Literature for grades 9–10: questions with answers
The Literature questions for grades 9–10 from the game, with the correct answers and an explanation for each.
Which novel opens with the line "Call me Ishmael"?
- The Old Man and the Sea
- Treasure Island
- Robinson Crusoe
- Moby-Dick
Correct answer: Moby-Dick — Ishmael is the narrator of Melville's novel; the name comes from the outcast son of Abraham in the Bible.
Which Dickens novel opens "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times"?
- Great Expectations
- The Old Curiosity Shop
- A Tale of Two Cities
- David Copperfield
Correct answer: A Tale of Two Cities — The two cities are London and Paris during the French Revolution; the novel was published in 1859.
Who wrote the poetry collection Leaves of Grass?
- Walt Whitman
- Robert Frost
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Correct answer: Walt Whitman — Whitman printed the first edition himself in 1855 and kept expanding it until his death in 1892.
Which American poet's 1,800 poems were nearly all published after her death in 1886?
- Emily Dickinson
- Sylvia Plath
- Elizabeth Bishop
- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Correct answer: Emily Dickinson — Dickinson lived reclusively in Amherst, Massachusetts; fewer than a dozen of her poems appeared in her lifetime.
Who wrote Wuthering Heights?
- Charlotte Brontë
- Anne Brontë
- Mary Shelley
- Emily Brontë
Correct answer: Emily Brontë — Emily Brontë's only novel, the story of Heathcliff and Catherine on the Yorkshire moors, appeared in 1847; she died the next year.
In which year was George Orwell's 1984 published?
- 1932
- 1938
- 1945
- 1949
Correct answer: 1949 — Orwell wrote the novel on the Scottish island of Jura while ill with tuberculosis; he died seven months after it appeared.
Who wrote the poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil)?
- Paul Verlaine
- Arthur Rimbaud
- Charles Baudelaire
- Guillaume Apollinaire
Correct answer: Charles Baudelaire — Six poems from the 1857 collection were banned in France for offending public morals; the ban was lifted only in 1949.
Émile Zola was the leading figure of which literary movement?
- Naturalism
- Romanticism
- Symbolism
- Surrealism
Correct answer: Naturalism — Naturalists treated the novel like a scientific study of heredity and environment; Zola's Germinal describes a miners' strike.
Who wrote the comedy Tartuffe?
- Jean Racine
- Pierre Corneille
- Molière
- Beaumarchais
Correct answer: Molière — The 1664 satire of a religious hypocrite was banned for five years under pressure from the Church.
Who wrote Dead Souls?
- Nikolai Gogol
- Ivan Goncharov
- Mikhail Lermontov
- Ivan Turgenev
Correct answer: Nikolai Gogol — Chichikov travels Russia buying up dead serfs who are still on the tax rolls; Gogol burned much of the unfinished second part.
Who wrote The Gulag Archipelago?
- Boris Pasternak
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- Vasily Grossman
- Varlam Shalamov
Correct answer: Alexander Solzhenitsyn — The account of the Soviet labour camps was published in Paris in 1973; Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the USSR the following year.
Who wrote The Magic Mountain?
- Hermann Hesse
- Günter Grass
- Heinrich Böll
- Thomas Mann
Correct answer: Thomas Mann — The 1924 novel is set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos; Mann won the Nobel Prize in 1929.
Which German poet wrote the Ode to Joy set to music by Beethoven?
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Friedrich Schiller
- Heinrich Heine
- Friedrich Hölderlin
Correct answer: Friedrich Schiller — Schiller wrote the poem in 1785; Beethoven used it in the finale of his Ninth Symphony, now the anthem of the European Union.
Who wrote the play Blood Wedding?
- Federico García Lorca
- Miguel de Unamuno
- Pedro Calderón de la Barca
- Lope de Vega
Correct answer: Federico García Lorca — Lorca wrote the tragedy in 1932; he was shot by Nationalist forces at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.
Which Argentine writer wrote the collection Ficciones?
- Julio Cortázar
- Jorge Luis Borges
- Ernesto Sabato
- Adolfo Bioy Casares
Correct answer: Jorge Luis Borges — Borges's 1944 stories of labyrinths and infinite libraries were written while he worked as a librarian in Buenos Aires.
Which Italian poet wrote the Canzoniere, sonnets to his beloved Laura?
- Dante Alighieri
- Petrarch
- Torquato Tasso
- Giacomo Leopardi
Correct answer: Petrarch — Petrarch's 14th-century sonnets set the pattern for love poetry across Europe, including Shakespeare's.
Who guides Dante through Paradise in the Divine Comedy?
- Virgil
- Saint Peter
- Homer
- Beatrice
Correct answer: Beatrice — Virgil, as a pagan, can lead Dante only through Hell and Purgatory; Beatrice, the woman Dante loved in his youth, takes over in Paradise.
Which ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos wrote love lyrics around 600 BC?
- Pindar
- Hesiod
- Sappho
- Anacreon
Correct answer: Sappho — Plato called Sappho the tenth Muse; only fragments of her nine books of poems survive.
Who wrote the Metamorphoses, a Latin poem of mythological transformations?
- Virgil
- Ovid
- Horace
- Lucretius
Correct answer: Ovid — Ovid's poem retells some 250 myths from the creation to Julius Caesar; Emperor Augustus exiled him to the Black Sea in AD 8.
Who wrote Things Fall Apart (1958), set in Nigeria?
- Wole Soyinka
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
- Chinua Achebe
- Ben Okri
Correct answer: Chinua Achebe — The novel of the Igbo leader Okonkwo and the arrival of British missionaries is the most widely read African novel in the world.