Hard Habit to Break Trivia Quiz

Answer: Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas was very particular about what colour paper he used for different types of writing: blue paper for fiction, yellow paper for poetry, and pink paper for articles. Once, while traveling, he ran out of blue paper and resorted to white paper instead. He later said that it made that work suffer.

Alexandre Dumas was born on July 24, 1802, in France. He wrote his first play, "Henry lll and His Court" in 1829. His second play, "Christine", came out the next year. Both were so successful, Dumas took up a full time writing career and, in 1836, his first novel, "The Countess of Salisbury" was published. In 1844, he went on to write "The Three Musketeers", and "The Count of Monte Cristo" followed two years later. She married Ida Ferrier in 1840, but they had no children together. Ida died in 1859. Throughout his life and marriage, Dumas had several mistresses and fathered at least four children. On December 5, 1870, Dumas died, most likely of a heart attack. He was 68 years old.

Answer: Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie liked to eat apples, drink tea, and look at crime photographs in the bathtub, saying it helped fuel her creative thinking. She quit the habit after observing that the bathtub was "too slippery, with no nice wooden ledge to rest pencils and paper on." She was born as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on September 15, 1890. In 1916, while working as a nurse, Christie wrote her first book, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles", which featured her famous detective Hercule Poirot. It was published in 1920, after which followed many more novels, some were Poirot novels, and some featured Miss Marple, and duo Tommy and Tuppence. Her play "The Mousetrap" is considered one of history's longest running plays. Christie's detective are known worldwide and have been played be many actors.

She married Archie Christie in 1914. They had a daughter, Rosalind, in 1919. Archie and Agatha divorced in 1928. In 1930, she remarried the archeologist Max Mallowan, and remained married until her death on January 12, 1976, at the age of 85.

Answer: Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens had a compass with him wherever he went so that he would always be sleeping in the north direction. He believed this prompted creativity and production. He was born on February 7, 1812, as the second of eight children. His first story, "A Dinner at Poplar Walk", was published in 1833.

Some of his most famous works include "Oliver Twist" (1838), "A Christmas Carol" (1843), "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859), and "Great Expectations" (1861). He married Catherine Hogarth in 1836. They had ten children together, and separated in 1858 after Dickens fell in love with the actress Ellen Ternan. Dickens and Ternan stayed together (unmarried) from 1857 until Dickens's death on June 9, 1870.

Answer: Edgar Allan Poe

Catterina was a tortoiseshell cat, and historians believe that Edgar Allan Poe and his wife adopted her in 1839/early 1840. When Poe's wife Virginia was ill with tuberculosis, Catterina gave them both comfort. When Poe died of unknown causes on October 7, 1849, Catterina was found dead two weeks later, also of an unknown cause.

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Massachusetts. He had an older brother and younger sister. In 1810, their father abandoned the family. Their mother died only a year later, so the three siblings were separated and placed in foster homes. Edgar was entrusted to the care of John and Frances Allan. In 1845, he published "The Raven", which became a big hit and still is to this day. Credited as the father of modern detective stories, Poe wrote three short stories feauring his detective Auguste Dupin. Poe would go on to write many
more stories and poems.

He was in a relationship with Sarah Elmira Royster for a short period, but she married another man while Poe was away at a university. Poe married his 13 year old cousin Virginia Clemm in 1836. She died of tuberculosis in 1847. About a year after her death, Poe rekindled his relationship with Sarah Royster, as her husband had since died too. Unfortunately, Poe died before they could move forward.

Answer: Victor Hugo

In the fall of 1830, Victor Hugo put himself on "house arrest" by ordering his valet to hide all his clothes, except for a grey knitted shawl. He was determined to finish "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" by February 1831. He finished it much sooner, though, in six months. Hugo originally wanted to call the book "What Came Out of a Bottle of Ink", but thankfully decided on the title it has now.

Victor Hugo was born on February 26, 1802, in France. Besides "The Hunchback of Notre Dame", he is also famous for "Les Miserables", which he wrote in 1862. Hugo wrote a few others books during his career.

Victor Hugo married Adele Foucher in 1822. They had three sons and two daughters. Despite both of them having affairs with other people, Victor and Adele stayed together until her death in 1868. Hugo himself died on May 22, 1885, due to a stroke.

