Mark Twain Quiz
Tom, Huck, a jumping frog and a comet: 15 questions on the father of American literature.
In which Twain novel does a boy trick his friends into paying him for the privilege of whitewashing a fence?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Tom Sawyer, punished by Aunt Polly with whitewashing thirty yards of fence on a Saturday, pretends the job is a treat and ends up with a pile of traded treasures while other boys do the work. It is the most famous scene in the 1876 novel.
Twain drew the Tom Sawyer scrapes from his own boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, and the fence outside his childhood home is still there for visitors to see.
Which river carries Huck and Jim on their raft in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
The Mississippi
Huck and the runaway slave Jim drift south down the Mississippi on a raft, meaning to turn up the Ohio toward the free states but missing the junction in the fog. The river is both the novel's road and its refuge from the cruelty on shore.
Ernest Hemingway wrote that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
In which state did Twain grow up, in the river town of Hannibal?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Missouri
Twain was born in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, in 1835 and moved to Hannibal on the Mississippi at four. Hannibal became St. Petersburg, the setting for Tom Sawyer and the opening of Huckleberry Finn.
Missouri was a slave state, and Twain later wrote that as a boy he never heard slavery questioned from the pulpit or anywhere else.
What is the name of the enslaved man who escapes down the river with Huck in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Jim
Jim runs away from Miss Watson after overhearing that she plans to sell him down river to New Orleans, and he and Huck become companions on the raft. Huck's decision to help him, and go to hell for it, is the moral heart of the book.
Percival Everett's 2024 novel James retold the story from Jim's point of view and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The pen name Mark Twain was borrowed from a call used in which job?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Riverboat pilot
On the Mississippi a leadsman measuring the depth would call out mark twain when the line showed two fathoms, or twelve feet (3.7 metres), which was safe water for a steamboat. Twain had earned his pilot's licence in 1859.
He first signed the name to a newspaper piece in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1863, and later said he took it from an old pilot named Isaiah Sellers.
What is the name of the judge's daughter whom Tom Sawyer falls for and gets lost with in McDougal's Cave?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Becky Thatcher
Becky Thatcher, daughter of Judge Thatcher, is Tom's sweetheart in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the two are lost for days in the cave where Injun Joe is hiding. Tom finds a way out and later leads a search for the treasure.
Becky was modelled on Laura Hawkins, a girl who lived across the street from the Clemens family in Hannibal.
Which 1865 short story about a frog named Dan'l Webster first made Twain famous across America?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
The tall tale of Jim Smiley's champion jumping frog, who loses a bet after a stranger fills him with quail shot, appeared in a New York paper in November 1865 and was reprinted nationwide. It was the title story of Twain's first book in 1867.
Angels Camp in California, where Twain heard the story in a mining camp bar, still holds a Jumping Frog Jubilee every May.
Twain was born in 1835 and died in 1910, both years marked by the appearance of which object in the sky?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Halley's Comet
Twain was born two weeks after Halley's Comet reached its closest point to the Sun in November 1835, and he died on 21 April 1910, one day after the comet's next perihelion. In 1909 he had said he fully expected to go out with it.
The comet returns roughly every 75 to 76 years, and its next appearance is due in 2061.
In which Connecticut city did Twain build the elaborate house where he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Hartford
The Clemens family lived in a 25 room Gothic mansion on Farmington Avenue in Hartford from 1874 to 1891, the happiest and most productive years of his life. He wrote his greatest books in the third floor billiard room.
His next door neighbour in the Nook Farm community was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
In The Prince and the Pauper, the beggar boy Tom Canty swaps places with which future English king?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Edward VI
Tom Canty trades clothes with Prince Edward, son of Henry VIII, and the two identical boys are mistaken for each other for weeks. Edward is crowned Edward VI only after proving his identity by revealing where he hid the Great Seal.
The 1881 novel was Twain's first attempt at historical fiction, and Edward VI really was crowned at nine and died at fifteen.
In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, how does Hank Morgan save himself from being burned at the stake?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
By predicting a solar eclipse
Hank, a nineteenth-century Hartford mechanic knocked back to the year 528, remembers that a total solar eclipse is due and threatens to blot out the sun unless he is freed. When the sky darkens, Arthur makes him his chief minister.
The eclipse trick was later borrowed by Hergé for Prisoners of the Sun, in which Tintin uses the same bluff to escape Inca captors.
