I can agree as far as Lolita goes, but no amount of figuring would have led me to the author’s name, which I don’t think I ever heard in all my life.
The ones I miss are either 1) “yeah, I should have known that,” or 2) “I never would have figured that out in a million years.” I suppose there’s a third option, for things I should know but just don’t. The capital of Pakistan, or Zimbabwe, for example. I assume most Jeopardy types would know that sort of thing and I just bow to their superior knowledge base.
Honestly, I was thinking D.H. Lawrence (thinking of Lady Chatterley’s Lover), though the timing was off and “foreign-born authors” suggests someone in the US.
The word “narrator” is an essential part of the clue. AFAIK Ayn Rand only wrote one book with a first-person narrator, Anthem, and that narrator is not particularly lecherous.
Edit: and of course as @The_Other_Waldo_Pepper points, out, the “his” in the clue refers to the author, telling us it must be a male author.
For some reason I got stuck on Norman Mailer. But he was born in New Jersey, and after reading his Wikipedia I realize he wasn’t the sort of author I thought he was. I might have been thinking of Phillip Roth, but the 1950s time frame wouldn’t have worked, and he was also born in New Jersey.
I my defense, either of those guys could have been foreign-born, for all I know.
But Nabakov never entered my brain, so I was way off no matter what.
Ditto. I’m not trashing anyone for not knowing it–apparently, I’m a hopeless ignoramus for never having heard of “Banksy”–but in my own mind, knowing of a book and knowing its author go hand in hand. It seems strange to me, personally, that you could go “oh! That sounds like a reference to Lolita! But I don’t know who wrote it.”
Edit: also, Lolita is one of those recurring topics you know come up every so often on Jeopardy if you watch it often enough.
Really? I read tons of books, and I can’t remember all the authors. I didn’t get this answer either, but I also didn’t think of the title. I drew a big blank.
Yogesh Raut, the boastful three-time winner from a couple of weeks ago, posted on Facebook that Jeopardy! is overvalued in America, saying, “There never has been, and never will be, any justification for treating Jeopardy! as the Olympics of quizzing.” Of course he starts his statement by listing his quizzing accomplishments, doing nothing to convince me that he’s not a boastful ass.
Well, it’s the only quiz show that has a mass audience, so in that way it’s like the Olympics. Sure, you can watch ice skating at other times, but how many do?
The guy must have some sort of personality disorder. He’s scrubbed his Facebook page now, but he’d posted several lengthy rants about Jeopardy, how we don’t have a “healthy quizzing culture in this country,” claiming to be a victim of racism and lambasting Jeopardy for not being a force for “social justice,” mixed with petty squabbles from his personal life. On other fora, commenters have said he’s been banned from several bar trivias, and one guy who played against him once said he screamed and threw such a tantrum when his team lost that the other guy’s team asked the host to just give Yogesh’s team the win out of pity.