Test Your Wits: A Literary Trivia Contest

How well do you know your literary trivia?

It's intriguing how popular the game Trivial Pursuit became. Here's a bit of trivia you may not have known: the game has sold over 100 million units in 26 countries and 17 languages. What year was it created? I would never have guessed. Answer: 1981. It seems like it has been around forever.

I've always enjoyed creating games. Trivia is indeed fun to play with. During Duluth's Dylan Fest I've usually been the one to create the Dylan Trivia Contest each year. So while cleaning my garage a couple weeks ago I assembled this trivial excursion.

HERE ARE THE RULES
1. Take a piece of paper and number it from 1 to 15. 

2. Here's the challenge. For each name in the list below, name the book this character appeared in and the author who wrote it. (A few are plays, but I read them in book form.) 

3. To the right of the title and author, write the name of the actor who played this character in a movie version of the book or play.

Do not scroll below the photos until you fill out your answers.

CALCULATING YOUR SCORE
A) Score one point for each correct Book Title. (In one instance the movie has a different title but is based on the book.)
B) Score one point for each book author that you name correctly.
C) Score one point for identifying the actor who played that character in the movie version of the book.
D) If you correctly identify all fifteen book titles WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE CLUES give yourself a bonus of 5 points. The same goes for identifying all fifteen authors and the fifteen actors. TOTAL POSSIBLE SCORE is 60. 

EdNote: The Clues are below the two photos at the end of this list. For the Extra Points, don't look till you have given up.

* * * * * 

1. Atticus Finch

2. Rhett Butler

3. Stella Kowalski

4. Kurtz

5. Ishmael

6. Alden Pyle

7. Harry Lime

8. Ann Sullivan

9. Robert Jordan

10. Daisy

11. Winston

12. Billy Pilgrim

13. Henry Wilcox

14. Tom Hagen

15. R.P. McMurphy

EdNote: Some of these titles are red herrings.

CHOOSE TITLES FROM THIS LIST
Moby Dick, For Whom The Bell Tolls, 1984, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, The Godfather, The Quiet American, The Last Tycoon, Chinatown, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Great Gatsby, Gone with the Wind, Howard's End, Heart of Darkness, The Miracle Worker, To Kill A Mockingbird, Bugsy, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Third Man

EdNote: Some of these actors are also misleading.

CHOOSE ACTORS FROM THIS LIST
Anthony Hopkins, Jack Nicholson, Gregory Peck, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, Kim Hunter, Vivien Leigh,  Richard Basehart, Mia Farrow, Michael Sachs, Brendan Fraser, John Hurt, Louise Fletcher, Holly Hunter, Faye Dunaway, Orson Welles, Gary Cooper

ANSWERS ARE BENEATH THE PHOTO BELOW

"We're just waitin' here for ya to finish. Take your time. We'll wait."

ANSWERS
1. To Kill A Mockingbird--Harper Lee/Gregory Peck
2. Gone with the Wind--Margaret Mitchell/Clark Gable
3. A Streetcar Named Desire--Tennessee Williams/Kim Hunter
4. Heart of Darkness--Joseph Conrad/Marlon Brando (Apocalypse Now)
5. Moby Dick--Herman Melville/Richard Basehart,
6. The Quiet American--Graham Greene/Brendan Fraser
7. The Third Man--Graham Greene/Orson Welles
8. The Miracle Worker--William Gibson/Ann Bancroft
9. For Whom The Bell Tolls--Ernest Hemingway/Gary Cooper
10. The Great Gatsby--F. Scott Fitzgerald/Mia Farrow 
11. 1984--George Orwell/John Hurt
12. Slaughterhouse-Five--Kurt Vonnegut/Michael Sachs
13. Howard's End--E.M. Forster/Anthony Hopkins
14. The Godfather--Mario Puzo/Robert Duvall
15. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest--Ken Kesey/Jack Nicholson

Please leave your score in the comments, either anonymously or publicly. Was this too easy? Too hard? Or just right?

Photos on this page courtesy Gary Firstenberg

Do You Read Banned Books?

When I was young Mad Magazine used to cost a quarter. My allowance was a quarter, which worked out well. I could buy a Mad magazine or save two quarters and buy Famous Monsters of Filmland, which was fifty cents. This left me with one more quarter to save for something more expensive, like a Revell model battleship or submarine. That was always around a dollar. 

