500 Most Famous Literature

This quiz goes over the 500 most common pieces of Literature in Quiz bowl. Given the piece of literature, enter the author who made that. Also a tool for Knowledge Bowl.
Based on NAQT's 'You Gotta Know"
Quiz by
EGehrke
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Last updated: September 27, 2025
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First submittedApril 27, 2025
Times taken1,199
Average score43.6%
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Romeo and Juliet
William Shakespeare
Hamlet
William Shakespeare
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
Harry Potter (Series)
J. K. Rowling
Othello
William Shakespeare
The Tempest
William Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
Oedipus Rex
Sophocles
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
The Iliad
Homer
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
1984
George Orwell
Ulysses
James Joyce
Gulliver's Travels
Jonathan Swift
Paradise Lost
John Milton
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
The Scarlett Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Red Badge of Courage
Stephen Crane
Our Town
Thornton Wilder
Candide
Voltaire
Billy Budd: Foretopman
Herman Melville
Les Miserables
Victor Hugo
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare
Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw
Song of Hiawatha
Henry Longfellow
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
William Shakespeare
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
The Three Musketeers
Alexandre Dumas
The Odyssey
Homer
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
Vanity Fair
William Thackeray
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
A Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott
As You Like it
William Shakespeare
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot
Aeneid
Virgil
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Antigone
Sophocles
Faust
Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe
Animal Farm
George Orwell
The Call of the Wild
Jack London
Much Ado about Nothing
William Shakespeare
The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams
The Crucible
Arthur Miller
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
Twelfth Night
William Shakespeare
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Rip van Winkle
Washington Irving
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
Waiting for Godot
Samuel Beckett
Death of a Salesman
Arthur Miller
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Eugene O'Neill
All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Slaughterhouse Five
Kurt Vonnegut
The Charge of the Light Brigade
Alfred Tennyson
The Merry Wives of WIndsor
William Shakespeare
The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
The Taming of the Shrew
William Shakespeare
Eugene Onegin
Alexander Pushkin
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Inferno
Miguel de Cervantes
The Stranger
Albert Camus
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry
Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
Utopia
Thomas More
Decameron
Sandro Boccaccio
The Raven
Edgar Allan Poe
Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott
The House of the Seven Gables
Nathaniel Hawthorne
My Antonia
Willa Cather
Da Vinci Code
Dan Brown
Number the Stars
Lois Lowry
The Jungle Book
Rudyard Kipling
The Tell-Tale Heart
Edgar Allan Poe
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
The Giver
Lois Lowry
The Fault in our Stars
John Green
The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien
The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
Anne of Green Gables
Lucy Maud Montgomery
The Art of War
Sun Tzu
The Little Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Necklace
Guy de Maupassant
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James
The Rape of the Lock
Alexander Pope
The Final Problem
Arthur Conan Doyle
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
Where the Wild Things Are
Maurice Sendak
Main Street
Sinclair Lewis
Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
The Tyger
William Blake
Lyrical Ballads
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx, Frederick Engles
Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
Siddhartha
Herman Hesse
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin
Harlem
Langston Hughes
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Native Son
Richard Wright
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward Albee
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tennessee Williams
Lysistrata
Aristophones
King Lear
William Shakespeare
Around the World in 80 Days
Jules Verne
The War of the Worlds
