Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Tuesday Trivia

  1. Nineteenth-century Shakespearian actor Edmund Keen collapsed onstage while performing the eponymous role in this Shakespearean tragedy. He died three months later, some say of having expended so much in his performance. (Hint: He collapsed during Act III, scene iii.)
  2. Nineteenth-century British actress Ellen Ternan may or may not have had an affair with this famous Victorian novelist, though he most certainly separated from his wife for her and provided her with a £1,000 bequest and a trust fund sufficient to guarantee that she would never have to work again.
  3. While most of this writer’s obituaries dismissed him as a writer of pornography who had “wasted his considerable talents,” colleague E. M. Forster praised him as “the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.”
  4. In which Thomas Hardy novel does an adolescent murder his siblings and then commit suicide, leaving a note that says, “Done because we are too menny”?


Last Week's Answers




Which is the longest running play in history?


"The Mouse Trap," by Agatha Christie.



How many weeks was Barbara Bush's book about her English Springer Spaniel, Millie's book, on the bestseller list?


29 weeks



Which literary character was born on September 22 1290?


Bilbo Baggins



What was Cinderella’s glass slipper originially made out of?


Cinderella's slippers were originally made out of fur, but the story was changed in the 1600s by a translator.



Who introduced mystery fiction's first fictional detective?


Edgar Allan Poe introduced Auguste C. Dupin, in his 1841 story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."



Which was the first American novel to sell more than one million copies?


Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin"


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