2020 will forever be known as a year of tremendous loss, including that of beloved Jeopardy host Alex Trebek. His run as the host of the trivia show lasted 37 seasons, from 1984 until his death last year. And while as of this writing a new permanent host has yet to be named, anyone who loves the show knows that he’ll forever be tied to it in memory and in legacy.
Whether you’re a diehard Jeopardy fan or simply a book nerd who loves trivia, let’s put your skills to the test with this roundup of literary Jeopardy answers from 2020. You’ll get to try your hand at comics trivia, word nerdery, and so much more.
For those unfamiliar with how Jeopardy works, each of the clues are an answer. Your job is to come up with the question. Here’s an example: “This is the largest independent book website in North America” is the answer. The correct question would be “What is Book Riot?”
J-Archive has the most comprehensive record of Jeopardy’s games and players, and all of the answers and questions were sourced from them. Find below answers by category, with corresponding questions listed by category at the bottom half of the post. Final Jeopardy answers are not included here and this is not a comprehensive roundup.
On your marks. Get set. And go forth with literary Jeopardy!
Literary Jeopardy Answers
Comics and Graphic Novels
- The graphic thriller Whiteout takes place at McMurdo station in this very remote place
- To correctly read this Japanese type of comic, be sure to start with the panel at the upper right side of the page
- The Marvel comic “Spider-Gwen” takes place in a universe where this girlfriend of Peter Parker gets the radioactive bite
- The graphic novel They Called Us Enemy is a memoir of this Star Trek actor’s time in an American WWII internment camp
- Exit Stage Left reimagines this cat from Hanna-Barbera cartoons as a Southern playwright in the 1950s
A Literary New Year
- A pregnant Mrs. Woodhouse attends a strange New Year’s Eve party in this devilish book by Ira Levin
- This character’s January 1 diary entry counts Bloody Marys as food (“as contain Worcester sauce & tomatoes”)
- He wrote of the Little Match Girl who had “frozen to death on the last evening of the old year”
- This author’s Middlemarch includes a party hosted by Mr. Vincy on New Year’s Day
- New Year’s Eve finds 4 people contemplating suicide in A Long Way Down by this man who also wrote About a Boy
On The Bookshelf
- The appetite for this 2008 dystopian bestseller, the first in a series, has yet to be quenched
- In the title of a bestseller by Gail Honeyman, this woman “is Completely Fine”
- Wolf Hall is the first in a planned trilogy of books about the rise & fall of this adviser to Henry VIII
- She wrote the novel Big Little Lies, the basis for an HBO series
- J.D. Vance analyzes the culture of poor white Americans in this 2016 memoir
Quoting Poets
- Emma Lazarus wrote, “Give me your tired, your” these
- In “Song of Myself” this poet sounds his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”
- In this poem Allen Ginsberg tells Carl Solomon, “I’m with you in Rockland” 19 times
- This Dylan Thomas title is rhymed with “Though wise men at their end know dark is right”
- These 3 words precede “the centre cannot hold” in Yeats’s “The Second Coming”
Fairytales and Folk Tales
- In an Irish tale, clever Tom captures this title magical creature who promises to bring him wealth, but deceives him instead
- Childe Rowland, youngest son of this legendary monarch of Britain, saves his sister & brothers from an elf king
- Made famous by Walt Disney, this student uses magic while his teacher is away, leading to loads of trouble
- In this folk tale, the title barnyard trio faces off against a troll under a bridge
- The opera Rusalka, about a water nymph who longs to be human, is partly based on this fairy tale by H.C. Andersen
Magazine Collection
- This colorful women’s magazine once had sister magazines Blue Book & Green Book
- Sports Illustrated has a yearly swimsuit edition; this competing mag is going online-only but will still print its Body Issue
- This 66-year-old magazine offers a section for shows on Netflix, Hulu & Amazon called “Stream It!”
