Britain and France | Reason, order, decorum, classical models, satire, heroic couplets | Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson; Racine and Molière in France | learn more |
| Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) | 1760s–1780s, Germany | Extreme emotion, rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism; named for Klinger’s 1776 play | Goethe’s Werther, Schiller’s The Robbers, Herder | learn more |
| Romanticism | c. 1790s–1850, Europe and America | Emotion, imagination, nature, the individual, the sublime, the past and the exotic | English: Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge (Lyrical Ballads, 1798), Byron, Shelley, Keats. German: Novalis, Hoffmann. French: Hugo. American: Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne | learn more |
| Transcendentalism | c. 1836–1860, Concord / Boston, MA | Divinity in nature and the individual; intuition over reason; self-reliance; journal The Dial; utopian Brook Farm and Fruitlands | Emerson (Nature, 1836), Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Peabody | learn more |
| Pre-Raphaelites | From 1848, England | Medieval subjects, vivid detail (poets and painters) | Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti (“Goblin Market”), William Morris, Swinburne | learn more |
| Realism | c. 1830–1900 | Ordinary life depicted truthfully, middle class, plausible detail | Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy, George Eliot, Twain, Howells, Henry James | learn more |
| Local color / Regionalism | c. 1865–1900, U.S. | Dialect, customs, and landscapes of specific regions | Bret Harte (“The Outcasts of Poker Flat”), Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Hamlin Garland, Joel Chandler Harris | learn more |
| Naturalism | c. 1870–1910 | Characters determined by heredity and environment; “scientific” and often bleak | Zola (The Experimental Novel), Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, Dreiser | learn more |
| Symbolism | 1880s–1890s, France (manifesto by Jean Moréas, 1886) | Suggestion, music, symbols rather than statement | Baudelaire (precursor), Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé | learn more |
| Aestheticism / Decadence | 1870s–1890s | “Art for art’s sake” (l’art pour l’art) | Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Swinburne | learn more |
| Modernism | c. 1900–1945 | Fragmentation, stream of consciousness, allusion and myth, break with tradition; Pound’s “Make it new”; 1922 is the annus mirabilis (Ulysses, The Waste Land) | Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Pound, Faulkner, Kafka, Proust, Mann; Bloomsbury Group | learn more |
| Imagism | 1912–1917 | Direct treatment of the thing, no superfluous word, rhythm of the musical phrase | Pound, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington; anthology Des Imagistes (1914) | learn more |
| Lost Generation | 1920s, American expatriates in Paris | Disillusionment after WWI; phrase from Gertrude Stein, quoted by Hemingway | Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Archibald MacLeish, E. E. Cummings | learn more |
| Harlem Renaissance | c. 1918–mid-1930s, Harlem, New York | “New Negro” movement in literature, music, and art; Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925); magazines The Crisis (Du Bois) and Opportunity | Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Arna Bontemps | learn more |
| Southern Renaissance & Southern Gothic | 1920s–1960s, American South | Grotesque characters, decay, violence, sin and grace, the burden of history | Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote; Fugitives/Agrarians (Ransom, Tate, Robert Penn Warren) | learn more |
| Existentialism | 1940s–1950s, France (roots in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky) | “Existence precedes essence”; freedom, responsibility, anguish, authenticity | Sartre, de Beauvoir; Camus (absurdism, related) | learn more |
| Beat Generation | 1940s–1960s, New York → San Francisco | Nonconformity, jazz, drugs, Eastern religion, spontaneous prose; “Howl” debuted at the Six Gallery reading (1955); “beatnik” coined by Herb Caen (1958) | Kerouac, Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (City Lights), Neal Cassady, Gary Snyder | learn more |
| Confessional poetry | Late 1950s–1960s, U.S. | Intensely personal subjects: mental illness, family, suicide | Robert Lowell (Life Studies), Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, John Berryman | learn more |
| Angry Young Men | 1950s, Britain | Working- and lower-middle-class frustration | John Osborne (Look Back in Anger), Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim), Alan Sillitoe, John Braine | learn more |
| Black Arts Movement | 1965–1975, U.S. | Artistic branch of Black Power | Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones; Dutchman), Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, later Gwendolyn Brooks | learn more |
| Magical realism & the Latin American Boom | 1960s–1970s | Supernatural events told matter-of-factly in a realistic world (Alejo Carpentier’s “lo real maravilloso”) | Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967; Macondo; Nobel 1982), Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch), Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa (Nobel 2010), Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits), Juan Rulfo (Pedro Páramo); precursor Jorge Luis Borges (Ficciones) | learn more · Boom |
| Postmodernism | 1960s– | Metafiction, irony, pastiche, fragmented and playful narratives | Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Vonnegut, DeLillo, Calvino, Eco, Nabokov’s Pale Fire | learn more |
Group nicknames: the Inklings (Oxford: Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams); the Bloomsbury Group (Woolf, Forster, Keynes, Lytton Strachey); the Lake Poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey); the Algonquin Round Table (Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley); the Fugitives (Vanderbilt). Inklings · Bloomsbury · Lake Poets
Nobel Prize in Literature — American laureates
