OPENING WORDS OF LITERATURE

Identify the title of the book or play from its opening line or words. A hint is in brackets. (e.g., All happy families are alike. [A woman’s name.] Answer: “Anna Karenina.”)

Freshman level

1. Call me Ishmael. [A whale of a story.]

2. It was a pleasure to burn. [A temperature.]

3. Elmer Gantry was drunk. [A man’s name.]

4. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream. [An Ernest Hemingway novella.]

5. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. [It’s a date.]

Graduate level

6. You better not never tell nobody but God. [A color.]

7. All this happened, more or less. [Billy Pilgrim.]

8. All children, except one, grow up. [Peter and Wendy.]

Answers: 1. “Moby-Dick.” 2. “Fahrenheit 451.” 3. “Elmer Gantry.” 4. “The Old Man and the Sea.” 5. “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (“1984”). 6. “The Color Purple.” 7. “Slaughterhouse-Five.” 8. “Peter Pan.”

— North America Syndicate