numerous books on three shelves; blue, yellow and orange circles with question marks surround them

Photo Collage: MOA Staff; (Source: Alamy)

Take Our Classic Books Quiz

Test your Austen powers (and Dickens ones, too)

Thom Geier,

AARP

Published August 25, 2023

10 Questions

The days of summer reading lists are long gone, but many of us still look back fondly on the classic novels we read in school. This quiz will test your knowledge of all those great works of fiction you probably read — or at least skimmed before the final exam.

Take Our Classic Books Quiz

[ {
  "question" : "True or false: The Charles Dickens novel “Great Expectations” begins: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”?",
  "answers" : [ {
    "answer" : "True",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "False",
    "correctAnswer" : true
  } ],
  "multiSelect" : false,
  "explanation" : "That opening line belongs to “A Tale of Two Cities,” Dickens’ sprawling historical novel set in London and Paris during the French Revolution. It became a hit when it was first serialized beginning in 1859 – though some critics were savage. James Fitzjames Stephen compared the book to a meal of “puppy pie and stewed cat,” adding, “he has put before his readers dishes of which the quality is not disguised by the cooking.”",
  "hint" : "",
  "hintLink" : "",
  "questionImgCaption" : "",
  "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
  "question" : "What is the name of the captain of the whaling vessel in Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”?",
  "answers" : [ {
    "answer" : "Moby-Dick",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Ahab",
    "correctAnswer" : true
  }, {
    "answer" : "Ishmael",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Starbuck",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  } ],
  "multiSelect" : false,
  "explanation" : "Gordon Bowker, cofounder of Starbucks, initially suggested naming the coffee chain Pequod after the whaling ship that “Moby-Dick” antihero Captain Ahab sails in his mad quest to find and kill the sperm whale that bit off his leg on a previous voyage. Instead, Bowker and partner Terry Heckler settled on Starbuck, the chief mate on the Pequod who resists Ahab’s vengeance plan.",
  "hint" : "",
  "hintLink" : "",
  "questionImgCaption" : "",
  "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
  "question" : "What is the first line of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”?",
  "answers" : [ {
    "answer" : "“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”",
    "correctAnswer" : true
  }, {
    "answer" : "“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  } ],
  "multiSelect" : false,
  "explanation" : "The narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” dreams of a mansion called Manderley; Leo Tolstoy imagines the difference between families in the opening of “Anna Karenina,” and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre recalls a rainy winter morning in her childhood.",
  "hint" : "",
  "hintLink" : "",
  "questionImgCaption" : "",
  "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
  "question" : "What chore does Tom Sawyer persuade his friends to do for him?",
  "answers" : [ {
    "answer" : "Mow the lawn",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Split firewood",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Whitewash a fence",
    "correctAnswer" : true
  }, {
    "answer" : "Shuck corn",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  } ],
  "multiSelect" : false,
  "explanation" : "Author Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, has a district that re-creates the look of the town in the 19th century – including Twain’s boyhood home, Becky Thatcher’s house (with a whitewashed fence across the street) and statues of Tom and Huckleberry Finn. The town’s Jaycees host annual fence-painting and frog-jumping contests.",
  "hint" : "",
  "hintLink" : "",
  "questionImgCaption" : "",
  "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
  "question" : "Who is the tortured hero of Emily Brontë’s novel “Wuthering Heights”?",
  "answers" : [ {
    "answer" : "Heathcliff",
    "correctAnswer" : true
  }, {
    "answer" : "Edward Rochester",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Raskolnikov",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Ichabod Crane",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  } ],
  "multiSelect" : false,
  "explanation" : "Brontë published “Wuthering Heights” in December 1847 — the year before her death at age 30 — under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, along with the novel “Agnes Grey” by her younger sister Anne, who published under the name Acton Bell. They were published two months after the release of sister Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” who used the nom de plume Currer Bell.",
  "hint" : "",
  "hintLink" : "",
  "questionImgCaption" : "",
  "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
  "question" : "How did Jay Gatsby make his fortune in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”?",
  "answers" : [ {
    "answer" : "Gun-running",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Bootlegging",
    "correctAnswer" : true
  }, {
    "answer" : "Embezzling",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Bank robbing",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  } ],
  "multiSelect" : false,
  "explanation" : "The novel was published in 1925 at the height of Prohibition, when a poor Midwesterner and World War I veteran like James Gatz could earn millions in the illegal booze business and refashion himself as a deep-pocketed golden boy. Hollywood icons Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio both played Gatsby in Oscar-winning films (in 1974 and 2013).",
  "hint" : "",
  "hintLink" : "",
  "questionImgCaption" : "",
  "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
  "question" : "What job does Atticus Finch hold in “To Kill a Mockingbird”?",
  "answers" : [ {
    "answer" : "Doctor",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Banker",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Police officer",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Lawyer",
    "correctAnswer" : true
  } ],
  "multiSelect" : false,
  "explanation" : "The hero of Harper Lee’s novel is a lawyer in 1930s Alabama who’s tapped to defend a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Gregory Peck won an Oscar for playing him in the 1962 film, and in 1997 the Alabama Bar Association erected a monument to the fictional attorney outside the courthouse in Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama.",
  "hint" : "",
  "hintLink" : "",
  "questionImgCaption" : "",
  "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
  "question" : "Who is the leader of the totalitarian nation Oceania in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”?",
  "answers" : [ {
    "answer" : "Winston Smith",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Big Brother",
    "correctAnswer" : true
  }, {
    "answer" : "The Governor",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Lord Voldemort",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  } ],
  "multiSelect" : false,
  "explanation" : "Orwell is widely believed to have modeled Big Brother in his 1949 novel on the Soviet leader Josef Stalin, even describing his character as having a “heavy black mustache” while enlisting spies to report on citizens who might resist elements going against Oceania’s Three-Year Plans (like Stalin’s own Five-Year Plans).",
  "hint" : "",
  "hintLink" : "",
  "questionImgCaption" : "",
  "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
  "question" : "True or false: In “The Catcher in the Rye,” the only school subject that Holden Caulfield was not failing was English.",
  "answers" : [ {
    "answer" : "True",
    "correctAnswer" : true
  }, {
    "answer" : "False",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  } ],
  "multiSelect" : false,
  "explanation" : "Holden is a budding writer who resents his older brother, D.B., and deems him a “phony” for abandoning serious literature in favor of a screenwriting career in Hollywood. Similarly, author J.D. Salinger refused all attempts to adapt his most famous novel for either stage or screen.",
  "hint" : "",
  "hintLink" : "",
  "questionImgCaption" : "",
  "questionImgCredit" : ""
}, {
  "question" : "What does Ralph use to summon his schoolmates in “Lord of the Flies”?",
  "answers" : [ {
    "answer" : "Conch shell",
    "correctAnswer" : true
  }, {
    "answer" : "Whistle",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Megaphone",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  }, {
    "answer" : "Drum",
    "correctAnswer" : false
  } ],
  "multiSelect" : false,
  "explanation" : "Stephen King was such a big fan of the 1954 novel that he wrote in the introduction to a 2011 reissue: “It was, so far as I can remember, the first book with hands — strong ones that reached out of the pages and seized me by the throat. It said to me, ‘This is not just entertainment; it’s life-or-death.’”",
  "hint" : "",
  "hintLink" : "",
  "questionImgCaption" : "",
  "questionImgCredit" : ""
} ]

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Thom Geier is an award-winning writer and editor with a passion for American pop culture. He served as executive editor of the digital news site TheWrap.com and as a senior editor at Entertainment Weekly, where he oversaw coverage of movies, theater and books. His essays and reviews appear regularly on CultureSauce.net.