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Quiz about Author Anagrams
Quiz about Author Anagrams

Author Anagrams Trivia Quiz


Fifteen British and American authors introduce themselves with anagrams of their names (in capitals) and a few more clues (usually references to their works). Many anagrams were generated by Anagram Genius software. Fill in the blanks with the names.

A multiple-choice quiz by TabbyTom. Estimated time: 11 mins.
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Author
TabbyTom
Time
11 mins
Type
Multiple Choice
Quiz #
198,690
Updated
Dec 03 21
# Qns
15
Difficulty
Difficult
Avg Score
7 / 15
Plays
2173
Awards
Top 5% quiz!
Last 3 plays: rhonlor (6/15), Guest 173 (0/15), hbosch (8/15).
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Question 1 of 15
1. It's about four hundred years since I wrote my plays, and since then many of my lines (e.g. "All the world's a stage," "Brevity is the soul of wit,") have become proverbial. So I think I can safely say "I'LL MAKE A WISE PHRASE."

Answer: (Two Words (7 letters, 11 letters))
Question 2 of 15
2. If you ever meet the women in my plays, don't expect a "VIRGINAL WELCOME." They're Restoration ladies, and usually involved in some kind of amorous intrigue. That's the way of the world, and it probably explains why I chose to remain an old bachelor.

Answer: (Two Words (7 letters, 8 letters))
Question 3 of 15
3. "HE IS A TOP MAN." That's what revolutionary Americans said about me during the crisis of the 1770s. But eventually they found my common sense about the rights of man to be a bit too radical, and I died in poverty on my farm at New Rochelle. Where my bones are now, nobody really knows.

Answer: (Two Words (6 letters, 5 letters))
Question 4 of 15
4. If you're looking for a "SCHOLARLY MATE," then I'm your man. I can tell you (at very great length) all about the French Revolution and Chartism and Oliver Cromwell, and I'm fluent in German. Just call at my house in Cheyne Row in Chelsea.

Answer: (Two Words (6 letters, 7 letters))
Question 5 of 15
5. In the mid-nineteenth century I could almost claim to be a "PERSON WHOM ALL READ." Nowadays I'm mainly remembered for a quotation about a better mousetrap, and maybe a poem called "Brahma."

Answer: (Three Words (5 letters, 5 letters, 7 letters))
Question 6 of 15
6. If you think that "I AM MERELY A WEAK CAT-LIKE CHAP," then think again. I'm 6 ft 4 in (193 cm) tall and big with it, and I learned to take care of myself at Charterhouse school (the Slaughterhouse, I called it). Neither is it fair to accuse me of vanity: I really am good, even if I've been overshadowed by my contemporary Charles Dickens.

Answer: (Three Words (7 letters, 9 letters, 9 letters))
Question 7 of 15
7. Tabby Tom is unkind enough to think that "A REALLY SUBLIME TWIT" describes me well, but then, he doesn't have much feeling for the Celtic twilight. My verse will take you to Coole, Innisfree or Byzantium, and I'm also remembered for my commemoration of Easter, 1916.

Answer: (Three Words (7 letters, 6 letters, 5 letters))
Question 8 of 15
8. Many people find my verse hard to understand: indeed, some say that I'm probably a certifiable lunatic or "REGISTERED NUT." Yet many of my detractors are happy to quote my line "Rose is a rose is a rose," or to describe some of my contemporaries in my words as the "Lost Generation."

Answer: (Two Words (8 letters, 5 letters))
Question 9 of 15
9. "AH, HATE IS TRAGIC!" Indeed it is, but if there were no hatred in the world, there would never be a murder in the vicarage or on the Orient Express, and then what would there be for me to write about?

Answer: (Two Words (6 letters, 8 letters))
Question 10 of 15
10. The world of my stories is very much a man's world, where the bell tolls for men without women, and the sun also rises as a prelude to death in the afternoon. In the 1930s I went big-game hunting among the green hills of Africa, where the locals certainly admired this "WHITE MAN'S ENERGY."

Answer: (Two Words (6 letters, 9 letters))
Question 11 of 15
11. Where can you find me now? Probably "IN MERRY HELL," between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, though I've also spent some quiet days in Clichy.

Answer: (Two Words (5 letters, 6 letters))
Question 12 of 15
12. I graduated from the New York Law School, but soon abandoned my legal career for the theatre: there I put people on trial, presented a street scene and looked at Judgment Day. Maybe my plays don't appear on Broadway or Shaftesbury Avenue as often as they did in my lifetime, but I hope I'm not just a "MERE RELIC."

Answer: (Two Words (5 letters, 4 letters))
Question 13 of 15
13. Can I really be called a "HASTY OLD MAN?" Well, you might say I lived life in the fast lane, but I died when I was only 39. Following the poetic advice I gave to my father, I did not go gentle into that good night.

