Test your literary knowledge by matching the opening lines below with the titles of the works that follow.

1. Mother died today.  Or maybe it was yesterday, I don’t know.
2. Call me Ishmael.
3. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
4. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like…
5. All this happened, more or less.
6. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.
7. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
8. When he was thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.
9. It was love at first sight.
10. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

A. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
B. Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome
C. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
D. George Orwell’s 1984
E. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
F. Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities
G. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick
H. Albert Camus’ The Stranger
I. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five
J. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

(Answers below)

1. H     2. G     3. D     4. C     5. I     6. B     7. J     8. E     9. A     10. F