Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Southern Gothic trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Southern Gothic started as an insult. Ellen Glasgow used the phrase in 1935 to dismiss Faulkner and Caldwell for aimless violence and fantastic nightmares, and Eudora Welty begged not to be called it. The label stuck to a whole tradition: Yoknapatawpha County, the Bundrens hauling a coffin to Jefferson, Hazel Motes preaching from a car hood, Blanche DuBois in the French Quarter and a preacher with LOVE and HATE on his knuckles. These 50 questions map the genre across page, stage, screen and song. The easy tier covers the region, Maycomb, New Orleans and Faulkner's county; the middle reaches Rowan Oak, Temple Drake, Thomas Sutpen, John Singer, Big Daddy, Walker Evans, Rick Rubin and Springsteen's Nebraska; the hard tier wants Henry Clay Lewis, Madison Tensas, Clarence John Laughlin, Garden District, Sevier County, Terrebonne Parish and the Legendary Shack Shakers. Capote, Harper Lee, Cormac McCarthy, Sharp Objects and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil all get a turn. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book club.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Southern Gothic fiction is set in which region of the United States?
The American South
It highlights violence and cruelty as features of the region's culture.
Q 02Which novelist critiqued the "Southern Gothic School" in 1935 as full of "aimless violence"?
Ellen Glasgow
Like the original term Gothic, the label began as an insult.
Q 03Which Mississippi writer said of the Southern Gothic label, "They better not call me that!"?
Eudora Welty
Her Jackson house is now a National Historic Landmark museum.
Q 04Unlike classic Gothic's barbaric past, Southern Gothic shows what persisting in the South?
Social trauma
The genre dismantles the romantic mythology of the antebellum South.
Q 05Which 19th-century humorist's grotesques are cited as early Gothic treatments of the South?
Henry Clay Lewis
He was a doctor who wrote as Madison Tensas, the Louisiana Swamp Doctor.
Q 06Which Great Depression photographer's images are said to evoke Southern Gothic visually?
Walker Evans
He said he understood why Southerners were haunted by their own landscape.
Q 07Surrealist photographer Clarence John Laughlin shot abandoned places mainly in which state?
Louisiana
He worked at it for nearly 40 years and was born in Lake Charles.
Q 08Which folk magic tradition is cited as a recurring Southern Gothic theme?
Hoodoo
Derelict houses, old cemeteries and overgrown swamps are the genre's visual furniture.
Q 09Which Bruce Springsteen album was influenced by the stories of Flannery O'Connor?
Nebraska
He recorded it alone on a four-track in his bedroom in Colts Neck, New Jersey.
Q 10Which R.E.M. album, their third, displayed a Southern Gothic influence?
Fables of the Reconstruction
It was recorded in London with producer Joe Boyd, the band's first album made abroad.
Q 11Johnny Cash's gothic-country American Recordings series was produced by whom?
Rick Rubin
A producer best known for hip hop and metal, he had Cash cover Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails.
Q 12Which singer's music has been described as "Southern Gothic Pop"?
Ethel Cain
Born Hayden Anhedönia, she broke through with the 2022 album Preacher's Daughter.
Q 13J.D. Wilkes, who called Southern Gothic music grotesque and beautiful, fronts which band?
Legendary Shack Shakers
The Kentucky band formed in Murray in 1995 and mixes rockabilly, blues and punk.
Q 21Which Faulkner novel takes its title from a soliloquy in Macbeth?
The Sound and the Fury
It was the first book to feature the Compson family.
Q 22Light in August (1932) introduces which doomed drifter, partner of Lucas Burch?
Joe Christmas
The novel is classed as both Southern Gothic and modernist.
Q 23Carson McCullers published her Southern Gothic debut The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter at what age?
23
It follows a deaf man named John Singer in a 1930s Georgia mill town.
Q 24The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter centres on John Singer, a man with what condition?
Q 14Which fictional Mississippi county is the setting for most of William Faulkner's work?
Yoknapatawpha
It stands in for Lafayette County, with Oxford renamed Jefferson.
Q 15In what year did William Faulkner win the Nobel Prize in Literature?
1949
The citation praised his powerful and unique contribution to the modern American novel.
Q 16What did Faulkner name the house he bought in Oxford, Mississippi?
Rowan Oak
Income from his short stories paid for it.
Q 17Faulkner's Southern Gothic novel As I Lay Dying follows which family's journey to bury their mother?
The Bundrens
Addie wanted to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi.
Q 18In "A Rose for Emily", what is the name of the Northern labourer Emily is seen with around town?
Homer Barron
The story appeared in The Forum in April 1930.
Q 19Faulkner's 1931 novel Sanctuary concerns the abduction of which college girl?
Temple Drake
Faulkner called the book a potboiler, but it was his commercial breakthrough.
Q 20Which plantation owner's rise and fall is told by unreliable narrators in Absalom, Absalom!?
Thomas Sutpen
The 1936 novel spans the years before, during and after the Civil War.
Deafness
The lonely townsfolk of a 1930s mill town confide in him.
Q 25Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in which city?
Columbus
She was born Lula Carson Smith, daughter of a jeweller.
Q 26McCullers's Member of the Wedding came from a "divine spark": Frankie is in love with whom?
Her brother and the bride
The novel took her five years, interrupted to write The Ballad of the Sad Café.
Q 27To Kill a Mockingbird is set in which fictional Alabama town?
Maycomb
Scout narrates three Depression years there, 1933 to 1935.
Q 28Harper Lee based Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird on which childhood friend?
Truman Capote
Capote returned the favour, basing Idabel in Other Voices, Other Rooms on Lee.
Q 29The young author of In Cold Blood was raised by relatives in which Alabama town?
Monroeville
Harper Lee was his neighbour and best friend there.
Q 30Which Capote novel, his 1948 debut, featured a character based on Harper Lee?
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Random House's Bennett Cerf signed him after the story "Miriam".