Arts and Literature Trivia Questions and Answers.

Arts and Literature trivia questions and answers.

What were the names of Scarlett O'Hara's sisters in the Margaret Mitchell classic Gone With the Wind?
A: Her two younger sisters were Careen, for Caroline Irene, and Suellen, for Susan Elinor.

In May 1969 Esquire magazine featured a story about the decline of the American avant-garde. How was this illustratred on its cover?
A: By a picture of Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell's tomato soup.

What architect designed the Gateway Arch in St. Louis?
A: Eero Saarinen.

To whom did Abraham Lincoln say; "Is this the little woman whose book made such a war?"
A: Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

What book begins, "He came into the world in the middle of the thicket, in one of those little, hidden forest glades which seems to be entirely open, but are really screened in on all sides"?
A: Bambi, by Felix Salten.

What future playwright was expelled from Princeton University by Woodrow Wilson when the American president-to-be was president of the university?
A: Eugene O'Neill. He was expelled for throwing a bottle of beer through Wilson's office window.

What famous writer is credited with originating the expression "rain cats and dogs"?
A: Jonathan Swift, in A Complete Collection of Polite and Ingenious Conversation, which he originally had published under the pseudonym Simon Wagstaff, Esquire.

What did artist Pablo Picasso reply when he was asked to name his favorite among all his paintings?
A: "The next one."

What unusual message was attached to all copies of Henry Miller's sex-packed novel Tropic of Cancer when it was first offered for sale in France in 1934?
A: A warning to book dealers--on a removable band--not to display the controversial novel in their shop windows.

On orders from Pope Pius IV, what did Italian artist Daniele de Volterra add to Michelangelo's Last Judgment on the west wall of the Sistine Chapel i the mid-sixteenth century;.
A: Loincloths, to cover up the nudity that shocked church officials. The commission earned the artist the nickname Il Braghettone, "the breeches maker."

What famous writer gave us he line, "Polly put the kettle on, we'll all have tea"?
A: Charles Dickens, in Barnaby Rudge.

According to Shakespeare, what was England's Henry VIII doing on the night his daughter, future Queen Elizabeth I, was born?
A: Playing cards. The game was primero, an early form of poker.

What satiric fifth-century B.C. play introduced the classic comedy team of the tall, thin, insulting straight man and the short, fat buffoon?
A: Lysistrata, by Aristophanes.

In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, why were Lilliputian heretics known as Big-Enders.
A: They believed eggs should be broken at the big end--as opposed to the traditionalist Little-Enders, who broke their eggs at the little end.

What writer originated the phrase "Do not count your chickens before they are hatched" in a story about a farmer's daughter?
A: Aesop, in his story The Milkmaid and Her Pail.

Who is the subject of the biography Poison Pen, published in 1991?
A: Kitty Kelly, author of unauthorized biographies of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan.