About the Authors... Trivia Quiz

Answer: Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens wrote this travelogue during an 1844 trip through France and Italy with his family. The French part of the journey gets short shrift, but once they arrive in Genoa the descriptions of their surroundings become quite detailed. The chapter titles indicate the major cities along their itinerary (Genoa, Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Verona, Mantua, Milan, a side trip into Switzerland, Pisa, Siena and finally Rome), but much of the description is of what is seen along the way. Rome is the star of the book - they arrive at the time of Carnival, and he is enchanted by its ebullience. His writer's eye was struck by the contrast between the ancient monuments and the daily life that went on around them, and he took great pains to capture the details of that colourful activity.

Dickens also wrote a few other books whose titles may be familiar: 'The Pickwick Papers', 'Oliver Twist' 'A Christmas Carol', 'David Copperfield', 'A Tale of Two Cities' and 'Great Expectations' among them.

Answer: Jules Verne

'Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar' is considered by many critics to be Jules Verne's best writing, although it is not as familiar (at least in the Anglophone world) as his many science fiction works, such as 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth', 'Around the World in Eighty Days', and 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'. While 'Michael Strogoff' is considered to be part of his 'Voyages Extraordinaire' series, it involves political intrigue, and plenty of adventure. Strogoff is a courtier of Tsar Alexander II of Russia, who is sent to the Siberian city of Irkutsk to warn the governor, who is the tsar's brother, of the presence of a traitor in his court who will betray them all to the rebel Tartar troops which have besieged Irkutsk. Along the way, travelling under an assumed name, he picks up a love interest and has a number of violent adventures, before things finally work out well.

There have been a number of adaptations of this novel to other media. Jules Verne himself wrote aa stage play, and the first silent film version was produced by Edison Studios in 1910. In 2017, a board game based on the events of the book was released by Devir Games.

Answer: Mark Twain

The fourth of Twain's six travel books is a mixture of fact and fiction. The narrator (Twain) and a fictional friend travel through Europe, starting in Germany, then on to Switzerland, France and Italy. Their stated plan is to walk (hence the tramp of the title), but they do not stick to that plan. Most of the humour of the book comes from Twain's portrayal of the pair as stereotypical uninformed American tourists, blissfully unaware of how little they understand of what they see and hear. The book includes six appendices, including the 'The Awful German Language', in which Twain both mocks his own difficulty in learning German and seriously explores the structural differences between languages.

What else did Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, write? A lot, including (in chronological order) 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches', 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer', 'The Prince and the Pauper', 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court', and his autobiography.

Answer: Rudyard Kipling

Perhaps if I told you that this collection of songs and poems written to reflect the vernacular of the British Army in the late-Victorian era included 'Mandalay' and 'Gunga Din', you would have made the connection more quickly. The 1892 collection had the full title 'Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses'; in 1896 'The Seven Seas' also included some of the poems considered to be 'Barrack-Room Ballads', as did the 1903 collection 'The Five Nations'. When the Yale a capella group known as the Whiffenpoofs was established in 1909, they set an adapted version of Kipling's 'Gentlemen-Rankers' to music for their theme song, retitled 'The Whiffenpoof Song'.

Kipling's words dwelt on the hardships of a soldier's life, and included:
"We're poor little lambs who've lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We're little black sheep who've gone astray,
Baa-aa-aa!
Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha' mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah!

While Kipling is very familiar from his prolific poetry, including the perennial 'If-', he also wrote on a wide range of topics including travel and military matters. His short story collections include 'The Jungle Book' and 'Just So Stories for Little children', and novels 'Kim' and 'Captains Courageous'.

Answer: Jack London

Jack London was an ardent social activist, and 'The People of the Abyss' is a good representative of this aspect of his writing. In 1902 he spent several weeks living in the Whitechapel district of London, where he tried to share the life of the underprivileged residents - sleeping in workhouses or on the street for most of the time, and lodging with a poor family for some of it, to get an idea of what their life was like. The urban poor, at that time, were commonly referred to as 'the Abyss', a phrase popularised by H G Wells in his 1901 best-seller 'Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought'. London used it again in his dystopian science fiction novel 'The Iron Heel'.

Jack London is most familiar from his works set in the Klondike Gold Rush, especially 'The Call of the Wild' and 'White Fang', but he was a prolific writer in many fields: fiction novels and short stories, poetry, non-fiction books and essays, autobiography, and a few plays.

