Are you ready for the answers to last week’s Children’s Author Trivia?
Question 1. (easy) This author’s most famous work is about her own family life, with herself and her three sisters as characters. Can you name the author and the book?
As Karen correctly surmised, this was referring to Louisa May Alcott’s book Little Women.
Question 2. (moderately difficult) What children’s author found the books she had donated to her son’s school had been banned from the shelves?
Although she said she didn’t have a clue, Karen nailed this one too. The book that was banned after she donated it was Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Question 3. And finally, here’s a tricky one: What author typed the manuscript for her most famous book on a typewriter with a faulty w, and had to fill all the w’s in by hand?
Okay, this was the ultimate in trivia. The author with the faulty typewriter is Lucy Maud Montgomery and the manuscript she completed was for Anne of Green Gables. (Can you imagine what it must have been like to put together a manuscript in the days before wordprocessing?)
How well do you know your children’s book authors? Want to try your hand at some new questions?
Question 4. What author was inspired to write is book about an island when he made a map of an imaginary island to entertain his stepson? He said, “It was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured…as I pored upon my map of …the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods;…”
Question 5. This beloved children’s author produced many detailed watercolor illustrations of fungi early in her career and would have considered a career in science if she hadn’t been discouraged by others. Who was this budding mycologist turned author?
Question 6. Who spent her early childhood in China and four years in Japan, before taking up writing? (Two of her books were given Newbery Awards.)
Edit: The answers are now up.