Answer: (Two Words (5 letters, 6 letters))
Question 14 of 15
14. My two marriages ended in divorce, so presumably "MY GENIAL KISS" lost its appeal for Hilary and Elizabeth Jane. But my early comic novels like "Lucky Jim" remain popular.

Answer: (Two Words (8 letters, 4 letters))
Question 15 of 15
15. "I LOVE DRAG!" So you might think if you know me only from my novel about a lady named Myra, who turns out to be not quite what she seems. But I've also written about historical figures from the Roman emperor Julian down to Abraham Lincoln, as well as some wise and witty essays on the modern American political and cultural scene.

Answer: (Two Words (4 letters, 5 letters))

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Most Recent Scores
Mar 28 2024 : rhonlor: 6/15
Mar 27 2024 : Guest 173: 0/15
Mar 09 2024 : hbosch: 8/15
Mar 07 2024 : angostura: 15/15
Feb 25 2024 : HappyPage: 0/15
Feb 13 2024 : Guest 195: 0/15
Feb 05 2024 : Guest 5: 9/15

Score Distribution

quiz
Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. It's about four hundred years since I wrote my plays, and since then many of my lines (e.g. "All the world's a stage," "Brevity is the soul of wit,") have become proverbial. So I think I can safely say "I'LL MAKE A WISE PHRASE."

Answer: William Shakespeare

Other appropriate anagrams of Shakespeare's name are "We all make his praise" and "A weakish speller, am I?" And Hamlet's celebrated line "Frailty, thy name is woman!" can be turned into "It's a whim of male tyranny!"
2. If you ever meet the women in my plays, don't expect a "VIRGINAL WELCOME." They're Restoration ladies, and usually involved in some kind of amorous intrigue. That's the way of the world, and it probably explains why I chose to remain an old bachelor.

Answer: William Congreve

Congreve's first play, "The Old Bachelor," was written when he was 23 years old, and was a great success: it had incidental music by Henry Purcell. It was followed by "The Double Dealer," "Love for Love," and finally "The Way of the World." For the remaining 29 years of his life he wrote very little, probably because of poor health.

His leading female roles were written for Anne Bracegirdle, the leading actress of the day and probably his mistress (Congreve never married).
3. "HE IS A TOP MAN." That's what revolutionary Americans said about me during the crisis of the 1770s. But eventually they found my common sense about the rights of man to be a bit too radical, and I died in poverty on my farm at New Rochelle. Where my bones are now, nobody really knows.

Answer: Thomas Paine

After an unsuccessful early life in England, Paine was persuaded by Benjamin Franklin to emigrate to Philadelphia, where he took up journalism and espoused the cause of independence. His "Common Sense" and "The American Crisis" did much to strengthen revolutionary feeling in America. Returning to England, he published "The Rights of Man," a defence of the principles of the French Revolution which caused him to be tried and sentenced to banishment for treason, but he had been warned of his impending arrest and had escaped to France.

He fell foul of the French revolutionaries by refusing to support the execution of King Louis XVI. Returning to America, he lived out his last years as a virtual outcast: his uncompromisingly radical views alienated the men he had supported.

After his death, William Cobbett brought his bones to England with a view to erecting a monument to him, but the bones were lost and no one knows where Paine's remains now lie.
4. If you're looking for a "SCHOLARLY MATE," then I'm your man. I can tell you (at very great length) all about the French Revolution and Chartism and Oliver Cromwell, and I'm fluent in German. Just call at my house in Cheyne Row in Chelsea.

Answer: Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle first came to notice with a biography of Friedrich Schiller and translations of Goethe and other German authors. His best known work is probably his three-volume "History of the French Revolution," published in 1837. In his early years he had radical political sympathies, expressed in "Chartism" and "Past and Present." Later he lost faith in democracy and yearned for the rule of a benevolent despot.

The house at 24 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, where he lived for nearly half a century, is open to the public.
5. In the mid-nineteenth century I could almost claim to be a "PERSON WHOM ALL READ." Nowadays I'm mainly remembered for a quotation about a better mousetrap, and maybe a poem called "Brahma."

Answer: Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Oxford Companion to American Literature summarizes Emerson's philosophy as "the great doctrine of a higher individualism, the spiritual nature of reality, the importance of self-reliance, the obedience to instinct, the obligation of optimism and hope, and the existence of a unifying Over-Soul which explains the many diverse phenomena of life." He is probably best remembered for saying that "If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door."
6. If you think that "I AM MERELY A WEAK CAT-LIKE CHAP," then think again. I'm 6 ft 4 in (193 cm) tall and big with it, and I learned to take care of myself at Charterhouse school (the Slaughterhouse, I called it). Neither is it fair to accuse me of vanity: I really am good, even if I've been overshadowed by my contemporary Charles Dickens.

Answer: William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray's life was not one of the happiest. His father died when he was three years old; at nine he was sent to a boarding school which he detested; his wife suffered an incurable mental breakdown after four years of marriage, and he nursed a hopeless passion for a friend's wife.