H. G. Wells
I, Robot
Isaac Asimov
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury
The Outsiders
S. E. Hinton
The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens
Mr. Popper's Penguins
Richard Atwater
Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu
The Gift of the Magi
O. Henry
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens
All Summer in a Day
Ray Bradbury
Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges
Mein Kampf
Adolf Hitler
The Jew of Malta
Christopher Marlowe
The Lottery
Shirley Jackson
Murder on the Orient Express
Agatha Christie
The Merchant of Venice
William Shakespeare
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
The Bet
Anton Chekhov
Where the Red Fern Grows
Wilson Rawls
The Prince
Niccolo Machiavelli
Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck
Call of Cthulhu
H. P. Lovecraft
A Wrinkle in Time
Madeline L'Engle
The Last of the Mohicans
James Cooper
Holes
Louis Sachar
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
Watership Down
Richard Adams
Hansel and Gretel
Brothers Grimm
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
The Dead
James Joyce
Across Five Aprils
Irene Hunt
Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank
White Fang
Jack London
Death on the Nile
Agatha Christie
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
The Chronicles of Narnia
C. S. Lewis
Dracula
Bram Stoker
The Polar Express
Chris Van Allsburg
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving
The Ugly Duckling
Hans Christian Andersen
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Victor Hugo
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne
The Phantom Tollbooth
Norton Juster
Because I could not stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
The Mysterious Benedict Society
Trenton Lee Stewart
Treasure Island
Robert Stevenson
The Snow Queen
Hans Christian Andersen
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
A Long Way from Chicago
Richard Peck
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Lemony Snicket
The Chocolate War
Robert Cormier
The Scarlet Ibis
James Hurst
The Cherry Orchard
Anton Chekhov
The Boy who Cried Wolf
Aesop
Foundation
Isaac Asimov
The Monkey's Paw
W. W. Jacobs
Divergent
Veronica Roth
The Three Sisters
Heather Morris
The Lady of Shalott
Alfred Tennyson
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
Emma
Jane Austen
Little House on the Prairie
Laura Ingalls Wilder
It
Stephen King
Unplugged
Gordon Korman
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud
The Red and the Black
Stendhal
On the Origin of Dreams
Charles Darwin
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Tom Stoppard
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Ambrose Bierce
Uncle Vanya
Anton Chekhov
Thanatopsis
William Cullen Bryant
Twilight (Series)
Stephanie Meyer
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
Howl
Allen Ginsberg
Death and the King’s Horseman
Akinwunde Oluwole Soyinka
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Yukio Mishima
Tuck Everlasting
Natalie Babbitt
Nevsky Prospekt
Nikolai Gogol
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler
And Then There Were None
Agatha Christie
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust
The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
The Queen of Spades
Alexander Pushkin
A Modest Proposal
Jonathan Swift
The Playboy of the Western World
John Millington Synge
Easter, 1916
William Yeates
Juno and the Paycock
Sean O'Casey
Rubáiyát
Omar Khayyám
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Flannery O'Connor
The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Dubois
Breakfast of Champions
Kurt Vonnegut
My Friendship with Oscar Wilde
Alfred Douglas
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
Seeing and Blindness
Jose de Sousa Saramago
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
James Thurber
The Tin Drum
Gunter Grass
Cry, The Beloved Country
Alan Paton
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
Death in Venice
Thomas Mann
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Passage to India
E. M. Forster
Hedda Gabler
Henrik Ibsen
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
T. S. Eliot
Rob Roy
Sir Walter Scott
The Library of Babel
Jorge Luis Borges
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
Out of Africa
Isak Dinesen
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Gilman
Steppenwolf
Herman Hesse
The Ransom of Red Chief
O. Henry
Arcadia
Tom Stoppard
To an Athlete Dying Young
Alfred Housman
If on a winter’s night a traveler,
Italo Calvino
White Noise
Don DeLillo
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace
Hatchet
Gary Paulsen
Ramona Quimby
Beverly Cleary
