50 Fun Facts About Modern Literature

Which French philosopher tried to refuse the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, saying he declined all official honours?

Jean-Paul Sartre argued that a writer should not let himself be turned into an institution, and the Swedish Academy gave him the prize anyway.

Which singer-songwriter won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature but did not travel to Stockholm for the ceremony?

Bob Dylan's citation praised 'new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition', and he collected his medal at a private ceremony in April 2017.

Which Daphne du Maurier novel opens 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again' and never names its narrator?

Rebecca's narrator becomes the second Mrs de Winter, yet it is Maxim's dead first wife, the title character, who dominates the Cornish estate.

Which 1984 William Gibson novel popularised the word cyberspace, coined in his short story 'Burning Chrome'?

Neuromancer remains the only novel to win the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick Award, science fiction's triple crown.

Which 1942 Albert Camus novella has Meursault kill a man on an Algiers beach weeks after his mother's funeral?

The Stranger's prosecutor dwells more on Meursault's failure to cry at his mother's funeral than on the killing itself.

Which 1922 James Joyce novel did Judge John Woolsey rule 'not obscene' in 1933, ending its de facto US ban?

Ulysses got its day in court only because Random House imported a French-printed copy and arranged for US customs to seize it.

Who coined the phrase 'Lost Generation', which Ernest Hemingway used as an epigraph for The Sun Also Rises?

Gertrude Stein picked the phrase up from a French garage owner scolding a young mechanic, Hemingway recalled in A Moveable Feast.

Which 1958 Chinua Achebe novel, about the Igbo leader Okonkwo, takes its title from a W. B. Yeats poem?

Things Fall Apart has been translated into more than fifty languages, making it one of the most translated works of literature in the world.

Which Haruki Murakami novel, named after a Beatles song, made him a reluctant superstar in Japan?

Norwegian Wood's success drove Murakami to leave Japan for a time, and it opens with Toru Watanabe hearing the song as his plane lands in Hamburg.

Which Patricia Highsmith con man, sent to Italy to bring home shipping heir Dickie Greenleaf, appears in five novels?

Tom Ripley's five novels, published between 1955 and 1991, are known to fans as the Ripliad.

Which Virginia Woolf novel follows Clarissa through one June day in London as she prepares to host a party?

Mrs Dalloway's working title was The Hours, later the title of a 2002 film about three women across generations shaped by the book.

Which Allen Ginsberg poem had its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights, arrested and tried for obscenity?

Howl was cleared on 3 October 1957, when Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene.

Which 1962 Anthony Burgess novel is narrated by Alex in Nadsat, a teenage slang built largely from Russian?

A Clockwork Orange lost its 21st chapter, in which Alex simply grows out of violence, in every US edition before 1986.

Which Umberto Eco novel sends Franciscan friar William of Baskerville to probe deaths at an Italian abbey in 1327?

The Name of the Rose's killer laces the pages of a forbidden book with poison, knowing a reader will lick his fingers to turn them.

Which Milan Kundera novel, set around the 1968 Prague Spring, follows the surgeon Tomáš and the café waitress Tereza?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being follows two women, two men and a dog through the 1968 Prague Spring, and it was filmed in 1988.

Which Günter Grass novel is narrated by Oskar, who stops growing at three and can shatter glass with his shriek?

The Tin Drum's author waited until 2006 to admit that he had been drafted into the Waffen-SS at 17.

Which Boris Pasternak novel, refused by Soviet publishers, was smuggled to Milan and first published in Italy in 1957?

Doctor Zhivago brought Pasternak the Nobel Prize the following year, an award that embarrassed and enraged the Soviet Communist Party.

Which Mikhail Bulgakov novel, with the Devil loose in 1930s Moscow as Professor Woland, was first published in 1966–67?

The Master and Margarita was burned by Bulgakov in 1930, just as the Master burns his own book in the story, and then written again.

Which Soviet author's novella about a day in a Stalinist labour camp appeared in 1962 with Nikita Khrushchev's approval?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was stripped of Soviet citizenship and flown to West Germany in 1974, and settled in Vermont two years later.

Which Erich Maria Remarque novel about the German soldier Paul Bäumer was among the books burned in Nazi Germany?

All Quiet on the Western Front cost Remarque his German citizenship in 1938, and in 1943 the Nazis beheaded his sister Elfriede.

Which Thomas Mann novel about Hans Castorp grew out of a 1912 visit to his wife at a Davos tuberculosis sanatorium?

The Magic Mountain was published in November 1924, twelve years after Mann's own three-week stay among the Davos doctors and patients.

Which French novelist's seven-volume cycle, the world's longest novel, turns on the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea?

Marcel Proust's first volume, Swann's Way, was rejected by several publishers, and the last three volumes appeared only after his death.

Which Japanese novelist, author of Confessions of a Mask, died by seppuku in 1970 after a failed coup attempt?

Yukio Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Prize five times in the 1960s, including in 1968, when it went to his benefactor Yasunari Kawabata.

Which South Korean novelist's The Vegetarian was the first Korean-language novel to win the International Booker Prize?

Han Kang became the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2024, for 'intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas'.

Which Peruvian novelist, author of The Time of the Hero, lost the 1990 presidential election to Alberto Fujimori?

Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize for 'his cartography of structures of power', twenty years after the voters turned him down.

Which Nigerian novelist's TEDx talk 'We Should All Be Feminists' was sampled by Beyoncé and printed on a Dior T-shirt?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus has been translated into more than forty languages, and she spent four years writing Half of a Yellow Sun.

