See If You Still Remember These Famous Novel Opening Lines
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Question 1
Which Novel Opens With 'Call Me Ishmael'?
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Which Book Begins 'It Was The Best Of Times'?
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Which Classic Opens With 'Happy Families Are All Alike'?
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Which Novel Famously Opens 'You Don't Know About Me'?
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Which Book Starts With 'Mrs. Dalloway Said She Would Buy The Flowers'?
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Which Great American Novel Opens 'If You Really Want To Hear About It'?
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Which Novel Begins 'It Is A Truth Universally Acknowledged'?
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Which Steinbeck Novel Opens 'To The Red Country And Part Of The Grey Country'?
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Which Novel Opens With 'They Shoot Horses Don't They'?
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Which Novel Opens With 'Someone Must Have Slandered Josef K'?
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Which Beloved Novel Begins 'Last Night I Dreamt Of Manderley Again'?
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Which Novel Starts With 'It Was A Pleasure To Burn'?
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Which Classic Opens With 'It Was The Day My Grandmother Exploded'?
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Which Novel Opens With 'All This Happened More Or Less'?
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Which Harper Lee Novel Opens 'When He Was Nearly Thirteen'?
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Which Novel Begins 'It Was A Bright Cold Day In April And The Clocks Were Striking Thirteen'?
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Which Fitzgerald Novel Opens 'In My Younger And More Vulnerable Years'?
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Which Toni Morrison Novel Opens With '124 Was Spiteful'?
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Which Novel Famously Opens 'Whether I Shall Turn Out To Be The Hero'?
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Which Novel Opens With 'Where's Papa Going With That Ax'?
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Which Hemingway Novel Opens 'Robert Cohn Was Once Middleweight Boxing Champion'?
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Which Novel Opens With 'It Was A Dark And Stormy Night; The Rain Fell In Torrents'?
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Which Willa Cather Novel Opens 'I First Heard Of Antonia On A Train'?
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Which Novel Opens With 'You Are About To Begin Reading'?
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Which Ralph Ellison Novel Opens 'I Am An Invisible Man'?
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Which Novel Famously Opens 'Lolita Light Of My Life Fire Of My Loins'?
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Which Edith Wharton Novel Opens 'Selden Paused In Surprise'?
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Which Novel Opens With 'It Was A Wrong Number That Started It'?
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Which Novel Opens With 'As Gregor Samsa Awoke One Morning'?
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Which Steinbeck Novel Begins 'The Salinas Valley Is In Northern California'?
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Which Novel Starts With 'It Was A Queer Sultry Summer The Summer They Executed The Rosenbergs'?
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Which Faulkner Novel Opens With 'Through The Fence Between The Curling Flower Spaces'?
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Which Nabokov Memoir Opens With 'The Cradle Rocks Above An Abyss'?
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Which Cormac McCarthy Novel Opens With 'See The Child'?
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Which Novel Opens With 'It Was The Best Of Times It Was The Age Of Wisdom' — What City Is The Story Set In?
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Which Zora Neale Hurston Novel Opens 'Ships At A Distance Have Every Man's Wish On Board'?
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Which Saul Bellow Novel Opens With 'If I Am Out Of My Mind It's All Right With Me'?
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Which Novel Opens With 'riverrun Past Eve And Adam's'?
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Which Flannery O'Connor Novel Opens 'Hazel Motes Sat At A Forward Angle'?
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Which Camus Novel Opens With 'Mother Died Today Or Maybe Yesterday I Don't Know'?
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Which Updike Novel Opens 'Boys Are Playing Basketball Around A Telephone Pole'?
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Which Novel Opens With 'It Was Love At First Sight'?
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Which Novel Starts With 'The Sky Above The Port Was The Color Of Television'?
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Which Marilynne Robinson Novel Opens 'I Have Been Feeling Very Old Lately'?
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Which Don DeLillo Novel Opens With A Description Of Station Wagons Arriving At A College?
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Which Novel Begins 'You Better Not Never Tell Nobody But God'?
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Which Novel Famously Opens 'Many Years Later As He Faced The Firing Squad'?
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Which Dostoevsky Novel Opens 'On An Exceptionally Hot Evening Early In July'?
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Which Truman Capote Novel Opens 'Where Are You Going Where Have You Been'?
Question 1
Which Novel Opens 'The Man In Black Fled Across The Desert'?
1
Moby-Dick
2
The Scarlet Letter
3
Billy Budd
4
The Sea-Wolf
Herman Melville wrote those three famous words in 1851 and Ishmael is the sole survivor of the Pequod's doomed voyage.
1
David Copperfield
2
Oliver Twist
3
Great Expectations
4
A Tale Of Two Cities
Dickens wrote that opening in 1859 and the full sentence runs an astonishing 119 words without stopping.
