Can You Name All 35 Famous Works of Literature From a Description?

“Don Quixote,” published in 1605, may be the most famous book that not many people read. The nobleman-knight, Don Quixote, famously jousts with windmills, imagining them to be giants. Since the late 18th century, idealistic and impractical acts of chivalry have been called “quixotic.”

The events of “Animal Farm” stand as an allegory for pre-Soviet Russia and the build-up to the Russian Revolution in ways that mystify high school students everywhere, who nonetheless are tested on the parallels. George Orwell wrote the book during World War II, looking back on his formative experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” brought the country’s attention to the catastrophe unfolding as a result of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. He wrote the thick book in just five months, as if it came to him in a vision.

Nathanial Hawthorne’s ”The Scarlet Letter” unmasked the hypocrisy of Puritanical society and created a clear image for a timeless Halloween costume. His son, Julian, reviewed the work with these words of praise: “The reader may choose his depth according to his inches but only a tall man will touch the bottom.”

Aristotle referred to “Oedipus Rex” multiple times as he defined what makes a great tragedy. Freud used to the play to exemplify his theory of the family drama, which he saw as the unconscious desire of children for their parents. What would Sophocles have made of that interpretation?

Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” teaches a great majority of American schoolchildren about how racism impacts the American criminal justice system. The book portrays Atticus Finch, the lead character Scout’s father, as a paragon of virtue, trying hard to see justice win but failing to be able to achieve it. Racism continues to make the U.S. criminal justice system more dangerous for indigenous and Black people than those who identify as white.

“Call Me Ishmael,” the three words that open “Moby Dick,” stand as some of the most iconic words in literary history. The words begin the epic adventure tale by drawing the reader into a private conversation with Ishmael. As the conversation progresses, readers find that Ishmael and Ahab search not only for the whale but for the meaning that lies in the depths.

Good old Gregor Samsa, the narrator of Franz Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis,” brings intrigue to high school English students across America. Readers of the story have vastly differing interpretations of the central fact of the story. Did he actually transform into a beetle, or is he dreaming? Is this an allegory, and if so, what for? Kafka insisted that the book would not have illustrations of Gregor to encourage such ambiguity.

In the ancient epic poem “Beowulf,” the hero — Beowulf — battles the monster Grendel, only to have to reckon with its bereaved mother. The 1000-year-old manuscript of the poem resides in the British Library. The British Library notes that Beowulf is not the only work contained in the manuscript; it shares space with a homily on St. Christopher, among other texts.

“The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Oscar Wilde’s sole novel, propounds the life philosophy of art for art’s sake that Wilde is known for. It also shows its dark side. Would you trade the beauty of your soul in order to keep the beauty of your face?

Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has had dramatic influence beyond the atmosphere of Earth. Three of Uranus’ moons bear the names of characters from the play: Oberon, Titania, and Puck.

In “The Odyssey,” Odysseus strives to get home after the Trojan War. For a full decade, the gods prevent him from reaching his beloved Penelope on Ithaca. One of the obstacles on his way, Scylla and Charybdis, form the original rock and a hard place.

The inner turmoil of Raskolnikov, the main character of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” blazes the trail of psychological exploration that takes off in 20th-century literature. Fyodor Dostoevsky perhaps had a close example of inner turmoil to work with. His own biography reads like a psychological thriller, including being in exile in Siberia, sentenced to death by firing squad and pardoned at the last minute.

Jean Valjean, the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” has his life turned around by an encounter with a merciful priest. The book counts 1400 pages in English. See if you can make it past the Battle of Waterloo.

The novel “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens follows Pip on a tumultuous path through life to his happy ending. However, Charles Dickens had originally written another ending that was much bleaker and more ambiguous. Another novelist convinced him to rewrite it.

When Abraham Lincoln met Harriett Beecher Stowe, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” he reportedly said, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." The book brought attention to the cruelty of slavery and the humanity of slaves and stoked the fires of the abolitionist cause. It was the bestselling book of the 19th century.

The most famous line in “Hamlet” has always been: “To be or not to be, that is the question.” This is an existential contemplation of whether it would be better to remain in the world with the tumult it holds or to take leave of it. While the line is so familiar it has become a cliche, the context of the soliloquy situates this question within the great conundrum of human life: how to live with the certainty of death and the uncertainty of what follows it?

