Literature

first lines

(fifteen questions)
Pretty self-explanatory: we give you a first line, you give us the title of the work it comes from and the author of that work.

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
"1984", George Orwell
"It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see."
"This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper."
"Skinny Legs and All", Tom Robbins
"The Citadel of Troizen, where the Palace stands, was built by giants before anyone remembers."
"The King Must Die", Mary Renault
"The sky above the port was the color of telelvision tuned to a dead channel."
"Neuromancer", William Gibson
"Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy."
"The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe", C. S. Lewis
"The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended."
"2001: A Space Odyssey", Arthur C. Clarke
"I always get the shakes before a drop. I've had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can't really be afraid.
"Starship Troopers", Robert Heinlein
"'Where's Papa going with that ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast."
"Charlotte's Web", E. B. White
"These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr. Bucket. Their names are Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine."
"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", E. B. White
"What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?"
"Love Story", Erich Segal
"Robert Cohn was once middle weight boxing champion of Princeton."
"The Sun Also Rises", Ernest Hemingway
"It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about."
"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", Mark Twain
"From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper."
"The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus", Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
"On the first Monday of the month April, 1625, the market town of Meung, in which the author of the 'Romance of the Rose' was born
"The Three Musketeers", Alexandre Dumas

author's day jobs

(twelve questions)
It is conventional wisdom that making a living and supporting oneself with one's writing is nearly impossible. Even for the great writers whose names we all remember because of the words they wrote: but what were their days jobs?

Francis Bacon
Philosopher
John Bunyan
Preacher
Anton Chekov
Doctor
Arthur Conan Doyle
Optician
Oliver Goldsmith
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Actually started as a writer/publisher. Became consul in Europe later in life
John Locke
Physician
Ben Jonson
Bricklayer/Soldier
Chaim Potok
Army Chaplain
Samuel Pepys
Secretary
Aleksandr Pushkin
Political Dilettante
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Senate Staffer

subtitles (or, other names for books)

(ten questions)
Given the book, give the subtitle and author:

Uncle Tom's Cabin
"Life Among the Lowly", Harriet Beecher Stowe
Godel, Escher, Bach
"An Eternal Golden Braid", Douglas Hofstadter
The Hobbit
"There and Back Again", J. R. R. Tolkein
Flatland
"A Romance of Many Dimensions", Edwin Abbott
Good omens
"The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch", Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Given the subtitle of the work, give the name of the work and the author:

A Tale of the Christ
"Ben Hur", Lew Wallace
A Story of Wall Street
"Bartelby, the Scrivener", Herman Melville
The Children's Crusade
"Slaughterhouse 5", Kurt Vonnegut
A Hot Fairy Tale
An Heroi-Comical Poem
"Rape of the Lock", Alexander Pope

locations

(twenty-five questions)
Given the book title and the author, give the (primary, unless otherwise noted) venue. Some are more specific than others; Petersburg hosted the story; however, for the question Hamlet/Shakespeare, the answer "Denmark" would suffice.)

Absalom, Absalom/William Faulkner
Jefferson, Mississippi (Yoknapatawpha County)
The Age of Innocence/Edith Wharton
New York City
(2) Brave New World/Aldous Huxley
Utopia
Call of the Wild/Jack London
Yukon
(2) Catch-22/Joseph Heller
Pianosa
A Doll's House/Henrik Ibsen
Emma/Jane Austen
Highbury/Hartfield
The Great Gatsby/F. Scott Fitzgerald
East Egg, Long Island
The House of Seven Gables/Nathaniel Hawthorne
Waldo County, Maine
Jude the Obscure/Thomas Hardy
Christminster and Marygreen
A Lost Lady/Willa Cather
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets/Stephen Crane
New York City
The Maltese Falcon/Dashiell Hammett
San Francisco
The Mikado/W.S. Gilbert
Titipu
(2) Othello/Shakespeare
Venice and Cyprus
Our Town/Thornton Wilder
Peterborough, New Hampshire
Pere Goriot/Balzac
Paris
A House Like a Lotus/Madeleine L'Engle
Greece/Cyprus
Rabbit, Run/John Updike
Romeo & Juliet/Shakespeare
Verona
The Scarlet Letter/Nathaniel Hawthorne
Early New England
(2) The Sun Also Rises/Ernest Hemingway
Paris and Poloma
The Swiss Family Robinson/J.R. Wyss
a desert island
To Kill a Mockingbird/Harper Lee
Maycomb, Alabama
Tom Sawyer/Mark Twain
Missouri

quote identification section!