Answer: H.G. Wells

This comic novel starts by introducing our unhappy antihero who hates everything about his life, including himself, as he faces bankruptcy at the age of 35. We then go back to the start, following his indecisive life through childhood, apprenticeship in the draper's trade at the age of 14, his father's death, his wooing of and marriage to Miriam at the age of 20, and his subsequent return to Fishbourne where he sets up the shop which was on the brink of collapse at the start. His solution involves arson, and pretending to be dead, followed by leaving his life behind. He may or may not have killed the man who threatened to destroy the life he then set up for himself, but he certainly ends up a more contented man than he started.

Herbert George Wells is better known for his science fiction works, many of which have been adapted into movies. These include 'The Time Machine', 'The Island of Dr Moreau', 'The invisible Man', and 'The War of the Worlds' (famously adapted for radio by Orson Welles in 1938).

Answer: Ernest Hemingway

This was Hemingway's second work of non-fiction, following 'Death in the Afternoon', a 1932 reflection on the history of Spanish bullfighting, considering how it can be seen to exemplify fear and courage. 'Green Hills of Africa' takes a month-long African safari as a similar starting point for more universal reflections on life, and specifically on the nature of writing. Both books, with their subject matter involving the killing of animals, can be difficult to read, but Hemingway's use of language is sufficient to make them also compelling reading. The book was not well-received by critics, but it is remembered for the passage in which Hemingway declares that "[all] modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn'."

Hemingway, like most of the authors in this quiz, is best known for his novels, which include 'The Sun Also Rises' (a roman a clef about the running of the bulls in Pamplona), 'A Farewell to Arms' (based on his experiences as an ambulance driver in World War I), 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' (inspired by his experiences in the Spanish Civil War), and the Pulitzer Prize winner 'The Old Man and the Sea'.

Answer: C.S. Lewis

This book is written as a series of letters from a demon named Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, offering advice on how best to lead humans into a life of sin so as to procure advancement in the bureaucracy of Hell. It is humorous in its approach, but deals with serious theological issues, and is unashamedly supportive of an active faith in Christianity as providing a meaningful framework for one's life. Wormwood is not very good at following his uncle's instructions, and the 'Patient' he is trying to move away from Christian belief and towards a future in Hell resists all the temptations placed in his way, ending up in heaven after dying in an air raid.

A lot of Lewis's writing was infused with his Christian faith, including his best-known work, 'The Chronicles of Narnia'. While Lewis has said that he did not intend the book to be apologetic, the figure of Aslan is clearly Christ-inspired, and Christian themes abound. His non-fiction writing includes both theological work and Medieval and Renaissance literature (the field in which he held a chair at Cambridge for the last years of his life).

Answer: J.R.R. Tolkien

As a philologist with a love of Medieval literature, Tolkien clearly had a lot of fun writing this fable of a mild-mannered farmer who ends up Lord of Tame due to his managing to stumble his way to being seen as a hero. First he scares off a giant more by luck than by management, then he is forced to confront a dragon that approaches his village, armed with a sword he was given in recognition of his giant repelling. Since this sword cannot be sheathed when it is within five miles of a dragon, Giles is forced to brandish it, and bully the dragon into submission.

It is not hard to see how this story, written in 1934 but not published until 1949, came from the same pen as that responsible for the creation of Middle-Earth, a process which similarly took place over a long time. 'The Hobbit', first published in 1939, was not originally part of the full-scale mythos that Tolkien started developing in 1914, and which remained largely unfinished and unpublished at his death. When 'The Lord of the Rings' formed a bridge between the adventures and the myths, he went back to the earlier material, and started reworking it into a coherent whole. After his death in 1973, his son Christopher took over the task of editing and publishing it, starting with 'The Silmarillion' in 1979.

Answer: John Steinbeck

Charley was Steinbeck's wife's poodle, with whom he undertook a 1960 trip around America in a campervan he called Rocinante, after the horse of Don Quixote, who also went on some epic travels. The journey started at his home on Long Island, then went north to Maine, before turning west to travel along the northern border of the country, turning south in Seattle to revisit California (especially the Salinas Valley, the area of his youth where many of his most famous works are set), then east and up the Atlantic coast. The later parts of the trip are described in much less detail - it is clear that he was a bit over it, and ready to get home. The book is a memoir, not a travelogue, and includes a lot of internal reflection. Some critics have pointed out that the details of his trip are impossible as recorded, but the essence of it is his perceptions and reactions.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning 'The Grapes of Wrath' is usually considered Steinbeck's masterpiece, a novel that captured a time and place exquisitely. His more humorous novels 'Tortilla Flat' and 'Cannery Row' are also set during the Great Depression. 'Sweet Thursday' sees Doc revisit Cannery Row after World War II, and is not as light in tone, The novellas 'The Red Pony' and 'Of Mice and Men' are frequently set as school texts, as their length makes them more accessible than the longer novels.