Twain co-wrote which 1873 novel whose title became the name for the whole era of post Civil War excess in America?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
The Gilded Age
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, written with his Hartford neighbour Charles Dudley Warner, satirised land speculation and political corruption in Washington. Historians adopted its title for the whole period from the 1870s to about 1900.
It was Twain's first novel and reportedly began as a bet with the authors' wives that the two men could write a better book than the ones the women were reading.
Which 1869 account of a cruise to Europe and the Holy Land was Twain's best-selling book during his own lifetime?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
The Innocents Abroad
The Innocents Abroad grew out of newspaper letters Twain wrote on the 1867 voyage of the steamship Quaker City, the first organised pleasure cruise from America. Its irreverent view of Old World monuments outsold every other book he published while he lived.
Twain met his future wife through the trip: a fellow passenger, Charles Langdon, showed him a miniature portrait of his sister Olivia.
In which western territory did Twain fail as a silver miner and start his writing career at the Territorial Enterprise newspaper?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
Nevada
Twain went west in 1861 with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory, and tried his luck on the Comstock Lode before joining the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City in 1862. Roughing It tells the story.
He fled Nevada in 1864 after a quarrel over a hoax article nearly ended in a duel, which was illegal in the territory.
Twain lost a fortune in the 1880s and 1890s investing in what kind of invention?
Got a hunch? Pick the answer that feels right.
A typesetting machine
Twain poured around 300,000 dollars into the Paige Compositor, an automatic typesetting machine with 18,000 parts that was quickly made obsolete by the simpler Linotype. Combined with his failing publishing house, it forced him into bankruptcy in 1894.
He repaid every creditor in full by undertaking a gruelling round the world lecture tour, which he wrote up in Following the Equator.
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All Literature quizzes →About the Mark Twain Quiz
Mark Twain was born two weeks after Halley's Comet passed in 1835, predicted he would go out with it, and died the day after it returned in 1910. In between he piloted steamboats, failed as a silver miner, lost a fortune on a typesetting machine and wrote the book Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from.
These 15 questions start with the fence, the raft and the river every reader knows, then range across his pen name, his Hartford home, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee and the travel books that made him the most famous American alive. It suits anyone who loved Tom and Huck and wants to know the man behind them.
You will find 15 multiple choice questions here, each with four options. Difficulty: Medium. Most people finish in about 6 minutes, and every answer comes with a short explanation and one extra fact worth keeping.
How to play
Read the question and pick one of the four answers. The correct answer is revealed straight away with a short explanation, then press Next question to keep going. At the end you get your score out of 15 and a full review of your round. Play again any time and the questions arrive in a fresh order. There is no timer and no account.
Good to know before you play
Which Mark Twain books should I read first?
Start with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then try The Innocents Abroad or Roughing It for his funniest non-fiction and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for satire.
Why is Huckleberry Finn controversial?
It is written in dialect, uses racial slurs of its 1840s setting hundreds of times and portrays slavery frankly, so it has been both banned from and championed in American schools since the 1880s.
Where can I visit Mark Twain sites today?
His boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, his Hartford, Connecticut mansion and his grave in Elmira, New York are all open to the public, and Hannibal holds a Tom Sawyer Days festival every July.
Answer key: all 15 questions with explanations
- In which Twain novel does a boy trick his friends into paying him for the privilege of whitewashing a fence?
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer, punished by Aunt Polly with whitewashing thirty yards of fence on a Saturday, pretends the job is a treat and ends up with a pile of traded treasures while other boys do the work. It is the most famous scene in the 1876 novel. Twain drew the Tom Sawyer scrapes from his own boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, and the fence outside his childhood home is still there for visitors to see. - Which river carries Huck and Jim on their raft in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
The Mississippi Huck and the runaway slave Jim drift south down the Mississippi on a raft, meaning to turn up the Ohio toward the free states but missing the junction in the fog. The river is both the novel's road and its refuge from the cruelty on shore. Ernest Hemingway wrote that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. - In which state did Twain grow up, in the river town of Hannibal?
Missouri Twain was born in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, in 1835 and moved to Hannibal on the Mississippi at four. Hannibal became St. Petersburg, the setting for Tom Sawyer and the opening of Huckleberry Finn. Missouri was a slave state, and Twain later wrote that as a boy he never heard slavery questioned from the pulpit or anywhere else. - What is the name of the enslaved man who escapes down the river with Huck in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
Jim Jim runs away from Miss Watson after overhearing that she plans to sell him down river to New Orleans, and he and Huck become companions on the raft. Huck's decision to help him, and go to hell for it, is the moral heart of the book. Percival Everett's 2024 novel James retold the story from Jim's point of view and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. - The pen name Mark Twain was borrowed from a call used in which job?