Mad was famous for occasional inserts. For example, they inserted a vinyl record in the center that you could play on a record player. Side A was It's a Gas, in which the only lyrics were periodic burps. (Burps are a gas, right?) Side B was She Got A Nose Job, which I can still sing to this day. 

Another time, the magazine inserted full color book covers that could be used to wrap around trade-sized paperbacks. The book covers were intended to shock adults by appearing to be banned books or very adult content. The fake title would be large and in small type the rest of the title. One of the book covers was Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Those three words were writ large in white block letters on a blue background. The full title might have been something like Let's go to a TROPIC isle OF no importance and get skin CANCER.

Other scandalous titles included Lady Chatterly's Lover and Fanny Hill. When I took a couple of these fake book covers and put them on my paperbacks, they achieved the intended goal of shocking an adult, specifically my mother. 

As it turns out, when I was in college eight or so years later the movie version of Tropic Of Cancer was playing at the theater. I probably would not have noticed but for the fake book cover I'd used from Mad. Out of curiosity I went to see it and left after about 20 minutes, not because it was vulgar but because it seemed pointless. (My assessment wasn't far afield. On imdb.com it has a 5.5 rating out of 10, which is pretty low.) 

* * * 

There was a time when the label Banned In Boston was a badge of notoriety. Perhaps it was Boston's Puritanical roots that resulted in the region's power to censor books, plays and movies, thereby dictating what was acceptable and unacceptable.

In addition to books like Ulysses (Joyce), Leaves of Grass (Whitman) and The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway), the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up Little Susie" was censored.

While perusing the shelves at our local library this past week I discovered the 2014 edition of Banned Books, a catalog of books that have stirred the ire of people in various parts of our country over the years. It's a large book with more than 325 pages of listings, identifying books and the causes of their being barred, or recommended to be. Here are some of the more surprising entries.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury surprised me. It's about book burning. Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles was also banned by one school district because the N-word is used in one of its stories. The book was reprinted without that sentence and is OK now. 

One of my favorite Bradbury stories is The Veldt. It's a short sci-fi story that was included in his The Illustrated Man. I went through a sci-fi stage once, reading a lot of Asimov short stories as well as Bradbury. I had to scratch my head as to why The Veldt would be criticized. Fortunately, Banned Books included the reason people were upset with these various books. In this case, the parent who complained felt the story failed to show any consequences for the children's actions. That's getting pretty picky. 

Various school districts and communities took umbrage with six of Richard Brautigan's books, most of which I read in college.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was banned in the USSR because of references to occultism and spiritism. A Study in Scarlet was pulled in one county school district because it portrayed Mormonism in a bad light. The surprise for me is that Sign of the Four doesn't seem to have received any complaints even though it begins with Holmes rather enjoying the effects of shooting cocaine. 

Upton Sinclair's Oil! was banned in Boston because of its criticism of the Harding administration. Harding was no longer president and his cronies already dispersed by the time the book was published. It was also banned in Yugoslavia and burned in Nazi Germany, the latter because of its socialist views. The film There Will Be Blood, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, was loosely based on this book.

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men was banned in dozens of localities for language and in some municipalities because it used the N-word. I've read this book a few times since first reading it in high school. I remember the characters and the power of the prose, not these language matters which passed faster than a speed bump.

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels was banned in Ireland.

Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn received dozens of challenges and has been pulled from countless reading lists because it was deemed to "undermine the self-esteem" of black youth, and the N-word is used in the book a number of times. 

Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird suffered the same fate, despite it being a story that shines a light on the evils of racial inequality. Some school districts rejected it because of racial slurs used in the story and does "psychological damage to the positive integration process." Ironically Harper Lee was showing the ugliness of people who demean other simply because of the color of their skin. 

Several Kurt Vonnegut books made the list including Slaughterhouse Five and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. 

* * *

There's much more that can be said here on this topic, but it's nuanced and I don't have time to detail all the distinctions as regards this issue. I agree with those who believe there is an age appropriateness to be considered when recommending books to younger audiences. Then again, that's a much longer discussion. 

This book, Banned Books, caught my attention when I saw it, and I decided to check it out. The subtitle is Challenging Our Freedom To Read.