Book Titles
A teenage boy’s summer turns dark as he navigates love, deceit, and a mysterious green light across the bay.
What is The Great Gatsby
This author published her major work under the pseudonym Ellis Bell.
Emily Brontë
This 15th-century peasant girl’s visions inspired not only armies but also a 20th-century play by Jean Anouilh and a film scored by Honegger.
Who is Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc)
The 18th-century printing innovation that made mass-market books possible through steam power.
The Steam Press
his American poet allegedly was found delirious in another man’s clothes shortly before his mysterious death in Baltimore.
Who is Edgar Allan Poe
A group of boys stranded on an island form their own brutal society with deadly consequences.
What is Lord of the Flies
Known for Madame Bovary, he was tried for obscenity in 1857 and helped shape literary realism.
Gustave Flaubert
This 19th-century novelist was so obsessed with realism that he boiled ink down to the exact tone of dried blood for his manuscripts.
Gustave Flaubert
Before wood pulp became standard, most European paper from the 13th to 19th centuries was made from recycled versions of this fabric.
What is Linen (or cotton rags)
This Irish author and playwright was famously imprisoned for “gross indecency” before dying in exile in Paris.
Oscar Wilde
A dystopian future where “Big Brother” watches every move and thoughtcrime is punishable by death.
1984
This American author coined the term “lost generation” and chronicled postwar disillusionment in The Sun Also Rises.
Ernest Hemingway
This poet and dandy of the 19th century wrote Les Fleurs du mal, was put on trial for “offending public morals,” and changed the face of modern poetry.
Who is Charles Baudelaire
Books printed before the year 1501, during the infancy of the printing press, are collectively known by this Latin term meaning “from the cradle.”
what is Incunabula
This Nobel laureate French author of The Plague died in a car crash while carrying an unused train ticket for the same journey in his coat pocket.
Albert Camus
A scientist’s obsession with reanimating life leads to a horrifying creation that turns on him.
Frankenstein
This Victorian author’s serialized novels, including Bleak House, critiqued the social injustices of industrial England.
Charles Dickens
This author and aviator of The Little Prince vanished during a 1944 reconnaissance flight; decades later, his identity bracelet washed ashore on the coast of Provence.
who is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
This 15th-century German goldsmith revolutionized communication forever by perfecting movable type.
Who is Johannes Gutenberg
This Italian novelist and filmmaker was murdered in 1975 under mysterious circumstances; his death is still unsolved and remains a scandal in literary circles.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
A young orphan becomes entangled in espionage, revolution, and romance amid the backdrop of 19th-century Paris.
Les Misérables
This famous American author became famously reclusive, refusing interviews and publishing no further novels after 1951.
J.D. Salinger
This 17th-century playwright, rival of Molière, was killed in a duel over a remark about a woman — his unfinished play, Le Cid, became a national treasure.
Pierre Corneille (or Cyrano de Bergerac, depending on debate)
The oldest known surviving printed book, the Diamond Sutra (868 CE), was printed on this fragile material — centuries before Gutenberg — using a technique later mimicked in Europe.
What is mulberry bark
This French Romantic poet, known for wandering Paris with a lantern to “light his own thoughts,” was found hanged from a gas lamp in 1855, in one of literature’s most eerie deaths.
Who is Gérard de Nerval?