Can You Match These Opening Lines to the Classic Books They Come From?

1. Which novel begins with the line, "They shoot the white girl first"?

Paradise

Beloved

The Color Purple

In Cold Blood

2. The following four classic novels were all penned by John Steinbeck - which one opens with the line, "A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green"?

East of Eden

Cannery Row

Of Mice and Men

The Grapes of Wrath

3. "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" is the first line from which of the following literary classics?

Finnegans Wake

The Good Soldier

1984

Slaughterhouse-Five

4. Which Ernest Hemingway novel opens with "In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains."?

A Farewell to Arms

The Sun Also Rises

The Old Man and the Sea

For Whom the Bell Tolls

5. Which of the following begins with the line, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"?

The Great Gatsby

Anna Karenina

Pride and Prejudice

The Age of Innocence

6. "Call me Ishmael" is the opening line from which classic work?

The Old Man and the Sea

Moby Dick

A Tale Of Two Cities

Death of a Salesman

7. Nathaniel Hawthorne penned which of the following first lines?

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it - was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.

Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst.

8. Which William Faulkner novel begins with the line, "It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man."?

The Sound and the Fury

Intruder in the Dust

As I Lay Dying

Light in August

9. "It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York," is the first line from which of the following classic novels?

Slaughterhouse-Five