Nail every mug or confess you thought Hemingway was just a font.
By Richie.Zh01
40 Questions
L1 Difficulty
1 × 40 Points
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About This Quiz
Behind every classic is a weirdo with great hair and worse decisions.
Swipe to meet the poets who duelled with pistols, the novelists who wrote masterpieces in prison, and the guy who literally invented “teen angst” from a bathtub.
From Gothic gloom to Romantic swoon, their faces are the whole mood-ring of literature.
You’ll spot Shakespeare’s bald dome in a heartbeat; the rest will roast your inner English major faster than SparkNotes.
Three rounds, three chances to flex—or to admit you still have “No Fear Shakespeare” on speed dial.
[C] Mark Twain | White suit and walrus mustache branded America's first stand-up comedian. Lost fortunes on inventions, made them back mocking everything.
2/40
2. Francois Rabelais
[D] Francois Rabelais | Renaissance monk whose portraits show mischievous intelligence. Gargantua proved toilet humor and theology mix surprisingly well.
3/40
3. Yasar Kemal
[D] Yasar Kemal | One-eyed Kurdish bard who sang Turkey's rural epics. Lost eye in childhood, gained vision for Anatolia's forgotten voices.
4/40
4. George Bernard Shaw
[B] George Bernard Shaw | Mephistophelean beard framed socialism's wittiest evangelist. Refused Nobel money, accepted Oscar, lived to 94 on vegetables.
5/40
5. Arthur Conan Doyle
[A] Arthur Conan Doyle | Walrus mustache adorned Sherlock's resentful creator. Killed Holmes, brought him back for cash, preferred talking to ghosts.
6/40
6. Jane Austen
[D] Jane Austen | Regency cap frames history's sharpest social satirist. Dissected marriage market while dying unmarried—savage irony level achieved.
7/40
7. Geoffrey Chaucer
[B] Geoffrey Chaucer | Medieval portraits show the customs official who moonlighted brilliantly. Made pilgrims tell dirty stories, invented modern English accidentally.
8/40
8. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
[C] Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | Aviator's weathered face matched his sky-seeking soul. Drew little prince while crashing planes, disappeared into Mediterranean mystery.
9/40
9. Erich Maria Remarque
[C] Erich Maria Remarque | Weimar elegance couldn't hide war's psychological wounds. All Quiet made him rich, Nazi hatred made him refugee.
10/40
10. J.D. Salinger
[D] J.D. Salinger | Reclusive features rarely captured after Catcher exploded. Hid in New Hampshire writing Glass family stories nobody saw.
11/40
11. Virginia Woolf
[A] Virginia Woolf | Ethereal beauty housed modernism's stream-of-consciousness pioneer. Filled pockets with stones, left note about hearing birds sing Greek.
12/40
12. Louis Aragon
[C] Louis Aragon | Surrealist turned communist with matinee idol looks. Loved Elsa madly, publicly, poetically—French romance at its most excessive.
13/40
13. Herman Melville
[C] Herman Melville | Seafarer's beard and haunted eyes obsessed over white whales. Died unknown, Moby-Dick discovered decades later as genius.
14/40
14. Alphonse Daudet
[A] Alphonse Daudet | Provençal charm and bohemian style disguised syphilitic suffering. Documented his deterioration with clinical precision between novels.
15/40
15. Mikhail Sholokhov
[D] Mikhail Sholokhov | Cossack features and Stalin's favorite Nobel laureate. Quiet Don flows beautifully; authorship debates flow eternally.
16/40
16. Stefan Zweig
[C] Stefan Zweig | Viennese elegance photographed before exile's darkness. Chess Story written fleeing Nazis, suicide note blamed world's brutalization.
17/40
17. José Saramago
[D] José Saramago | Iberian communist with skeptical eyebrows questioning everything. Made punctuation optional, God villainous, blindness contagious metaphor.
18/40
18. Bertolt Brecht
[A] Bertolt Brecht | Angular features and cigar—theater's chain-smoking revolutionary. Alienation effect worked; audiences think, actors stayed distant.
