Book Worm Quiz

Vintage-Bridge.com re-posts from old blogs by Bridget Eileen logo Victorian blue and floral background with script and print

Ye Olde Bloggens are re-posts of old blogs
by Bridget Eileen - Writer in Providence, Rhode Island 

The following post was originally posted on one of Bridget Eileen’s old blogs: In the Pines, Neophyte Poetics, Bridget Eileen’s Commonplace Book, Dreaming Bridge Designs or A Vegetarian Notebook. They aren’t all fancy with photos and subheadings and search descriptions, or even that much content, sometimes. They’re here for posterity, because it’s fun to read the archives!


Bookworm quiz from MSNBC, with explanations:
(http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21790674/)

1. What National Football League team is named after a poem?

The San Francisco Forty-Niners
The New York Jets
The Detroit Lions
The Baltimore Ravens

Edgar Allen Poe is from Baltimore and his most famous poem is "The Raven", which makes them my favorite NFC team.
2. Who is widely considered to be the first African-American author to publish a book in the New World?

Phillis Wheatley
Frederick Douglas
Sojourner Truth
Ralph Ellison

Phillis Wheatley published a book of poems in the pre-Revolutionary time. She was from Boston and one of the buildings at UMass Boston is named after her.
3. On whose Concord, MA, land did Henry David Thoreau build his cabin on Walden Pond?

His own
The government’s, in an act of protest
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s

Kind of like "You, Me and Dupree" HDT was the freeloading, free spirit, hippie outlaw friend. Indeed, he is the FIRST freeloading, free spirit, hippie, outlaw friend in America. The first in the world was probably Socrates or Lao Tzu.

4. Who is the most recent American recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature?

William Faulkner
Thomas Pynchon
Toni Morrison
No American has ever won the Nobel Prize for Literature

Sadly, I know this answer not from teaching, college, graduate school or being a librarian or even from devoutly listening to NPR every day. No, in fact, I know this answer because I heard it from Oprah, whose favorite author is Toni Morrison.
5. Which of the following books was written based on interviews conducted for Playboy magazine?

"The Autobiography of Malcolm X," by Alex Haley
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," by Hunter S. Thompson
"How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," by Jenna Jameson and Neil Strauss
"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," by Tom Wolfe

This is the one I got wrong.
6. Which American poet also delivered over 2,000 babies?

Robert Frost
William Carlos Williams
Anne Sexton
Emily Dickinson

This I knewdue to logic & vague biographical backgrounds. Anne Sexton was too selfish (to put it bluntly and very insensitively. I am joking. She was a fantastic confessor). Emily Dickinson was agoraphobic. Robert Frost was a hermit, at least some times. And - OH YEAH! But of course DOCTOR WmCsWms!!!!!
7. Which American writer was made a commander of the Legion of Honor in 1986 by the French government?

William Faulkner
James Baldwin
Thomas Pynchon
Saul Bellow

I didn't know this one, either. I am going to Google it right now. See below for the explanation.
8. Which novel contains a famous scene in which an escaped slave crosses the Ohio River on ice floes?

"Moby-Dick"
"Uncle Tom’s Cabin"
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"
"Invisible Man"

EFFING UNCLE TOM"S CABIN SUX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But I read it, albeit reluctantly, for American Women's Literature
9. Which American writer had to hop freight trains to get to college because he couldn’t afford a ticket?

Mark Twain
John Steinbeck
Ralph Ellison
Alex Haley

The Invisible Man would be the only one to be that stealth
10. Which writer, though associated with rural New England, was actually born in San Francisco?

Henry David Thoreau
Sarah Orne Jewett
Wallace Stevens
Robert Frost

I knew it wasn't Sarah Orne Jewett because she barely left Maine. I knew it wasn't HDT because SF wasn't developed enough back then, at least not as an American territory. And Wallace Stevens isn't so much associated with the rural-ness of New England, even though he's from around here. It is the man that stops by the woods on snowy evenings and travel on roads less traveled that it so closely associated with rural New England. So I picked Frost and I was right.