Awarded since 1901 by the Swedish Academy. full list of laureates
| Year | Laureate | Note | More |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1930 | Sinclair Lewis | First American winner | learn more |
| 1936 | Eugene O’Neill | Only American playwright to win | learn more |
| 1938 | Pearl S. Buck | First American woman | learn more |
| 1948 | T. S. Eliot | American-born; a British citizen when he won | learn more |
| 1949 | William Faulkner | Prize was actually awarded in 1950 | learn more |
| 1954 | Ernest Hemingway | Soon after The Old Man and the Sea | learn more |
| 1962 | John Steinbeck | learn more | |
| 1976 | Saul Bellow | Canadian-born | learn more |
| 1978 | Isaac Bashevis Singer | Polish-born; wrote in Yiddish (“Gimpel the Fool”) | learn more |
| 1980 | Czesław Miłosz | Polish poet, U.S. citizen since 1970 | learn more |
| 1987 | Joseph Brodsky | Russian-born poet exiled in 1972 | learn more |
| 1993 | Toni Morrison | First Black woman laureate | learn more |
| 2016 | Bob Dylan | First songwriter; “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” | learn more |
| 2020 | Louise Glück | Poet (The Wild Iris) | learn more |
Notable European (and other) laureates
| Year | Laureate | Country | Note | More |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1901 | Sully Prudhomme | France | First laureate ever (Tolstoy was famously passed over) | learn more |
| 1902 | Theodor Mommsen | Germany | Historian (History of Rome) | learn more |
| 1905 | Henryk Sienkiewicz | Poland | Quo Vadis | learn more |
| 1907 | Rudyard Kipling | UK | First English-language winner; youngest ever (41) | learn more |
| 1909 | Selma Lagerlöf | Sweden | First woman | learn more |
| 1913 | Rabindranath Tagore | India | First non-European (Gitanjali) | learn more |
| 1920 | Knut Hamsun | Norway | Hunger, Growth of the Soil | learn more |
| 1923 | W. B. Yeats | Ireland | learn more | |
| 1925 | George Bernard Shaw | Ireland/UK | Later won an Oscar too | learn more |
| 1929 | Thomas Mann | Germany | Buddenbrooks | learn more |
| 1934 | Luigi Pirandello | Italy | Six Characters | learn more |
| 1946 | Hermann Hesse | Germany/Switzerland | learn more | |
| 1953 | Winston Churchill | UK | For his histories and oratory | learn more |
| 1957 | Albert Camus | France | Age 44 | learn more |
| 1958 | Boris Pasternak | USSR | Forced to decline | learn more |
| 1964 | Jean-Paul Sartre | France | Voluntarily declined | learn more |
| 1969 | Samuel Beckett | Ireland | learn more | |
| 1970 | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | USSR | learn more | |
| 1971 | Pablo Neruda | Chile | learn more | |
| 1982 | Gabriel García Márquez | Colombia | Magical realism | learn more |
| 1983 | William Golding | UK | learn more | |
| 1986 | Wole Soyinka | Nigeria | First African laureate | learn more |
| 1995 | Seamus Heaney | Ireland | learn more | |
| 1996 | Wisława Szymborska | Poland | learn more | |
| 1998 | José Saramago | Portugal | First in Portuguese | learn more |
| 1999 | Günter Grass | Germany | learn more | |
| 2005 | Harold Pinter | UK | learn more | |
| 2007 | Doris Lessing | UK | Oldest laureate at the time (87) | learn more |
| 2013 | Alice Munro | Canada | “Master of the contemporary short story” | learn more |
| 2017 | Kazuo Ishiguro | UK | learn more | |
| 2018 | Olga Tokarczuk | Poland | Announced in 2019 after the Academy’s 2018 scandal | learn more |
| 2022 | Annie Ernaux | France | Memoir-novels (The Years) | learn more |
| 2023 | Jon Fosse | Norway | Playwright and novelist | learn more |
| 2024 | Han Kang | South Korea | The Vegetarian | learn more |
| 2025 | László Krasznahorkai | Hungary | Satantango | learn more |
Only two people have declined the literature Nobel: Pasternak (forced, 1958) and Sartre (by choice, 1964). Tolstoy, Ibsen, Twain, Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Borges never won. learn more
Pulitzer & other prizes
- Pulitzer Prize: established by the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer (New York World); administered by Columbia University; first awarded in 1917. Book categories include Fiction (called “Novel” until 1947; first winner Ernest Poole’s His Family, 1918), Drama (from 1918), Poetry (from 1922; first winner Edwin Arlington Robinson), History, Biography, and General Nonfiction. learn more
- Pulitzer records: Eugene O’Neill — 4 for drama; Robert Frost — 4 for poetry; Thornton Wilder — only one to win for both fiction and drama; Robert Penn Warren — only one for both fiction and poetry; two-time fiction winners Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, John Updike, Colson Whitehead. Firsts: Edith Wharton (first woman, fiction, 1921); Gwendolyn Brooks (first Black winner, 1950). Kansans: William Allen White (1923, 1947) and William Inge (Drama, 1953). fiction winners · drama winners
- National Book Award (U.S., since 1950) — e.g., Ellison’s Invisible Man, Stafford’s Traveling Through the Dark. learn more
- Booker Prize (UK, since 1969; first winner P. H. Newby) — two-time winners include J. M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, and Margaret Atwood; Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the “Booker of Bookers.” learn more
- Prix Goncourt (France, since 1903) — e.g., Proust (1919), de Beauvoir (1954). Cervantes Prize (Spanish-language lifetime award, since 1976). Goncourt · Cervantes Prize
- Newbery Medal (since 1922; most distinguished American children’s book; first winner The Story of Mankind) and Caldecott Medal (since 1938; picture-book illustration) — both from the American Library Association. Hans Christian Andersen Award — international, the “Little Nobel.” Newbery · Caldecott
- Hugo and Nebula Awards — science fiction and fantasy. Edgar Award — mystery (named for Poe). Hugo · Edgar
- Poets Laureate: UK — first official laureate John Dryden (1668); Tennyson served longest (1850–92). U.S. — the Library of Congress “Consultant in Poetry” (from 1937) was retitled Poet Laureate Consultant in 1986; Robert Penn Warren was the first under the new title. UK · U.S.