19/40
19. Mario Vargas Llosa
[D] Mario Vargas Llosa | Peruvian aristocrat's face launched political campaigns and feuds. Punched García Márquez over mysterious woman—Latin literature's best drama.
20/40
20. T.S. Eliot
[B] T.S. Eliot | Banker's suit contained modernism's measured revolutionary. April's cruelty and Prufrock's anxieties defined century's poetic angst.
21/40
21. Guy de Maupassant
[A] Guy de Maupassant | Magnificent mustache crowned France's prolific pessimist. Syphilis drove him mad; claimed growing butterflies in brain.
22/40
22. John Keats
[D] John Keats | Romantic beauty died at 25, tuberculosis claiming poetry's sensualist. Wrote greatest odes while coughing blood—peak Romanticism.
23/40
23. Sabahattin Ali
[B] Sabahattin Ali | Turkish radical's defiant gaze challenged authority constantly. Madonna in Fur Coat hidden until death; government probably involved.
24/40
24. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar
[A] Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar | Ottoman melancholy in modernist Istanbul's chronicler. Time Regulation Institute satirized Turkey's modernization beautifully, bitterly.
25/40
25. John Fante
[D] John Fante | Italian-American features captured Los Angeles' struggling writer. Bukowski called him god; diabetes took legs, not spirit.
26/40
26. Henri-Frédéric Blanc
[C] Henri-Frédéric Blanc | French novelist from Marseille known for satirical, off-beat urban fiction.
27/40
27. Isaac Asimov
[B] Isaac Asimov | Muttonchops and thick glasses—science fiction's prolific professor. Published 500 books, feared flying, never left Earth mentally.
28/40
28. Fitzgerald Scott
[B] Fitzgerald Scott | Jazz Age golden boy's beautiful, doomed features. Gatsby's green light flickered while he drank himself toward darkness.
29/40
29. J.M. Coetzee
[C] J.M. Coetzee | Austere South African face confronted apartheid's aftermath. Disgrace earned Nobel Prize and violent controversy equally.
30/40
30. Kazuo Ishiguro
[C] Kazuo Ishiguro | Japanese-British reserve hiding emotional devastation perfectly. Remains of Day proved repression literature's most heartbreaking genre.
31/40
31. Hermann Hesse
[A] Hermann Hesse | Mystical eyes sought Eastern wisdom from Swiss mountains. Siddhartha and Steppenwolf guided every '60s seeker's backpack journey.
32/40
32. Robert Louis Stevenson
[B] Robert Louis Stevenson | Tubercular Scottish wanderer with adventure-seeking mustache. Treasure Island written sick in bed, died in Samoa, beloved.
33/40
33. Salman Rushdie
[B] Salman Rushdie | Magical realist whose fatwa made him history's most famous fugitive. Midnight's Children born at India's birth, controversy followed.
34/40
34. N. K. Jemisin
[D] N. K. Jemisin | First writer ever to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years in a row (2016–2018) for the Broken Earth trilogy—reshaping epic fantasy with geology, justice, and grit.
35/40
35. Aldous Huxley
[D] Aldous Huxley | British author of *Brave New World* (1932). His mescaline essay *The Doors of Perception* lent a rock band its name—and he died on Nov 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated.
36/40
36. Paul Valéry
[B] Paul Valéry | Mathematician's precision in poet's French face. Morning notebooks filled 30,000 pages contemplating consciousness before coffee.
37/40
37. Thomas Pynchon
[A] Thomas Pynchon | Most famous unknown face in literature. Gravity's Rainbow launched thousand dissertations; author vanished, possibly intentionally.
38/40
38. H.P. Lovecraft
[C] H.P. Lovecraft | Gaunt New England recluse who invented cosmic horror. Racist fears spawned Cthulhu; tentacles outlived prejudices ironically.
39/40
39. Haruki Murakami
[B] Haruki Murakami | Marathon runner's lean intensity translated into surreal prose. Makes pasta, parallel worlds, and missing cats equally mysterious.
40/40
40. Nikos Kazantzakis
[D] Nikos Kazantzakis | Cretan passion carved into philosophical features. Zorba danced while Last Temptation scandalized; both challenged God enthusiastically.