Which 2003 debut by Afghan-born physician Khaled Hosseini follows Amir's guilt over his boyhood friend Hassan in Kabul?

The Kite Runner spent 101 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, letting Hosseini retire from medicine to write full-time.

Which Brazilian author's The Alchemist had a first print run of 900 copies, and a publisher who chose not to reprint it?

Paulo Coelho's fable about a shepherd boy has since sold more than 150 million copies in over 65 languages.

Which Stieg Larsson hacker, imagined as a grown-up Pippi Longstocking, debuted in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?

Lisbeth Salander's creator died in 2004, before any of the three Millennium novels had been published.

Which John le Carré spymaster, who cleans his glasses on the fat end of his tie, hunts a mole inside the Circus?

George Smiley is short, overweight and balding, compared by le Carré to a toad, the opposite of the glamorous spy of his era.

Which Hilary Mantel novel about Thomas Cromwell won the 2009 Booker Prize and opened a trilogy completed in 2020?

Wolf Hall is named after the Seymour family seat in Wiltshire, home of the Jane Seymour who became Henry VIII's third wife.

Who shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood for Girl, Woman, Other, becoming the first Black woman to win it?

Bernardine Evaristo went on to serve four years as President of the Royal Society of Literature, the first Black or Asian person to hold the post since 1820.

Which Thomas Pynchon novel did the 1974 Pulitzer jury pick, only for the board to call it 'unreadable' and 'obscene'?

Gravity's Rainbow left 1974 with no Pulitzer for fiction awarded at all, while Pynchon stayed away and let comedian 'Professor' Irwin Corey collect its National Book Award for him.

Which Paul Beatty satire about reviving segregation near Los Angeles made him the first American Booker winner?

The Sellout opens with its narrator, known only as Bonbon, on trial before the US Supreme Court for trying to restore slavery and segregation.

Which Samantha Harvey novel, following six astronauts through 24 hours on a space station, won the 2024 Booker Prize?

Orbital was written while Harvey watched a continuous live stream of Earth from the International Space Station, having never been to space herself.

Which Cormac McCarthy novel, following a father and son across an ash-covered America, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize?

The Road took McCarthy only six weeks to write, and he dedicated it to his young son John, whose 2003 trip with him to El Paso inspired it.

Which Colson Whitehead novel has Cora flee a Georgia plantation on a literal train line, winning the 2017 Pulitzer?

The Underground Railroad also took the National Book Award, and Whitehead's next novel made him only the fourth writer to win the fiction Pulitzer twice.

Which Donna Tartt novel has 13-year-old Theo carry a Dutch painting out of a bombed museum, winning the 2014 Pulitzer?

The Goldfinch's real painting is one of the few surviving works by Carel Fabritius, who died in the 1654 Delft explosion that destroyed most of his art.

Which New Orleans comic novel, published thanks to Walker Percy and its late author's mother, won the 1981 Pulitzer?

A Confederacy of Dunces' author, John Kennedy Toole, died by suicide at 31 in 1969, and its title comes from a Jonathan Swift epigram about dunces uniting against a true genius.

Which Barbara Kingsolver novel, relocating David Copperfield to opioid-hit Appalachia, shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize?

Demon Copperhead also won the 2023 Women's Prize for Fiction, and it opens with Damon Fields born to a teenage mother in a Lee County trailer.

Which poet read 'The Hill We Climb' at Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration, the youngest ever to perform at one?

Amanda Gorman was recommended for the inauguration by Jill Biden, and two of her books hit the bestseller lists within weeks of the reading.

Which poet of 'Dulce et Decorum est' was killed crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal one week before the 1918 Armistice?

Wilfred Owen's mother received the telegram announcing his death on Armistice Day, as Shrewsbury's church bells rang out in celebration.

Which Irish poet, Nobel laureate of 1995, won the Whitbread Book of the Year with a 1999 verse translation of Beowulf?

Seamus Heaney had already taken the Whitbread three years earlier with The Spirit Level, and his Nobel citation praised 'works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth'.

Which Spanish poet, author of The House of Bernarda Alba, was killed by Nationalists in 1936, his remains never found?

Federico García Lorca's killers' motive is still disputed, with theories ranging from his socialism and his homosexuality to a personal feud.

Which Hull university librarian's poem 'This Be The Verse' opens by blaming your mum and dad for messing you up?

Philip Larkin turned down the Poet Laureateship in 1984 after John Betjeman's death, and the poem ends by advising readers not to have kids.

Which British dramatist, whose play The Birthday Party closed after eight performances, won the 2005 Nobel Prize?

Harold Pinter's flop was rescued by an enthusiastic review from critic Harold Hobson, and the playwright later collected France's Légion d'honneur in 2007.

Which Eugene O'Neill play about the Tyrone family, published only after his death, won the 1957 Pulitzer for Drama?

Long Day's Journey into Night was sealed in a Random House vault with orders to wait 25 years after O'Neill's death, but his widow Carlotta had it published within three.

Which playwright's ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle, including Fences, chronicles Black American life across the 20th century?

August Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice, for Fences and The Piano Lesson, and was called 'theater's poet of Black America'.

Which towering patient who pretends to be deaf and mute narrates Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

Chief Bromden presents himself as deaf, mute and docile, and only late one night reveals to McMurphy that he can speak and hear.

Which New Zealander won the 2013 Booker Prize at 28, the youngest ever, with the 832-page The Luminaries?

Eleanor Catton built The Luminaries on astrology, with twelve sections each shorter than the last to mimic the waning moon.