Arts And Literature Trivia Questions

Position your cursor over the question mark found beside each question for the answer.


What city's two main papers are the Free Press and the News?

       a. Boston
       b. Chicago
       c. Detroit
       d. Atlanta


In the Herman Melville novel, he's an officer on the Bellipotent. In the Benjamin Britten opera based on the novel, he is an officer on the HMS Indomitable. Who is he?

       a. Moby Dick
       b. Billy Budd
       c. Long John Silver
       d. Captain Flint


Art dealer Ambroise Vollard helped nurture which 19th-century art movement?

       a. Romanticism
       b. Baroque
       c. Impressionism
       d. Expressionism


Who developed the three laws of robotics, as well as a zeroith law that says that a robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm?

       a. Arthur C Clarke
       b. Ray Bradbury
       c. Isaac Asimov
       d. HG Wells


Five years after he died in 1930, his widow had his body dug up in France and cremated. Unfortunately, her new boyfriend, Angelo Ravagli, dumped the ashes in Europe and replaced them with new ashes by the time he got back to Taos, New Mexico. Who was this dead writer?

       a. Norman Mailer
       b. Jack Kerouac
       c. DH Lawrence
       d. Truman Capote


What author of "Born Free" was initially believed to have been mauled to death by a lion?

       a. Joy Adamson
       b. Mary Leakey
       c. Jane Goodall
       d. Dian Fossey


On November 9, 1863, the US president saw what actor at Ford's Theatre, where he played Raphael in The Marble Heart?

       a. John Wilkes Booth
       b. Henry Irving
       c. David Garrick
       d. Edmund Kean


What defeated presidential candidate had written several books on environmental issues, including "Earth in the Balance - Ecology and the Human Spirit"?

       a. Bob Dole
       b. Ralph Nader
       c. Al Gore
       d. Michael Dukakis


Calling itself the "World's Greatest Newspaper", what is Chicago's largest newspaper called?

       a. Times
       b. Tribune
       c. Sun
       d. Post


In 2002, a German family discovered that "Massacre of the Innocents", a painting of Herod's murder of Jewish infants, was actually painted in about 1610 by whom?

       a. Rubens
       b. Rembrandt
       c. Michelangelo
       d. Raphael


Art dealer Jacopo Strada is best remembered now for the painting of him by which of his clients?

       a. Rafael
       b. Michelangelo
       c. Titian
       d. Caravaggio


What San Francisco romance writer's five husbands include a convicted bank robber/rapist, a heroin addict/burglar and a Silicon Valley investor?

       a. Nora Roberts
       b. Barbara Cartland
       c. Danielle Steel
       d. Barbara Taylor Bradford


Abrogate, prerogative and interrogate all come from the Latin root "rogare". What does this mean?

       a. To propose a law
       b. To exert a privilege
       c. To establish one's authority
       d. To ask a question


The son of Czech immigrants, what artist was born in Pittsburgh in 1928?

       a. Roy Lichtenstein
       b. Andy Warhol
       c. Willem DeKooning
       d. Jackson Pollock


The original "Ignoramus" appeared in a satirical play by Cambridge University Professor George Ruggle. Who was he?

       a. An uneducated lawyer
       b. A court astrologer
       c. A tax collector
       d. An unwashed peasant




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