1
Anna Karenina
2
The Brothers Karamazov
3
Crime And Punishment
4
War And Peace
Tolstoy's 1878 masterpiece opens with that line and literary scholars still debate whether he actually believed it.
1
The Catcher In The Rye
2
A Connecticut Yankee
3
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn
4
The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain had Huck break the fourth wall in 1884 making him one of the first narrators in American literature to speak directly to readers.
1
Orlando
2
To The Lighthouse
3
The Hours
4
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf published that opening line in 1925 and the entire novel takes place over just one single day in London.
1
A Separate Peace
2
The Catcher In The Rye
3
Franny And Zooey
4
The Bell Jar
J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield opened with that dismissive tone in 1951 and the novel was immediately banned in dozens of school districts.
1
Northanger Abbey
2
Pride And Prejudice
3
Sense And Sensibility
4
Emma
Jane Austen wrote that ironic opening in 1813 and the line is actually mocking the very truth it claims to state.
1
The Grapes Of Wrath
2
East Of Eden
3
Of Mice And Men
4
Cannery Row
Steinbeck opened his 1939 Pulitzer winner by describing the Dust Bowl landscape before introducing a single human character.
1
As I Lay Dying
2
The Sound And The Fury
3
They Shoot Horses Don't They
4
The Old Man And The Sea
Horace McCoy's 1935 Depression-era novel used that haunting title as its opening line and inspired a major 1969 Hollywood film.
1
The Castle
2
The Trial
3
The Metamorphosis
4
Invisible Man
Franz Kafka wrote The Trial in 1914 and it wasn't published until after his death in 1925.
1
Jane Eyre
2
Rebecca
3
Wuthering Heights
4
The Woman In White
Daphne du Maurier published Rebecca in 1938 and never named its famous narrator.
1
We
2
The Handmaid's Tale
3
Fahrenheit 451
4
Brave New World
Ray Bradbury chose 451 degrees because he believed that was the temperature paper catches fire.
1
A Prayer For Owen Meany
2
The Crow Road
3
One Hundred Years Of Solitude
4
Beloved
Iain Banks wrote this darkly comic Scottish novel in 1992 and it became an instant cult classic.
1
A Farewell To Arms
2
The Things They Carried
3
Slaughterhouse-Five
4
Catch-22
Kurt Vonnegut based Slaughterhouse-Five on his own survival of the 1945 Dresden firebombing.
1
The Color Purple
2
Go Set A Watchman
3
In Cold Blood
4
To Kill A Mockingbird
Harper Lee wrote To Kill A Mockingbird in just two and a half years winning the Pulitzer in 1961.
1
Animal Farm
2
We
3
Brave New World
4
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell titled the book by reversing the last two digits of the year he finished writing it.
1
The Beautiful And Damned
2
This Side Of Paradise
3
The Great Gatsby
4
Tender Is The Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald based the green light in The Great Gatsby on a real dock across from his Long Island home.
1
The Bluest Eye
2
Beloved
3
Song Of Solomon
4
Sula
Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 and dedicated Beloved to the 60 million enslaved.
1
Great Expectations
2
Bleak House
3
Oliver Twist
4
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens considered David Copperfield his favorite of all his novels calling it his favorite child.
1
Charlotte's Web
2
Old Yeller
3
The Yearling
4
Sounder
E.B. White wrote Charlotte's Web in 1952 and that alarming first line hooks readers immediately.
1
The Old Man And The Sea
2
For Whom The Bell Tolls
3
The Sun Also Rises
4
A Farewell To Arms
Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises in 1926 drawing on his own Lost Generation experiences in Paris.
1
Dracula
2
Frankenstein
3
Paul Clifford
4
The Moonstone
Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote that notorious 1830 opener inspiring an annual Bad Writing Contest named in his honor.
1
My Antonia
2
O Pioneers!
3
The Song Of The Lark
4
Death Comes For The Archbishop
Willa Cather based My Antonia on a real Bohemian immigrant girl she knew growing up in Nebraska.
1
Invisible Cities
2
The Name Of The Rose
3
The Baron In The Trees
4
If On A Winter's Night A Traveler
Italo Calvino broke the fourth wall in 1979 by addressing the reader directly as the very first move.
1
Go Tell It On The Mountain
2
Their Eyes Were Watching God
3
Native Son
4
Invisible Man
Ellison's 1952 masterpiece uses invisibility as a metaphor for how America ignored Black citizens.
1
Pale Fire
2
The Gift
3
Lolita
4
Ada Or Ardor
Nabokov wrote Lolita directly in English not Russian making it his first major novel composed in his third language.
