Greg Winsky ’71 created a quiz featuring first lines from famous works of fiction, smashed together. We’ve adapted it for PAW Online readers. Test your literary knowledge with these five examples.
Scroll down for answers.
1. A Saturday afternoon in November was overcoat weather again, not just topcoat weather, as it had been all week and as everyone had hoped it would stay for the big weekend — the weekend of the Yale game.
A. Tess of the d'Urbervilles + This Side of Paradise
B. Something Wicked This Way Comes + The Catcher in the Rye
C. The Return of the Native + Franny and Zooey
2. Two households, both alike in dignity, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
A. Romeo and Juliet + Anna Karenina
B. Great Expectations + Tristram Shandy
C. Romeo and Juliet + Emma
3. When in April, the cruelest month, sweet showers fall.
A. 1984 + The Grapes of Wrath
B. The Canterbury Tales + The Wasteland
C. Uncle Tom’s Cabin + The Sound and the Fury
4. Once upon a time, and a very good time it was, there was a moocow coming down along the road, and my brother Jem got his arm broken at the elbow.
A. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man + To Kill a Mockingbird
B. Midnight’s Children + Beloved
C. Ulysses + To Kill a Mockingbird
5. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, the first thing you’ll probably want to know about me is where I was born, what my lousy childhood was like, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.
A. Ethan Frome + Catch-22
B. The Great Gatsby + Lord of the Flies
C. David Copperfield + The Catcher in the Rye
ANSWERS: 1. C; 2. A; 3. B; 4. A; 5. C.