Tuesday Trivia

1. Washington Irving got the idea for the story of Rip Van Winkle from which ancient poet?
2. What was the first American novel published in 1789?
3. What was the full name of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin?
4. How many words in all of Shakespeare’s works begin with the letter “X”?
5. Who was the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

Last Week's Answers

What date in history do Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis have in common and why?

Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis both died on November 22, 1963, but the day is most often remembered for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

What literary work gives the “quark,” a building block of the proton, its name?

The quark takes its name from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, from the line "Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he hasn't got much of a bark".

What was the first work of fiction to be blessed by a Pope?

Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ by American Civil War General, Lew Wallace, was published in 1880 and was the first work of literature to be blessed by the Pope.

How many years older than Shakespeare was his wife Anne Hathaway?

Because Anne Hathaway's tombstone states she was 67 when she died in 1623, it is generally believed that she was eight years older than her husband. However, the figures 1 and 7 are easily confused — so she may have actually been 61, only two years older than William.

Where does the term “bestseller” come from?

The Kansas Times and Star was the first newspaper to use the phrase “bestseller” in their April 25, 1889 edition referring to six books as the “best sellers here last week.”