Margaret Walker
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40 free Margaret Walker trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Margaret Walker published a prize-winning book of poems in her twenties, then spent three decades researching and writing a single novel. For My People and Jubilee made her a landmark figure in American letters, yet many readers know little about the life behind them. This quiz covers her Southern childhood, her years in the literary circles of the Depression-era Midwest, the family history behind Jubilee and its heroine Vyry, her long teaching career in Mississippi, and the honors and lawsuits that followed her fame. It suits students reading Jubilee or For My People, book clubs, teachers planning a lesson on American poetry, and anyone who enjoys American literary history. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up new facts as you play.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1970s blockbuster did Margaret Walker claim in court had borrowed from her novel Jubilee?
Roots
Roots was the target: Walker sued Alex Haley in 1977, but the court found no actionable similarities and dismissed her case.
Q 02Margaret Walker's Jubilee is often read as a Black answer to which hugely popular Civil War novel?
Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind made the Old South glamorous in 1936; Jubilee retells the same era through the eyes of an enslaved woman, Vyry.
Q 03Vyry, the enslaved heroine of Margaret Walker's Jubilee, is based on which of Walker's relatives?
Her great-grandmother
Her great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, lived through slavery and the Civil War. Walker first heard the stories at bedtime as a child.
Q 04Which Harlem Renaissance poet urged teenage Margaret Walker's parents to send her north for college?
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes was on a speaking tour when the teenager showed him her poems, and he told her family she should study outside the South.
Q 05In Margaret Walker's Jubilee, which group burns down the home Vyry's family builds in Troy, Alabama?
The Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan torches the house, forcing the family onward again before they finally settle near Greenville.
Q 06Which civil rights leader, Margaret Walker's Mississippi neighbor, did she honor as Micah in a poem?
Medgar Evers
Medgar Evers lived on her street in the state capital, and the road the two families shared now carries Walker's name.
Q 07Which 1930s friend did Margaret Walker later profile in her biography Daemonic Genius?
Richard Wright
Richard Wright leaned on her research help while writing Native Son. Her 1988 biography of him survived a copyright suit from his widow.
Q 08For My People made Margaret Walker the first Black winner of which university's Younger Poets prize?
Yale
Yale University Press published the collection in 1942, and its title poem remains her best-known and most-recited work.
Q 09Margaret Walker's 1973 poetry festival marked 200 years since which colonial-era poet's first book?
Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley published Poems on Various Subjects in 1773. The festival drew Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez and others to Mississippi.
Q 10Fresh out of college in 1936, Margaret Walker spent three years with which New Deal program?
Federal Writers' Project
The Federal Writers' Project put her beside other young talents, and one supervisor was so impressed that he let her work from home on her own material.
Q 11At which historically Black Mississippi university did Margaret Walker teach from 1949 to 1979?
Jackson State
Jackson State kept her for thirty years, and the institute she founded there in 1968 now bears her name.
Q 12Margaret Walker was born in 1915 in which Alabama city, where she spent her first ten years?
Birmingham
Birmingham's schools left a mark: Walker later named the dedicated Black women who taught her there as early inspirations.
Q 13To which Southern port city did Margaret Walker's family move in 1925, when she was ten?
New Orleans
New Orleans is where she finished high school at fourteen and spent two years at the college where both her parents taught.
Q 21Margaret Walker's 1974 book A Poetic Equation records her talks with which younger Black poet?
Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni was born the year Walker married; their book shows a shared concern for justice bridging two generations of poets.
Q 22Margaret Walker joined the South Side Writers Group in the 1930s Black Renaissance of which city?
Chicago
Chicago's South Side Writers Group met at the Abraham Lincoln Center and counted Arna Bontemps and Frank Marshall Davis among its members.
Q 23Which national magazine ran one of Margaret Walker's first published poems in 1934?
The Crisis
The Crisis, the NAACP magazine founded by W. E. B. Du Bois, published the poem while she was still an undergraduate.
Q 14Margaret Walker graduated in 1935 from which Midwestern university, her father's alma mater?
Northwestern
Northwestern gave her a BA in English in 1935, though she later recalled that only one restaurant would serve her as a student there.
Q 15Margaret Walker earned two graduate degrees, over twenty years apart, at which state's university?
Iowa
The University of Iowa is home to the celebrated Writers' Workshop, where she arrived in 1939 after her New Deal job ended.
Q 16Before its 1966 publication, Margaret Walker's novel Jubilee served as which piece of academic work?
Her doctoral dissertation
Her doctoral dissertation was finished in 1965 and published as a novel a year later; it has stayed in print ever since.
Q 17In which state does Vyry grow up enslaved on the Dutton estate in Margaret Walker's Jubilee?
Georgia
Georgia is where the real woman behind Vyry was born, in Terrell County; Walker visited the area in 1947 while researching the book.
Q 18In Margaret Walker's Jubilee, which man is the father who never acknowledges Vyry as his daughter?
The plantation's master
The plantation's master, John Dutton, promises to free Vyry in his will but never does, so she stays enslaved until the war's end.
Q 19In Margaret Walker's Jubilee, Vyry's free-born first husband, Randall Ware, works in which trade?
Blacksmith
Blacksmith Randall Ware is free but cannot buy Vyry's freedom; when war comes he joins the Union troops and the couple are separated.
Q 20Composer Ulysses Kay turned Margaret Walker's Jubilee into which kind of musical work in 1976?
An opera
An opera in three acts with a libretto by Donald Dorr, it was commissioned by the company Opera/South.
Q 24Margaret Walker's minister father, Sigismund, emigrated from which part of the Caribbean?
Jamaica
Jamaica was his birthplace; he became a minister and college teacher who raised his four children to expect university degrees.
Q 25Which label known for Woody Guthrie records released three Margaret Walker poetry albums in 1975?
Folkways
Folkways issued her readings of her own poems alongside those of Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson; the Smithsonian acquired the label in 1987.
Q 26Margaret Walker's 1970s publisher Broadside Press was founded by poet Dudley Randall in which city?
Detroit
Detroit's Broadside Press began in 1965 with single poems printed on broadsides and went on to publish Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez.
Q 27In Margaret Walker's Jubilee, Vyry wins over wary white neighbors by doing what for a stranger?
Deliver her baby
Vyry hears the screams and stays to deliver her baby; the grateful family then rallies neighbors to help build the Browns a house.
Q 28In Margaret Walker's Jubilee, Aunt Sally trains Vyry for which job in the Dutton Big House?
Cook
Cook is the post Vyry earns after Aunt Sally is sold away, because her dishes taste identical to her teacher's.
Q 29Margaret Walker's Jubilee helped launch which genre, later home to Toni Morrison's Beloved?
Neo-slave narrative
Neo-slave narrative is the label for modern novels that reimagine bondage from the inside; Jubilee, from 1966, is counted among the first.
Q 30Which title did Margaret Walker give her 1989 volume of new and collected poems?
This Is My Century
This Is My Century gathers more than fifty years of verse by a poet born in 1915, from her Depression-era debut onward.