White Teeth
Zadie Smith
The Spanish Tragedy
Thomas Kyd
Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe
Volpone
Ben Jonson
The Duchess of Malfi
John Webster
The Way of the World
William Congreve
She Stoops to Conquer
Oliver Goldsmith
The Rivals
Richard Sheridan
The Game of Thrones
George. R. R. Martin
Sacred Emily
Gertrude Stein
Sons and Lovers
D. H. Lawrence
In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound
The Enormous Room
E. E. Cummings
The Bridge
Hart Crane
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Pablo Neruda
Peter Rabbitt
Beatrix Potter
The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende
The Labrynth of Solitude
Octavio Paz
The Heart of Midlothian
Sir Walter Scott
The New Colossus
Emma Lazarus
American Pastoral
Phillip Roth
Pillow Book
Sei Shonagon
Winnie the Pooh
A. A. Milne
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
Middlemarch
George Eliot
Jurrasic Park
Michael Crichton
His Dark Materials
Phillip Pullman
Charlotte's Web
E. B. White
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Howard's End
E. M. Forster
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
Bridget Jones's Diary
Helen Fielding
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
The Secret Garden
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Restart
Gordon Korman
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
Labrynths
Jorge Luis Borges
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol
Requiem
Anna Akhmatova
My Last Duchess
Robert Browning
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Luigi Pirandello
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin
Scoop
Evelyn Waugh
Lady Chatterly's Lover
D. H. Lawrence
Greyfriar's Bobby
Eleanor Atkinson
Orlando
Virginia Woolf
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells
Goosebumps (Series)
R. L. Stine
Women of the Harlem Renaissance
Marissa Constantinou
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
James Johnson
The Alchemist (1988)
Paulo Coelho
Passing
Nella Larsen
Kidnapped
Robert Stevenson
Maurice
E. M. Forster
American Psycho
Bret Ellis
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
Zone One
Colson Whitehead
Dune
Frank Herbert
Brighton Rock
Graham Greene
The Pillars of the Earth
Ken Follett
The Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer
Because of Winn-Dixie
Kate DiCamillo
The Prince and the Pauper
Mark Twain
Casino Royale
Ian Fleming
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
The Playboy of the Western World
John Synge
J'Accuse
Emile Zola
The History of the Siege of Lisbon
Jose Saramago
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
James Thurber
The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie
The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
Waverly
Walter Scott
The World According to Garp
John Irving
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith
Discworld (SERIES)
Terry Pratchet
If on a winter's night a traveler
Italo Calvino
Fences
August Wilson
Snow Country
Yasunari Kawabata
The Wizard of Oz
L. Frank Baum
Peter and Wendy
James Barrie
The Good Earth
Pearl Buck
The Danzig Trilogy
Gunter Grass
Coraline
Neil Gaiman
The Pelican Brief
John Grisham
Atonement
Ian McEwan
In Cold Blood
Truman Capote
Interview with the Vampire
Anne Rice
Don Juan
Lord Byron
Finnegan's Wake
James Joyce
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
The White Man's Burden
Rudyard Kipling
The Aleph
Jorge Luis Borges
Sonnets from the Portuguese
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Ben Hur
Lewis Wallace
The Piano Lesson
August Wilson
July's People
Nadine Gordimer
The Time of the Hero
Mario Vargas Llosa
The Libation Bearers
Aeschylus
Ragtime
E. L. Doctorow
A Red, Red Rose
Robert Burns
Miss Julie
August Strindberg
A Supermarket in California
Allen Ginsberg
The Seagull
Anton Chekhov
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers
Young Wurther
Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
Big Sur
Jack Kerouac
Cairo Trilogy
Naguib Mahfouz
Fathers and Sons
Ivan Turgenev
Blood Wedding
Federico Garcia Lorca
To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell
Endgame
Samuel Beckett
The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Paul Revere's Ride
Henry Longfellow
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton
Spoon River Anthology
Edgar Lee Masters
Night
Elie Wiesel
The Bald Soprano
Eugene Ionesco
A Personal Matter
Oe Kenzaburo
Il Canzoniere
Petrarch
The Cask of Amontillado
Edgar Allan Poe
Ode to a Grecian Urn
John Keats
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
The Chambered Nautilus
Oliver Holmes
Hard Times
Charles Dickens
Silas Marner
George Eliot
The Emporer of Ice Cream
Wallace Stevens
Ragged Dick
Horatio Alger