1
The Custom Of The Country
2
The House Of Mirth
3
The Age Of Innocence
4
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winning it in 1921.
1
Ghosts
2
The New York Trilogy
3
Moon Palace
4
City Of Glass
Paul Auster used a misdial as his entire plot engine making City Of Glass a postmodern detective masterpiece.
1
The Castle
2
The Trial
3
The Metamorphosis
4
Amerika
Franz Kafka wrote this surreal opening in 1915 and never saw it published as a standalone book during his lifetime.
1
East Of Eden
2
Tortilla Flat
3
Of Mice And Men
4
Cannery Row
Steinbeck called East Of Eden his masterpiece and based the Salinas Valley setting on his own California childhood home.
1
The Bell Jar
2
Revolutionary Road
3
Peyton Place
4
The Group
Sylvia Plath published The Bell Jar under the pen name Victoria Lucas in 1963 fearing her mother's reaction to the story.
1
Absalom Absalom
2
As I Lay Dying
3
Light In August
4
The Sound And The Fury
That opening voice belongs to Benjy a 33-year-old man with an intellectual disability narrating one of literature's most daring first sections.
1
Pnin
2
Ada Or Ardor
3
Pale Fire
4
Speak Memory
Nabokov's 1951 memoir is considered one of the finest autobiographical works ever written in the English language.
1
No Country For Old Men
2
The Road
3
Suttree
4
Blood Meridian
Blood Meridian's spare two-word sentence launches one of the most violent and debated novels in American literary history.
1
Paris And Vienna
2
Paris And London
3
London And Dublin
4
Rome And Athens
Dickens set A Tale Of Two Cities during the French Revolution alternating between London and a revolutionary Paris tearing itself apart.
1
Their Eyes Were Watching God
2
Jonah's Gourd Vine
3
Dust Tracks On A Road
4
Moses Man Of The Mountain
Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in just seven weeks in 1937 and it was later championed by Alice Walker who helped rescue it from obscurity.
1
Mr. Sammler's Planet
2
Henderson The Rain King
3
Humboldt's Gift
4
Herzog
Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976 and Herzog is widely considered his most autobiographical and emotionally raw masterpiece.
1
Finnegans Wake
2
The Portrait
3
Ulysses
4
Dubliners
James Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake's last sentence to connect directly to its famous opening creating one endless circular story.
1
A Good Man Is Hard To Find
2
Wise Blood
3
Everything That Rises
4
The Violent Bear It Away
Flannery O'Connor considered Wise Blood her most personal novel despite its dark and unsettling religious themes.
1
The Stranger
2
Nausea
3
The Fall
4
The Plague
Camus wrote The Stranger in 1942 and the French word 'aujourd'hui' sparked endless translation debates about Meursault's detachment.
1
Rabbit At Rest
2
Rabbit Run
3
Rabbit Redux
4
Rabbit Is Rich
John Updike wrote four Rabbit novels spanning thirty years earning him two Pulitzer Prizes for the series.
1
All Quiet On The Western Front
2
Catch-22
3
The Naked And The Dead
4
A Farewell To Arms
Joseph Heller coined the phrase catch-22 and it later entered dictionaries as a real English word.
1
The Diamond Age
2
Neuromancer
3
Do Androids Dream
4
Snow Crash
William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984 and single-handedly invented the cyberpunk genre with that one opening line.
1
Home
2
Lila
3
Gilead
4
Housekeeping
Gilead won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and is written as a letter from a dying Iowa preacher to his young son.
1
Mao II
2
Libra
3
Underworld
4
White Noise
DeLillo's 1985 novel opens with station wagons and won the National Book Award predicting America's consumer culture obsession.
1
The Color Purple
2
Beloved
3
Their Eyes Were Watching God
4
Sula
Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for The Color Purple and its unforgettable opening voice.
1
Chronicle Of A Death Foretold
2
Love In The Time Of Cholera
3
The Autumn Of The Patriarch
4
One Hundred Years Of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote this Nobel Prize-winning novel in 1967 in just eighteen months of nonstop writing.
1
Crime And Punishment
2
The Idiot
3
Notes From Underground
4
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky wrote Crime And Punishment in 1866 while deeply in debt and racing against a publisher's deadline.
1
In Cold Blood
2
Neither — Joyce Carol Oates Wrote It
3
Other Voices Other Rooms
4
Breakfast At Tiffany's
Joyce Carol Oates wrote this 1966 story and dedicated it to Bob Dylan whose music inspired the tale.
1
The Gunslinger
2
Blood Meridian
3
No Country For Old Men
4
Lonesome Dove
Stephen King began The Dark Tower series in 1978 and considers it his most important work of his entire career.
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Some opening lines are unforgettable, but can you match them to the novels they came from?
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