Riverboat pilot On the Mississippi a leadsman measuring the depth would call out mark twain when the line showed two fathoms, or twelve feet (3.7 metres), which was safe water for a steamboat. Twain had earned his pilot's licence in 1859. He first signed the name to a newspaper piece in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1863, and later said he took it from an old pilot named Isaiah Sellers. - What is the name of the judge's daughter whom Tom Sawyer falls for and gets lost with in McDougal's Cave?
Becky Thatcher Becky Thatcher, daughter of Judge Thatcher, is Tom's sweetheart in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the two are lost for days in the cave where Injun Joe is hiding. Tom finds a way out and later leads a search for the treasure. Becky was modelled on Laura Hawkins, a girl who lived across the street from the Clemens family in Hannibal. - Which 1865 short story about a frog named Dan'l Webster first made Twain famous across America?
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County The tall tale of Jim Smiley's champion jumping frog, who loses a bet after a stranger fills him with quail shot, appeared in a New York paper in November 1865 and was reprinted nationwide. It was the title story of Twain's first book in 1867. Angels Camp in California, where Twain heard the story in a mining camp bar, still holds a Jumping Frog Jubilee every May. - Twain was born in 1835 and died in 1910, both years marked by the appearance of which object in the sky?
Halley's Comet Twain was born two weeks after Halley's Comet reached its closest point to the Sun in November 1835, and he died on 21 April 1910, one day after the comet's next perihelion. In 1909 he had said he fully expected to go out with it. The comet returns roughly every 75 to 76 years, and its next appearance is due in 2061. - In which Connecticut city did Twain build the elaborate house where he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn?
Hartford The Clemens family lived in a 25 room Gothic mansion on Farmington Avenue in Hartford from 1874 to 1891, the happiest and most productive years of his life. He wrote his greatest books in the third floor billiard room. His next door neighbour in the Nook Farm community was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. - In The Prince and the Pauper, the beggar boy Tom Canty swaps places with which future English king?
Edward VI Tom Canty trades clothes with Prince Edward, son of Henry VIII, and the two identical boys are mistaken for each other for weeks. Edward is crowned Edward VI only after proving his identity by revealing where he hid the Great Seal. The 1881 novel was Twain's first attempt at historical fiction, and Edward VI really was crowned at nine and died at fifteen. - In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, how does Hank Morgan save himself from being burned at the stake?
By predicting a solar eclipse Hank, a nineteenth-century Hartford mechanic knocked back to the year 528, remembers that a total solar eclipse is due and threatens to blot out the sun unless he is freed. When the sky darkens, Arthur makes him his chief minister. The eclipse trick was later borrowed by Hergé for Prisoners of the Sun, in which Tintin uses the same bluff to escape Inca captors. - Twain co-wrote which 1873 novel whose title became the name for the whole era of post Civil War excess in America?
The Gilded Age The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, written with his Hartford neighbour Charles Dudley Warner, satirised land speculation and political corruption in Washington. Historians adopted its title for the whole period from the 1870s to about 1900. It was Twain's first novel and reportedly began as a bet with the authors' wives that the two men could write a better book than the ones the women were reading. - Which 1869 account of a cruise to Europe and the Holy Land was Twain's best-selling book during his own lifetime?
The Innocents Abroad The Innocents Abroad grew out of newspaper letters Twain wrote on the 1867 voyage of the steamship Quaker City, the first organised pleasure cruise from America. Its irreverent view of Old World monuments outsold every other book he published while he lived. Twain met his future wife through the trip: a fellow passenger, Charles Langdon, showed him a miniature portrait of his sister Olivia. - In which western territory did Twain fail as a silver miner and start his writing career at the Territorial Enterprise newspaper?
Nevada Twain went west in 1861 with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory, and tried his luck on the Comstock Lode before joining the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City in 1862. Roughing It tells the story. He fled Nevada in 1864 after a quarrel over a hoax article nearly ended in a duel, which was illegal in the territory. - Twain lost a fortune in the 1880s and 1890s investing in what kind of invention?
A typesetting machine Twain poured around 300,000 dollars into the Paige Compositor, an automatic typesetting machine with 18,000 parts that was quickly made obsolete by the simpler Linotype. Combined with his failing publishing house, it forced him into bankruptcy in 1894. He repaid every creditor in full by undertaking a gruelling round the world lecture tour, which he wrote up in Following the Equator.
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