The Rembrandt painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer may not be by Rembrandt but by a pupil so divinely gifted in learning the lessons of his master that he never was able to accomplish anything more and whose name, as a consequence, has been lost in obscurity. The bust of Homer that Aristotle is shown contemplating is not of Homer. The man is not Aristotle.
I think in the context of our adventures--and Henry's--that it's fitting to conclude with my erection, the circumcised erection of the Jewish father, reminding you of what you said when you first had occasion to hold it. I wasn't so chagrined by your virginal diffidence as by the amusement that came in its wake. Uncertainly I asked, "Isn't it to your liking?" "Oh, yes, it's fine," you said, delicately weighing it in the scale of your hand, "but it's the phenomenon itself: it just seems a rather rapid transition." I'd like those words to stand as the coda to that book you so foolishly tell me you wish to excape. To escape into what, Marietta? It may be as you say that this is no life, but use your enchanting, enrapturing brains: this life is as close to life as you, and I, and our child can ever hope to come.
I was born in the city of Bombay...once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more...On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thatnks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate--at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.
Midnight''s Children, Salman Rushdie
After that he didn't ask for the children to be sent to America and didn't answer when Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money. In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, New York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with someone to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the heart of the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant's in Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in the section of the country, in one town or another.
Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
[NOTE: Skipped to due inability to scan or create needed pictures]
The nymph's resentments none but I Can well imagine or condole; But none can guess Lysander's soul, But those who swayed his destiny. His silent griefs swell up to storms, And not one god his fury spares; He cursed his birth, his fate, his stars; But more the shepherdess's charms, Whose soft bewitching influence Had damned him to the hell of impotence.
IT HAD BEEN LIKE DYING, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread. It was like slipping into fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering. We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we were in a strange place--a hotel in central Washington, in a town near Yakima. The eclipse we had traveled here to see would occur early the next morning.
[SKIPPED]
And he went back for some more fir-cones. It did. It kept on doing it. Then he dropped two in at once, and leant over the bridge to see which of them would come out first; and one of them did; but as they were both the same size, he didn't know if it was the one which he wanted to win, or the other one. So the next time he dropped one big one and one little one, and the big one came out first, which was what he had said it would do, and the little one came out last, which was what he had said it would do, so he had won twice...
Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo ..... His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.
O, the geen wothe botheth.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
Now, I feel just as sure as I'm sure that my name Isn't Willow, titwillow, titwillow, That 'twas blighted affection that made him exclaim, "Oh, willow, titwillow, titwillow!" And if you remain callous and obdurate, I Shall perish as he did, and you will know why, Though I probably shall not exclaim as I die, "Oh, willow, titwillow, titwillow!"
The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan

random questions about literature that didn't fit anywhere else:

(ten questions)
Some Questions About Love & Marriage Courtesy of Cynthia: How many proposals did each of these people get and from whom?

Laura Ingalls Wilder
Jane Eyre
Anne Shirley
Buttercup
How many times is Mouse 'married' in Tales of the City?

Just plain random questions

In Red Dragon, what book does Hannibal Lechter use as code to get a serial killer a message?
Goodnight Moon is a Classic, but what's the name of it's yuppie spoof (which also pays it considerable homage)?
Where is Jane Eyre's uncle from, and what does he do? (hint: the two are related.)
What two figures play dice for the Mariner's Soul (Coleridge)?
Death and Life-in-Death
Tam Lin is a traditional tale about a young man doomed to be the Fairie Queen's tithe to Hell and the young woman who attempts to save him. It was recently name of what folk-rock group?

work-within-works

(8 questions)

What play does Hamlet have the players perform?
The Mousetrap
How does he accidentally mistakenly refer to the play?
What play is performed in A Midsummer Night's Dream?
The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe.
Shakespeare used this play as a basis for one of his own. Which?
In "The Parliament of Fowls," Chaucer gives an account of what classical work?
`Tullius of the dreme of Scipioun.'
In the work-within-a-work-within-a-work cycle of "Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead" by Tom Stoppard, what is "buried deepest?"
What book by what author is actually ten different books, each purporting to be the first chapter of a book that the reader is attempting to find and read?
What book by what author contains three stories framed within "The Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius," itself framed within the larger
The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem

and, an essay question, because Rich wanted it

Trace the lineage of Equus. Feel free to use the backs of pages if you need to.