The Spanish bullfight, at the center of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” fascinated Hemingway. The beauty and tragedy compelled Hemingway into the complex drama enacted between the bull and the matador.

Most readers think of “War and Peace” work as a novel, though Tolstoy himself had quibbles with that designation. The book mixes genres of history, fiction, and philosophy and defied conventions of the time. It’s length defies conventions of our time, at 1225 pages. It’s a war to get through, but will it bring peace?

Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” has been heralded as a protofeminist novel. When the protagonist Jane falls in love and is wounded by her love’s two-sided nature, she finds the strength within herself to remain independent.

Francis Ford Coppola adapted Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” to the context of the Vietnam War in “Apocalypse Now.” The film controversially shows a water buffalo actually being sacrficially killed. According to IMBD, the Ifugao people sacrificed the bull “for their own (ritual) purposes,” and the film crew merely filmed it happening.

Edna Pontnellier, of Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening,” finds a drastic resolution to what she perceives as the oppressive bounds of her life. Readers have variously found the ending empowering, catastrophic, and shameful.

Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” has been compared to the transcendalist musings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The book won her a Pulitzer Prize at a mere 29 years of age.

The New Yorker commentary on “The Bell Jar” (quoted above) notes that this work of fiction hauntingly parallels Sylvia Plath's life, blurring the lines between fiction and memoir. The book was originally published just a month before the author’s suicide.

Kurt Vonnegut survived the allied bombing of Dresden in a slaughterhouse 60 feet underground. By the time he and his fellow POWs surfaced, as many as 25,000 people had been killed. It took Vonnegut 25 years to begin writing about the experience through the perspective of Billy Pilgrim in “Slaughterhouse Five.”

In “Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman declares “I am large, I contain multitudes.” The collection of poetry was first published in 1855, but the poet continued to revisit and revise the poems throughout his lifetime. The speaker of the poems embraces the fluidity and complexity of the self, acknowledging, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.”

The father of the female protagonist in Anthony Doerr's “All the Light We Cannot See” fabricates a perfect miniature copy of their city for her to memorize, in order for her to gain confidence in her explorations of the city. The concept of building small and accurate copies becomes a hinge in this intricate narrative. The story is so deeply suspenseful and shockingly beautiful that by the end you may be weeping into your drink while "Claire de Lune" plays.

Though she hails from a well-established family, Elizabeth Bennet, of “Pride and Prejudice,” would not be wealthy once her father died. Her financial security depended wholly on her ability to marry well. Jane Austen knew this pressure from experience. At 20 she was separated from a love interest because she did not have the social rank to suit him.

The story of Janie Crawford, in “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” draws in readers with its compelling colloquial African-American speech from Florida in the 1930s. Despite her wide recognition today, the author, Zora Neale Hurston, died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, “Beloved,” haunts readers both with its eerie and graphic tale and also with the reality of the history that it reckons with. The Pulitzer Prize-winning book is a study in memory and trauma, as Sethe, the main character, struggles to live with her “re-memory” as past events replay in her mind.

When James Joyce’s “Ulysses” hit book stands in 1918, it scandalized the masses. The book defied literary conventions and upturned common decency. Censors at the time, according to New York Times’ reviewers Charles McGrath and Rivka Galchen, worried that the book would it disrupt the “very fabric of civilization.”

Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man” evokes the experience of the unnamed narrator as he awakens to the dominant white culture’s inability to see him because of his blackness. He moves through dfferent modes of relating to white culture and trying to adapt himself to its norms, before he comes to an elated embrace of his invisibility.

Written in just two weeks, “The Alchemist” has been a source of spiritual inspiration for countless pilgrims. On the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, a spirituality devoted to “The Alchemist” has evolved.

“The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” by Gertrude Stein plays with the idea of what constitutes the story of a self. Tellingly, the so-called autobiography of Alice focuses primarily on Stein's brilliance.

Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” delves into the cavernous depths of mind, perception and memory, even in the mundane experiences of getting ready for a party and taking a walk in the park. The characters Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith live parallel lives facing the impossibility of realizing desire.