Miscellaneous Arts and Literature Trivia Questions and Answers.

Arts and Literature trivia questions and answers.

What bizarre theory about Dr. Watson did mystery writer Rex Stout, and ardent Sherlock Holmes fan, once suggest to fellow members of the Baker Street Irregulars?
A: That Watson was a woman.

What does "rubaiyat" mean--as in the famous Ruaiyat of Omar Khayyam?
A: Quatrains.

Which is the only Shakespearean play to include a mention of America?
A: The Comedy of Errors (Act III, Scene ii).

What was on the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo painted his famous fresco?
A :Silver stars on a plain blue field.

What famous writer claimed she did most of the plotting for her books while sitting in a bathtub munching on apples?
A: Agatha Christie.

What famous nineteenth-century French novelist published a plagiarized nonfiction work under the pseudonym Bombet and when the plagiarism was discovered, defended the nonexistent Bombet in letters signed by an equally nonexistent Bombet Jr.?
A: Stendhal, who is best known for his novels The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. For his plagiarized work, The Lives of Haydn, Mozart, and Metastasio, he lifted from two biographies and a eulogy.

What kind of ship was the U.S.S. Caine in Herman Wouk's 1952 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Caine Mutiny?
A: A minesweeper.

In what year was George Orwell's chilling political satire Nineteen Eighty-four published?
A: In 1949.

What was the title of the 1960 autobiography of the very first Fuller Brush man, Alfred Fuller?
A: A Foot in the Door.

In what writer's work did author Cicily Isabel Fairfield Andrews find her famous pseudonym--Rebecca West?
A: Henrik, Ibsen's. Rebecca West is the name of the strong-willed heroine in his play Rosmersholm.

What famous artist designed shirts, hats, ashtrays, stamps, brandy bottles, coat hangers, bathing suits, crystal ware, tapestries, and playing cards--among other things?
A: Surrealist Salvador Dali.

How many books with "rags to riches" success stories did Horatio Alger write?
A: 119.

What was the name of the seaport hometown of comic strip hero Popeye the Sailor?
A: Sweetwater.

What is the only building in the Western Hemisphere designed by famed British architect Sir Christopher Wren?
A: The Wren Building at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. It is the oldest academic building still in use in the United States.

What is the Greek meaning of Utopia--the name of the perfect island society created by Sir Thomas More in his book of the same name?
A: It means nowhere, from the Greek ou, meaning "not," and topos, meaning "a place".

How many years after American expatriate Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer was published in France did the novel become legal in the United States?
A: 27. Published in France in 1934 with a dust jacket cautioning booksellers not to display it in their shop windows, the book was banned in the U.S. until 1961 on the grounds of obscenity.

In the Disney version of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, the wicked Queen falls off a precipice and dies. How does she meet her end in the original Grimm brothers fairy tale?
A: She was condemned to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she died.

In H.G. Wells's science-fiction classic War of the Worlds, how did the Martian invaders get to Earth?
A: They were shot to Earth in giant projectiles.