March Quiz - Firsts!
Firsts!
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.
In honor of the inaugural issue of Open Letters, the quiz this time around will deal with firsts.
1. Who was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature?
2. What was Jack Aubrey’s first command?
3. President Theodore Roosevelt was the first to popularize the term
“muckraker.” From which literary work did he draw the term?
4. What was the first movie adapted from a work of literature?
5. Who was the first Nobel laureate for literature to die in a car accident?
6. What was the first book to be printed in paperback?
7. Who was the first U.S. President to dabble in fiction-writing?
8. On the first night of Grendel’s attack on Heorot, how many men die?
9. Who was the first person to translate Homer into English?
10. Who tells the first of the Canterbury Tales?
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