Richard Cory
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy
Chicago
Carl Sandburg
The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
William Shakespeare
The Dunciad
Alexander Pope
The Power and the Glory
Henry Greene
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Ernest Hemingway
Absalom and Achitophel
John Dryden
Ozymandias
Percy Shelley
The Iceman Cometh
Eugene O'Neill
Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner
The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot
Sula
Toni Morrison
The Old Curiosity Shop
Charles Dickens
Billiard at Half-Past Nine
Heinrich Boll
Hopscotch
Julio Cortazar
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Truman Capote
Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates
A Man in Full
Tom Wolfe
Herzog
Saul Bellow
Babbitt
Sinclair Lewis
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
The School for Wives
Moliere
First Fig
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Thomas De Quincey
Dover Beach
Matthew Arnold
The Shining
Stephen King
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
Carson McCullers
Persuasian
Jane Austen
Sophie's Choice
William Styron
Cat's Cradle
Kurt Vonnegut
The Frogs
Aristophones
Rabbit, Run
John Updike
Disgrace
J. M. Coetzee
Old Yeller
Fred Gipson
A Separate Peace
John Knowles
To Autumn
John Keats
The Human Comedy
Honore de Balzac
The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
The Lion and the Jewel
Akinwunde Oluwole Soyinka
Drinking Alone by Moonlight
Li Bai
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Schindler's Ark
Thomas Keneally
Young Goodman Brown
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth
The Comedy of Errors
William Shakespeare
Nicholas Nickleby
Charles Dickens
The Pearl
John Steinbeck
Medea
Euripides
The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
Light in August
William Faulkner
Mourning Becomes Electra
Eugene O'Neill
James
Percival Everett
Tender is the Night
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Wise Blood
Flannery O'Connor
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Wallace Stevens
Sometimes A Great Notion
Ken Kesey
The Misanthrope
Moliere
Blood Petals
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
The Little Foxes
Lillian Hellman
Molloy
Samuel Beckett
Ode to the West Wind
Percy Shelley
There There
Tommy Orange
O Pioneers!
Willa Cather
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
Look Homeward, Angel
Thomas Wolfe
The Invisible Man
H. G. Wells
Coming of Age in Samoa
Margaret Mead
Moll Flanders
Daniel Defoe
Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen
The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams
The Portait of a Lady
Henry James
Lady Lazarus
Sylvia Plath
A Man Without Qualities
Robert Musil
Annie Allen
Gwendolyn Brooks
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Patrick Suskind
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Laurence Sterne
Indiana
George Sand
Cannary Row
John Steinbeck
Journey to the Center of the Earth
Jules Verne
The Conversationist
Nadine Gordimer
Gitanjali
Rabindranath Tagore
Tartuffe
Moliere
The Weary Blues
Langston Hughes
The Luck of Roaring Camp
Bret Harte
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Everything That Rises Must Converge
Flannery O'Connor
The Masque of Anarchy
Percy Shelley
I Sing of Olaf Glad and Big
E. E. Cummings
Gem of the Ocean
August Wilson
The Alchemist (1610)
Ben Jonson
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17 Comments
+1
Level 77
Jun 1, 2025
Kenneth Grahame, not Grahme

Emily Dickinson, not Dickenson

There are also many spelling errors in the clues.

+1
Level 43
Jun 5, 2025
apologies, feel free to let me know if you spot any more
+1
Level 77
Aug 21, 2025
A Separate PEACE, Not Place.

The InterpEtation of Dream, not InterprItation.

+1
Level 43
Aug 21, 2025
oopsie daisy
+1
Level 45
Jul 1, 2025
Forster not forester
+1
Level 43
Jul 1, 2025
thank you
+1
Level 72
Aug 8, 2025
Kenneth Grahame has not been corrected
+1
Level 43
Aug 8, 2025
oopsie daisy
+1
Level 77
Sep 26, 2025
The Waste Land is by T.S. Eliot, not H.G. Wells. That's a careless mistake. One of too many.
+1
Level 43
Sep 27, 2025
oopsie daisy
+1
Level 60
Dec 14, 2025
It's Yeats, not Yeates (Easter, 1916)
+1
Level 43
Jan 25, 2026
oopsie daisy
+1
Level 17
Feb 28, 2026
Inferno is wrong
+1
Level 43
Mar 10, 2026
inferno is referencing "The Inferno" from Dante's The Divine Comedy
+1
Level 50
Apr 2, 2026
This is cool! Thanks for putting in so much work.
+1
Level 50
Apr 2, 2026
PS Would be amazing if it was available in smaller sections (5x100?) and yellow boxed.
+1
Level 43
Apr 4, 2026
i feel as if yellow boxed would make it significantly more difficult and not very necesary