Tuesday Trivia

1. According to Maeve Binchy, if she could be any historical figure who would she choose?
2. Which notorious Shakespearean siblings probably take their name from the Old English word for “fate” or “personal destiny”?
3. The 1956 science fiction film classic, Forbidden Planet is an interplanetary adaptation of which Shakespearean favorite?
4. Which female writer was the first woman registered to vote in Concord, New Hampshire?
5. What was George Eliot's real name?

Contrary to his express desire, instead of being buried privately in the cathedral of his childhood home, this British author is honored in Westminster Abbey’s famous “Poet’s Corner.”



Charles Dickens




What was Pulitzer Prize-Winning author John Sanford’s reason for deciding to become a writer?


His journalism schooling was paid for by the Army.



The 2009 British independent film Bright Star dramatizes the short-lived romance between which consumptive romantic poet and his girlfriend?



Bright Star is the story of John Keats, Fanny Brawne, and their three year romance and engagement, lasting from December 1818 until Keats’s death in February 1821.



Though not the first to express the sentiment, this British novelist and playwright is credited with coining the phrase, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”



Edward Bulwer-Lytton is credited, but the idea for the phrase can be traced back to the Greek poet Euripides, who said, "The tongue is mightier than the blade." Similarly Shakespeare writes in Hamlet "[...] many wearing rapiers are afraid of goosequills" and Robert Burton wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy, "From this it is clear how much more cruel the pen may be than the sword."



What does Jane Smiley say she would be doing if she were not a writer?



She would choose to raise horses.