- Founded in 1922, this magazine sold longer versions of its condensed articles to other magazines
- Founded in 1885, this magazine established an institute to test consumer goods, which might get its seal of approval
Their Pen Went Silent
- His whale of a tale began in New York City in 1819 & ended there with his death in 1891
- This Nobel Laureate, whom Barack Obama called a national treasure, passed away at 88 in 2019
- Just prior to his death in 2006, this bestselling novelist wrote a book for younger readers called “Shark Life”
- This 6’9″ author who raised dinosaurs from the dead passed away in 2008 after a battle with cancer
- Charlie Chaplin read this Sister Carrie author’s poem “The Road I Came” at his funeral & served as a pall bearer
TV Shows Based On Books
- Richard Hooker’s Novel About Three Army Doctors was the basis for a film & a TV show, both with this name
- In season one of this series based on Jay Asher’s novel, Clay tries to figure out what made Hannah Baker kill herself
- The good times roll in Bon Temps, Louisiana, the setting for this drama where some folks really vamped it up
- Blake Lively & Penn Badgley starred in this CW series based on Cecily von Ziegesar’s book series about privileged NYC teens
- Jeff Lindsay’s books about a very different Miami CSI were the basis for this Showtime series
Poems’ Second Lines
- In line 2 of this poem, “The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play”
- In a poem by William Blake, these four words precede the second line, “In the forests of the night”
- Second line: “I love thee to the depth and breadth and height…”; first line: this
- Its second line is “Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”
- Title of the poem with the second line “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”
Myth In Modern Literature
- Geryon, a character in one of this hero’s labors, falls in love with him in Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red
- W.H. Auden wrote a famous poem about a painting of him, described as “a boy falling out of the sky”
- In a Shelley work this fire bringer is not happy to be nailed to a “wall of eagle-baffling mountain”
- The title character of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad tells the story of running this kingdom while waiting for Odysseus to get back
- Dionysus is a big factor in The Secret History, this author’s first novel
Number That Book
- “Ready Player ___ “
- “__ Years a Slave”
- By Khaled Hosseini: “A ___ Splendid Suns”
- “___ Years in Tibet”
- “___ Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis”
Literature: The Subtitle
- “Or, the Boy Who Would Not Grow Up”
- A 1970s special Pulitzer winner: “The Saga of an American Family”
- “Or, the Parish Boy’s Progress”, which included picking a pocket or 2
- By Monsieur Flaubert, “A Story of Provincial Life”
- Robert Pirsig’s 2-wheeled traveling tale: “An Inquiry into Values”
Libraries
- The Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy is home to more than 15,000 of these from 1910 to the present
- For her work with libraries & literacy, a promenade outside a library at SMU is named in honor of this first lady
- The Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading isn’t in Portugal, but in this carnival city
- The Folger Library is in D.C. across 2nd Street SE from this much larger library
Those Are My Literary Characters
- Jem Finch, Mayella Ewell
- Jason Bourne, a whole lot of people chasing Jason Bourne
- Robert Langdon & “the hulking albino named Silas”
- Arthur Dimmesdale, (Young) Goodman Brown
- Mr. Sammler, who had a “Planet”; Von Humboldt Fleisher, who had a “Gift”
Novels by Chapter Title
- “The Whiteness of the Whale”
- No lie: “The Beautiful Child Rescues the Puppet”
- By Dickens: “Knitting”
- 1883: “Pieces of eight”
- From a Verne work: “Boldly Down the Crater”
Shakespeare by Night
- In this play Oberon says, “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania”
- Romeo and Juliet: “Good night, good night!” these 5 words “that I shall say good night till it be morrow”
- Act II of this play ends with Cornwall saying, “‘Tis a wild night. My Regan counsels well. Come out o’ the storm”
- Speaking to Viola in this play, Olivia says, “Love’s night is noon”
- Marcellus asks this friend of Hamlet “to watch the minutes of this night, that if again this apparition come, he may…speak to it”
Unfilmed Novels
- Jerry Lewis was among those who desperately wanted to play him, J.D. Salinger’s most famous character
- Michael Chabon’s “Amazing Adventures” novel is still unfilmed, with juicy parts for both Kavalier & this other title guy
- He refused offers to film Foucault’s Pendulum, perhaps because of his experience with the film of his first novel
- Plenty of this author’s works have made it to the screen, but Blood Meridian — not yet
- Will Ferrell & John Belushi were considered to play Ignatius J. Reilly, but this novel is still unfilmed
Shapely Book Titles
- Written by Elliott Roosevelt, “Murder in” this room features his mom, Eleanor, solving a homicide in the White House
- Title of Charles Berlitz’s 1974 bestseller about the ships & planes that have vanished in an area, of the Atlantic
- This Dave Eggers novel about an uber-powerful internet company that links everything became a Tom Hanks film
- It’s the two-word title of a memoir by Shirley Temple Black, who was perhaps the most famous one ever
