Book Club Literature Jeopardy

Classic novels, famous authors, memorable characters and literary prizes, built for book clubs that fancy a break from discussion. Free to copy.

6 categories · 30 clues · Final Jeopardy · everyone buzzes in from their phone

For game night

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Every clue on this board

This page is public, so anyone can read the answers — copy the board and swap a few clues before game day.

Classic Novels

$200
Lawyer Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson in this Harper Lee novel.
What is To Kill a Mockingbird?
$400
Elizabeth Bennet spars with Mr. Darcy in this Jane Austen novel.
What is Pride and Prejudice?
$600
Big Brother is always watching in this George Orwell novel.
What is Nineteen Eighty-Four?
$800
Narrated by Ishmael, this novel follows Captain Ahab's hunt for a white whale.
What is Moby-Dick?
$1,000
This Tolstoy heroine's affair with Count Vronsky ends when she throws herself under a train.
Who is Anna Karenina?

Famous Authors

$200
This British author created Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Who is J.K. Rowling?
$400
Samuel Clemens wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer under this pen name.
Who is Mark Twain?
$600
This modernist author wrote Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
Who is Virginia Woolf?
$800
This author of Beloved won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Who is Toni Morrison?
$1,000
This Colombian author wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Who is Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

Literary Characters

$200
This girl follows a White Rabbit down a rabbit hole into Wonderland.
Who is Alice?
$400
Three ghosts visit this miser on Christmas Eve.
Who is Ebenezer Scrooge?
$600
This teenage narrator of The Catcher in the Rye roams New York after leaving his prep school.
Who is Holden Caulfield?
$800
Heathcliff's great love in Wuthering Heights is this daughter of the Earnshaw family.
Who is Catherine Earnshaw?
$1,000
In Crime and Punishment, this poor former student murders a pawnbroker.
Who is Raskolnikov?

Poets and Poetry

$200
This poet wrote "The Road Not Taken" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
Who is Robert Frost?
$400
This Edgar Allan Poe poem features a bird that answers every question with the same single word.
What is "The Raven"?
$600
This reclusive poet from Amherst, Massachusetts saw fewer than a dozen of her poems published in her lifetime.
Who is Emily Dickinson?
$800
This poet kept revising and expanding Leaves of Grass for decades.
Who is Walt Whitman?
$1,000
Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" is this 19-line form built on two repeating refrains.
What is a villanelle?

Page to Screen

$200
Jennifer Lawrence played Katniss Everdeen in the 2012 film of this Suzanne Collins novel.
What is The Hunger Games?
$400
Greta Gerwig directed a 2019 film of this Louisa May Alcott novel about the March sisters.
What is Little Women?
$600
Anthony Hopkins won an Oscar as Hannibal Lecter in this 1991 adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel.
What is The Silence of the Lambs?
$800
Stanley Kubrick adapted this Stephen King novel, set at the snowbound Overlook Hotel.
What is The Shining?
$1,000
Gillian Flynn adapted her own novel for this 2014 David Fincher thriller about a missing wife.
What is Gone Girl?

Literary Prizes

$200
The Nobel Prize in Literature is announced and presented in this Swedish city.
What is Stockholm?
$400
This American prize, established by the will of a newspaper publisher, honors fiction, drama, poetry and journalism.
What is the Pulitzer Prize?
$600
This prize for the best English-language novel published in the UK and Ireland has been awarded since 1969.
What is the Booker Prize?
$800
In 2016, this singer-songwriter was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Who is Bob Dylan?
$1,000
In 1964, this French philosopher and author declined the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Who is Jean-Paul Sartre?

Final Jeopardy — Literary Characters

The story of Jay Gatsby is told by this narrator, his neighbor and a cousin of Daisy Buchanan.

Who is Nick Carraway?

How to run this board

Book clubs sometimes want a night off from discussing one book, and trivia about all of them is a good substitute. This board covers classic novels, famous authors, literary characters, poetry and poets, books adapted into films, and literary prizes.

Put the board on a TV in the host's living room and let members buzz in from their phones. Smaller clubs can play as individuals; larger ones do better in pairs.

A good tradition to start: the winner of the night picks the next month's book. It gives the game real stakes without anyone needing a prize.

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