In conjunction with the .4K writing competition and as a way of honoring our many talented writers, I have compiled a list of 20 major literary characters that I feel have gone a long way in contributing to the genre of prose fiction. They were all created by 20th Century authors, and are, for the most part, taken from American novels, with a couple of short stories thrown in for good measure.
The idea is to match the character (number) with the corresponding story (letter of the alphabet).
Don’t be concerned with not knowing some of the answers, because I wouldn’t be able to answer them all either with my memory being what it is. To make this more fun for yourself, please do not look at anyone else’s answers until you have submitted your own. I will post the answer key later this afternoon. Enjoy!
Will O’Ban
Literay Trivia Main Characters – Prose Fiction – 20th Century
Haze Motes ---------- a) Deliverance by James Dickey
Nick Adams ----------- b) Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Holden Caulfield ---------- c) Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Billy Pilgrim ----------- d) House Made Of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
Ed Gentry ----------- e) The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemmingway
Jean Louise Finch ------------ f) Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Abel (a Native American) ----------- g) Rabbitt Run by John Updike
Danny Alvarez ------------- h) All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
Guy Montag ---------- i) Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker ----------- j) Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Stella-Rondo -------------- k) Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
Jake Barnes ------------- l) Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
Rabbit Angstrom ------------- m) The Killers by Ernest Hemmingway
Judd Mulvaney ------------------n) Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Dick Diver ---------------- o) 1984 by George Orwell
Jack Burden ---------------p) The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Sallinger
George Follansbee Babbitt --------------- q) We Were The Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
Valentine Michael Smith --------------- r) All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Winston Smith ----------------s) To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Paul Baumer -------------- t) Why I Live At The P.O. by Eudora Welty
Considering I almost exclusively read non-fiction I am quite pleased with my results.
Cather in the Rye. Zany youth.
Slaughterhouse Five. And so it goes.
To Kill a Mockingbird. (Almost didn’t get this one then “Finch” suddenly rang a bell. Attica Finch. I confess I looked it up to verify if I was right.)
Farenheit 451. Oddly I was just reading the blurb on the back cover to this on Saturday.
Stranger in a Strange Land. (I prefer Starship Troopers)
How prophetic
All quiet on the Western Front. One of my all time favorites.
I’m ashamed to admit, I can only positively identify #3 as coming from The Catcher in the Rye, by Salinger, and #19, Winston Smith as belonging to 1984 by George Orwell.
Otherwise, it seems that my memory for tv ads, though sketchy, is better than my familiarity with 20th C. literature. Sad.
(I should have gotten the Finch one though! dumb.)
Actually, I think that you all did well. It’s tough remembering the titles of stories that you probably haven’t had to read in years. I know I have the same trouble, and I compiled the list!
To help jog your memory a little, I have added the answers in a mix and match format. I think you may be suprised at how many of the others you can recall when you see the title/author. So give it another shot.
I think you people are being too hard on yourselves. The purpose of this was no different than that of naming the commercial jingles – to have fun with it and see what you remember. Nothing more. Chas has the right idea. Knowing one literary character from another means nothing in the larger scheme of things . . . that’s why it’s called trivia here. If you’ve read all of the works I listed that’s great. If you haven’t, that’s fine too. It’s a matter of personal taste and what different people find interesting, and remembering the details of what you read years later (which is my number one failing). These words probably sound odd coming from someone who used to teach most of these books in his 20th Century Lit class. But that’s life
I agree that Aticus Finch would have been easier to recognize than his daughter’s proper name – Jean Louise Finch, but I was trying to limit the character to the one narrating the story when that was possible. Also, I purposely didn’t use her nickname “Scout” because I thought everyone would recognize it too quickly. I guess I can be sneaky like that sometimes.