Answer: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's children's nanny, Lily Loder Symonds, was alleged to have psychic abilities and prompted Doyle's belief in spiritualism in 1916. His son Kingsley's death in 1918 furthur strengthen Doyle's spiritualistic beliefs because of his desperate wish to communicate with his son after death. In 1917, two girls took the famous but fake "Cottingley Fairies" pictures, and Doyle believed they were real. As you've read in the question, Doyle was friends with Harry Houdini, whom he believed to have supernatural powers. Houdini was opposed to the spiritualist movement and exposed fake mediums, seances, and anything that had to do with spiritualism. This led to a bitter fight between the two former friends.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859, in Scotland. In 1886, he wrote the first story featuring his fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in three weeks and had it published. Doyle would go on to write 56 stories and 4 novels featuring Holmes between 1886 and 1927. His other works are hardly known, especially next to Sherlock Holmes, but he did write other works.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle married Louisa Hawkins in 1885 and had two children with her. After Louisa's death in 1906, Doyle married Jean Leckie and had three more children with her. Doyle's children had no children of their own, so there are no direct descendants of their family. Doyle died on July 7, 1930, of a heart attack. His wife, Jean, outlived him by ten years.

Answer: Ernest Hemingway

In the letter, Ernest Hemingway said he tried to put the bad work in the wastebasket and forget about it. Hemingway implied he writes for pleasure and saves only the best of his work, and that others authors just publish average or bad work because they listen to critics and/or want to make money.

Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Illinois. During his career, Hemingway wrote several books, among the most famous are "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), "A Farewell to Arms" (1929), "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1940), and "The Old Man and the Sea" (1952). He married Hadley Richardson from 1921 to 1927; Pauline Pfeiffer from 1927 to 1940, Martha Gellhorn from 1940 to 1945, and Mary Welsh from 1946 until his death by suicide on July 2, 1961. Hemingway had three sons.

Answer: Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll work as a mathematics professor at Oxford, where the teachers used purple ink to grade and correct students' papers. This habit carried over into his writing career.

Lewis Carroll was born on January 27, 1832, in England, as Charles Dodgson. He had a passion for photography from 1856 until 1880. Only 40% of his photographs survived. In 1864, he wrote "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", supposedly for Alice Liddell, who people say the heroine is based on. However, Carroll denied that Alice (from the book) was based on Alice Liddell. In 1965, he took Lewis Carroll as his penname and published "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". In 1871, he published the sequel "Through the Looking Glass". Queen Victoria was said to have adored the first Alice book. He was never married nor had children. He died on January 14, 1898, at age 65. His death was due to pneumonia.

Answer: Jane Austen

Jane Austen's nephew, Edward Austen-Leigh, wrote in his book, "A Memoir of Jane Austen", that "She would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of some of her people." Being a writer myself, I certainly understand Jane's feelings.

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in England. Her writing career started in 1796 when she began work on her first novel, "Sense and Sensibility". It was published in 1811 anonymously. Austen went on to write "Pride and Prejudice" (1813), "Mansfield Park" (1814), "Emma" (1815), "Persuasion" (1817), and "Northanger Abbey" (1817). Despite her numerous suitors and marriage proposals, she never married. She did get engaged once, but broke it off the next morning. Austen died on July 18, 1817. Her cause of death is listed as Addison's Disease.

Answer: Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka formed this habit because of his severe insomnia. He once wrote that when somebody sleeps, his soul leaves him (this is actually a common Jewish belief) and that he feared his soul wouldn't return. In fact, Kafka's view on sleeping made its way into "The Metamorphosis", in which the main character had contrasting opinions on sleeping. Often, Kafka's works focused on sleeping or lack of sleeping.

Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Austria-Hungary. He wrote his breakthrough work, "The Judgement" in 1912. In 1915, he wrote his most famous novel, "The Metamorphosis", which is about an unhappy man who was transformed into a cockroach (morbid, huh?). He never actually married, although he became engaged to Felice Bauer twice, and once to Julie Whoryzek. He was in a relationship with Milena Jesenska for a short period, and then became the lover of Dora Diamant. Kafka was infected with tuberculosis when he died on June 3, 1924, but the cause of death was starvation, because his throat hurt so much he couldn't eat. He died at the age of 40 in the arms of Dora Diamant.