June Quiz - Summertime!

There’s nothing quite like a good quiz to get the mental juices flowing, but they’ve become intensely problematic in this age of instantaneous Internet content at everybody’s fingertips. Google and Wikipedia and like sites are pirate-coves for the lazy and the cheatful, and so the monthly Open Letters quiz will rely entirely on the honor system: readers are expected to rely on their memories alone. And no quiz would be complete without incentive! The first reader to respond with the highest number of correct answers will receive a book in the mail, courtesy of the editors at Open Letters. Email your answers to quiz@openlettersmonthly.com.

June is icumen in. And with it the Bacchanal beginning of true summer, when every reader’s thoughts turn to barbecues, drunken patio sex, and Open Letters literary quizzes! In honor of the season that President Al Gore warned is soon to engulf us all, our Open Letters quiz will cluster around a summer theme like overheated German tourists around the only water fountain in Times Square. So pour yourself an icy lemonade, sit back, and prepare to fail so brutally that you consider legally changing your name.

1. Name five works of literature whose titles include the word “summer” (we’re well aware that during the summer even the most perspicacious of us tend to devolve into wallowing hippopotami, but please: Edith Wharton’s Summer does not qualify).

2. Quote five famous lines of literature in which the word “summer” occurs that have never been made into a book title.

3. Name five works of literature in which the season of summer plays a pivotal role (extra points if you can describe the role).

4. Name five works of literature whose titles includes the names of any of the month’s of summer.

5. Even in these fraught times for America, the 4th of July is still the centerpiece of the summer. Name five works of literature that also feature the 4th of July as a centerpiece.

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May’s quiz was greeted with the usual bucketload of balderdash and buffoonery, but it also brought out the best in some of our readers, especially in our winner, John Wright from Ishpeming in the gorgeous Upper Peninsula of Michigan, who correctly answered every question without any aid from Wikipedia! John’s answers, plus some extras, appear below.

1. Name five authors who hit it big before they were thirty.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stephen Crane, John Keats, Christopher Marlowe, Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, Catullus

2. Name five authors who are buried in Boston’s gorgeous Mount Auburn Cemetery.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Creeley, Buckminster Fuller, James Russell Lowell, Francis Parkman, Julia Ward Howe.

3. Name five out of the long list of England’s Poets Laureate (naturally, discounting John Dryden, the one everybody knows)
—Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Ben Jonson, Colley Cibber, Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion.

4. March madness notwithstanding, it’s May that deranges people. Name five authors who spent time in nuthouses.
—John Clare, Friedrich Nietzsche, Christopher Smart, Guy de Maupassant, Ezra Pound, Charles Lamb, Robert Lowell.

5. Finally, in the lenient spirit of this most lenient of months, name five American novels whose titles are also proper names.
—Moby-Dick, Maggie, Ethan Frome, McTeague, Hannibal, Julian, Jennie Gerhardt.

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