- In a children’s classic by George Selden, Harry the Cat befriends Chester, “The Cricket in” this NYC location
Women’s Memoirs
- Fight Like a Girl & Unbecoming recount women’s experiences in this “most masculine” branch of the U.S. military
- My Life in France is the story of how this chef found her true calling
- I Feel Bad About My Neck, about the travails of aging, is by this late, great writer & director of You’ve Got Mail
- Award-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody’s record of her time as one of these performers is titled Candy Girl
- This advisor to Barack Obama wrote Finding My Voice: My Journey to the West Wing and the Path Forward
Literary Twins
- In this 1954 novel, identical twins Sam & Eric are eventually just called Samneric by the other castaways
- A chapter in Through the Looking-Glass is named for these mirror-image twins
- This is the family name of twins with benefits Jaime & Cersei in the Game of Thrones novels
- Each of the two sets of twins in this Shakespeare play have the same name but different home towns — what a mistake!
- This alliterative title Dickens character works for the wealthy Cheeryble twins & his sister Kate marries their nephew
Children’s Books
- The man in the yellow hat takes care of this inquisitive primate
- A farmer gets exasperating but very legible notes from his livestock in Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That do this
- The B. stands for Beatrice, a name this Barbara Park kindergartener can’t stand
- In a series of kids’ books, this Swedish girl lives by herself in Villa Villekulla
- Seen here is the title character of this 2017 book, also the title of a 1954 novel about a very evil little girl
Literary Awards
- Like the protagonist in the early part of Dumas’s novel, the judges of the newly created Prix Monte-Cristo are these
- No twist necessary in the short stories that since 1919 win the prize named for this short story author
- 2019 Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke is perhaps best known for the novel this player’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
- In 2019 the name of this prestigious prize became a little shorter when the Man Group stopped sponsoring it
- The 2017 Women’s Prize for Fiction went to Naomi Alderman for this sci-fi novel where women get shocking abilities
Book Title Animals
- John Grogan’s Marley & Me is subtitled “Life and Love with the World’s Worst” this
- Aslan represents one of the three title items in this first Chronicle of Narnia
- Sue Monk Kidd examined their Secret Life
- Book 4 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is titled So Long, and Thanks for All these
- Political tension surrounds 2 Turkish children in Ece Temelkuran’s The Time of Mute these birds
Literary Genres
- The Book and the Sword is a Wuxia novel, a Chinese story about these “arts”
- In poetry, it’s a long narrative, often about heroic deeds; there’s also a “mock” type
- This Latin American genre with an oxymoronic name involves the extraordinary seeming ordinary
- Penguin has a line of regency romance novels that are set during the regency of the soon-to-be George IV, in this century
- Some of Carson McCullers’ works fall into the genre of “Southern” this, also an old architectural style
A Marriage Made in Literature
- Anna Oblonsky is the maiden name of this title character
- When Romeo marries Juliet, these two families are joined in matrimony & later, tragedy
- Creepy! In order to get closer to Lolita, this man with a double-talk name marries her mother Charlotte Haze
- The title of this Daphne du Maurier novel refers to the first Mrs. de Winter; the second Mrs. de Winter is obsessed with her
- This 1966 novel is about the first marriage of the character Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre
Literary Landmarks
- 2006 landmark at the gate of Chicago’s Union Stockyards honors the 100th anniversary of this Upton Sinclair novel
- Landmarks in this city at the very bottom of Florida include homes of Robert Frost, John Hersey & Wallace Stevens
- Visit the art deco building in NYC where Erich Maria Remarque, author of this antiwar novel about WWI, lived until his death
- The birthplace of F. Scott Fitzgerald is a landmark at 481 Laurel Avenue in this midwestern state capital
- Nineteen of this man’s monologues, including “Morning, Noon, and Night”, were written at his home in Sag Harbor, New York
Literary Title Beverages
- Okakura Kakuzo’s classic work The Book of this beverage explores its history & place in Asian culture
- “Rusty Nail” & “Bloody Mary” are titles in the series about this police detective whose name sounds like Tennessee whiskey
- Laura Esquivel’s bestseller Like Water for Chocolate takes place in this country around the turn of the 20th century
- Are You there, Vodka? It’s Me, this comedian & talk show host & her collection of personal stories & witticisms
- Naturally, apple picking is featured in this 1985 John Irving novel
Beastly Books (Name the Animal)
- Babar the King by Jean de Brunhoff
- Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
- Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry
- The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Literary Jeopardy Questions
Don’t forget to add “Who is/are” or “What is/are” to the questions.