His best known work is almost certainly "Vanity Fair."
7. Tabby Tom is unkind enough to think that "A REALLY SUBLIME TWIT" describes me well, but then, he doesn't have much feeling for the Celtic twilight. My verse will take you to Coole, Innisfree or Byzantium, and I'm also remembered for my commemoration of Easter, 1916.

Answer: William Butler Yeats

Among Yeats's early works are collections of Irish folk tales, including "The Celtic Twilight." As a young man he was deeply involved in the Irish cultural revival. His poem "Easter 1916" commemorates the men who were executed after the unsuccessful nationalist rising in that year. He served as a Senator of the Irish Free State in the 1920s and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
8. Many people find my verse hard to understand: indeed, some say that I'm probably a certifiable lunatic or "REGISTERED NUT." Yet many of my detractors are happy to quote my line "Rose is a rose is a rose," or to describe some of my contemporaries in my words as the "Lost Generation."

Answer: Gertrude Stein

In her "Lectures in America," published in 1935, Ms Stein compares her repetitive style with the technique of motion pictures, in which each frame is only slightly different from the one before, but each frame advances the action.
9. "AH, HATE IS TRAGIC!" Indeed it is, but if there were no hatred in the world, there would never be a murder in the vicarage or on the Orient Express, and then what would there be for me to write about?

Answer: Agatha Christie

Beginning with "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" in 1920, Ms Christie produced 66 detective novels as well as many short stories, more than a dozen plays and two volumes of verse. Under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott she wrote six romantic novels. The play "The Mousetrap," her own adaptation of her novelette "Three Blind Mice," has (at the time of writing) run for more than fifty years in the West End.
10. The world of my stories is very much a man's world, where the bell tolls for men without women, and the sun also rises as a prelude to death in the afternoon. In the 1930s I went big-game hunting among the green hills of Africa, where the locals certainly admired this "WHITE MAN'S ENERGY."

Answer: Ernest Hemingway

In the words of the Oxford Companion to American Literature, Hemingway "expressed the feelings of a war-wounded people disillusioned by the loss of faith and hope, and so thoroughly defeated by the collapse of former values that ... they could turn only to a stoic acceptance of primal emotions."
11. Where can you find me now? Probably "IN MERRY HELL," between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, though I've also spent some quiet days in Clichy.

Answer: Henry Miller

Miller's early works, "Tropic of Cancer," "Tropic of Capricorn" and "Black Spring" were published in France while he was living there in the 1930s, but were too sexually explicit to be published in the US until the 1960s. For Miller, however, "more obscene than anything is inertia." He is widely seen as an important influence on the later Beat movement.
12. I graduated from the New York Law School, but soon abandoned my legal career for the theatre: there I put people on trial, presented a street scene and looked at Judgment Day. Maybe my plays don't appear on Broadway or Shaftesbury Avenue as often as they did in my lifetime, but I hope I'm not just a "MERE RELIC."

Answer: Elmer Rice

Rice's first successful play, "On Trial," used a flashback technique to present scenes that are described by witnesses at a trial: it also used a revolving stage. Later successes included "Street Scene," for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and "Judgment Day," about the burning of the Reichstag.
13. Can I really be called a "HASTY OLD MAN?" Well, you might say I lived life in the fast lane, but I died when I was only 39. Following the poetic advice I gave to my father, I did not go gentle into that good night.

Answer: Dylan Thomas

Thomas is best known for his radio play "Under Milk Wood," which in its final form was broadcast posthumously in 1954 with Richard Burton as a memorable narrator. His early death, on a lecture tour of the USA, was hastened by alcoholism: according to some, his last words were "I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record."
14. My two marriages ended in divorce, so presumably "MY GENIAL KISS" lost its appeal for Hilary and Elizabeth Jane. But my early comic novels like "Lucky Jim" remain popular.

Answer: Kingsley Amis

"Lucky Jim," published in 1954, was Amis's first novel (he had previously published two volumes of poetry), and it brought him immediate success. Although he is generally associated with this kind of satirical comedy, he also produced work in other genres, including "The Anti-Death League" (a spy story incorporating speculation about the existence of God), "The Green Man" (a novel of the supernatural) and "The Riverside Villas Murder" (a venture into the classic detective story mode).
15. "I LOVE DRAG!" So you might think if you know me only from my novel about a lady named Myra, who turns out to be not quite what she seems. But I've also written about historical figures from the Roman emperor Julian down to Abraham Lincoln, as well as some wise and witty essays on the modern American political and cultural scene.

Answer: Gore Vidal

Vidal's novels are often seen as falling into two categories - the historical works such as "Julian," "Burr" and "Lincoln," and the satirical works which he called "inventions," such as "Myra Breckinridge" and "Live from Golgotha." He has also written essays, TV plays, film scripts and (under the pseudonym Edgar Box) three murder mysteries.
Source: Author TabbyTom

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor bloomsby before going online.
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