Comics and Graphic Novels
- Antarctica
- Manga
- Gwen Stacy
- George Takei
- Snagglepuss
A Literary New Year
- Rosemary’s Baby
- Bridget Jones
- Hans Christian Andersen
- George Eliot
- Nick Hornby
On The Bookshelf
- The Hunger Games
- Eleanor Oliphant
- Thomas Cromwell
- Liane Moriarty
- Hillbilly Elegy
Quoting Poets
- Poor
- Walt Whitman
- Howl
- Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
- Things Fall Apart
Fairy Tales and Folk Tales
- A leprechaun
- King Arthur
- The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
- The Three Billygoats Gruff
- The Little Mermaid
Magazine Collection
- Redbook
- ESPN The Magazine
- TV Guide
- Reader’s Digest
- Good Housekeeping
Their Pen Went Silent
- Herman Melville
- Toni Morrison
- Peter Benchley
- Michael Crichton
- Dreiser
TV Shows Based On Books
- M*A*S*H
- 13 Reasons Why
- True Blood
- Gossip Girl
- Dexter
Poems’ Second Lines
- “Casey At The Bat”
- Tyger! Tyger! Burning Bright
- How do I love thee
- “The Raven”
- “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
Myth in Modern Literature
- Hercules
- Icarus
- Prometheus
- Ithaca
- Donna Tartt
Number That Book
- One
- 12
- A thousand
- 7
- 13
Literature: The Subtitle
- Peter Pan
- Roots
- Oliver Twist
- Madame Bovary
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Libraries
- Scripts or screenplays
- Laura Bush
- Rio de Janeiro
- The Library of Congress
Those Are My Literary Characters
- Harper Lee
- Robert Ludlum
- Dan Brown
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Saul Bellow
Novels by Chapter Title
- Moby Dick
- Pinocchio
- A Tale of Two Cities
- Treasure Island
- Journey to the Center of the Earth
Shakespeare by Night
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- “Parting is such sweet sorrow”
- King Lear
- Twelfth Night
- Horatio
Unfilmed Novels
- Holden Caulfield
- Clay
- Umberto Eco
- Cormac McCarthy
- A Confederacy of Dunces
Shapely Book Titles
- The Oval Office
- The Bermuda Triangle
- The Circle
- The Child Star
- Times Square
Women’s Memoirs
- Marines
- Julia Child
- Nora Ephron
- A stripper
- Valerie Jarrett
Literary Twins
- Lord of the Flies
- Tweedledee and Tweedeldum
- Lannister
- A Comedy of Errors
- Nicholas Nickelby
Children’s Books
- Curious George
- Type
- Junie B. Jones
- Pippi Longstocking
- The Bad Seed
Literary Awards
- Prisoners
- O. Henry
- The Goalie
- A Booker
- The Power
Book Title Animals
- Dog
- The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
- Bees
- Fish
- Swans
Literary Genres
- Martial Arts
- An epic
- Magical Realism
- The 19th Century
- Gothic
A Marriage Made in Literature
- Anna Karenina
- The Montagues and Capulets
- Humbert Humbert
- Rebecca
- Wild Sargasso Sea
Literary Landmarks
- The Jungle
- Key West
- All Quiet on the Western Front
- St. Paul
- Spalding Gray
Literary Title Beverages
- Tea
- Jack Daniels
- Mexico
- Chelsea Handler
- The Cider House Rules
Beastly Books (Name the Animal)
- An elephant
- A dog
- A mouse
- A horse
- A deer
Source : Even More Literary Jeopardy To Test Your Bookish Knowledge