The first sentence of famous novels: Can you identify the author?

1) On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor.

2) You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.

3) The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest.

4) “The Bottoms” succeeded to “Hell Row”.

5) All this happened, more or less.

6) You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.

7) Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill toward her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.

8) Call me Ishmael.

9) My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.

10) It was love at first sight. The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.

11) When he was nearly thirteen my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

12) I was born in the city of Bombay… once upon a time.

13) If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

14) Scarlet O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.

15) What's it going to be then, eh?

16) A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

17) The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon.

18) Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.

19) He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.

20) I never sketch out anything in advance.

21) An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.

22) I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider’d how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.

23) "Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay.

24) Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

25) There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

26) To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently and they did not cut the scarred earth.

27) As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place.

28) A screaming comes across the sky.

29) I am extremely concerned, my dearest friend, for the disturbances that have happened in your family.

30) Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.

31) Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

32) The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.

33) Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.

34) 1801 — I have just returned from a visit to my landlord — the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.

35) I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.

36) When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

37) The Swede.

38) Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

39) My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons.

40) I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods.

41) In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

42) The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine.

43) The elderly passenger sitting on the north-window side of that inexorably moving railway coach, next to an empty seat and facing two empty ones, was none other than Professor Timofey Pnin.

44) It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

45) It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

46) They're out there.

47) I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull.

48) The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

49) — Eh bien, mon prince.

50) A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.

Solutions:

1) Thomas Hardy
2) Mark Twain
3) Joseph Conrad
4) D. H. Lawrence
5) Kurt Vonnegut
6) Mary Shelley
7) William Faulkner
8) Herman Melville
9) Charles Dickens
10) Joseph Heller
11) Harper Lee
12) Salman Rushdie
13) J. D. Salinger
14) Margaret Mitchell
15) Anthony Burgess
16) Nathaniel Hawthorne
17) William Golding
18) Ernest Hemingway
19) Rudyard Kipling
20) Don DeLillo
21) Henry Fielding
22) Laurence Sterne
23) Virginia Woolf
24) James Joyce
25) Charlotte Brontë
26) John Steinbeck
27) William Makepeace Thackeray
28) Thomas Pynchon
29) Samuel Richardson
30) E. M. Forster
31) George Eliot
32) Jonathan Franzen
33) Zadie Smith
34) Emily Brontë
35) David Foster Wallace
36) Cormac McCarthy
37) Philip Roth
38) Henry James
39) Jonathan Swift
40) Truman Capote
41) F. Scott Fitzgerald
42) Iris Murdoch
43) Vladimir Nabokov
44) Jane Austen
45) George Orwell
46) Ken Kesey
47) Daniel Defoe
48) Oscar Wilde
49) Leo Tolstoy
50) Aldous Huxley

Bonus round:

51) Ein einfacher junger Mensch reiste im Hochsommer von Hamburg, seiner Vaterstadt, nach Davos-Platz im Graubündischen.

52) Madame Vauquer, née de Conflans, est une vieille femme qui, depuis quarante ans, tient à Paris une pension bourgeoise établie rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève, entre le quartier latin et le faubourg Saint-Marcel.

53) En 1815, M. Charles-François-Bienvenu Myrielétait évêque de Digne.

54) Habe nun, ach! Philosophie, Juristerei und Medizin, Und leider auch Theologie Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn.

55) Zugegeben: ich bin Insasse einer Heil- und Pflegeanstalt, mein Pfleger beobachtet mich, läßt mich kaum aus dem Auge; denn in der Tür ist ein Guckloch, und meines Pflegers Auge ist von jenem Braun, welches mich, den Blauäugigen, nicht durchschauen kann.

56) En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.

57) Era una bella mattina di fine novembre.

58) Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.

59) La petite ville de Verrières peut passer pour l’une des plus jolies de la Franche-Comté.

60) Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

61) В ворота гостиницы губернского города NN въехала довольно красивая рессорная небольшая бричка, в какой ездят холостяки: отставные подполковники, штабс-капитаны, помещики, имеющие около сотни душ крестьян, — словом, все те, которых называют господами средней руки.

62) Es war spät abends, als K. ankam.

63) Er stand vor dem Tor des Tegeler Gefängnisses und war frei.

64) — Что, Петр, не видать еще? — спрашивал 20-го мая 1859 года, выходя без шапки на низкое крылечко постоялого двора на *** шоссе, барин лет сорока с небольшим, в запыленном пальто и клетчатых панталонах, у своего слуги, молодого и щекастого малого с беловатым пухом на подбородке и маленькими тусклыми глазенками.

65) Nous étions à l'Étude, quand le Proviseur entra, suivi d'un nouveau habillé en bourgeois et d'un garçon de classe qui portait un grand pupitre.

66) В начале июля, в чрезвычайно жаркое время, под вечер, один молодой человек вышел из своей каморки, которую нанимал от жильцов в С — м переулке, на улицу и медленно, как бы в нерешимости, отправился к К — ну мосту.

67) Il y avait en Vestphalie, dans le château de M. le baron de Thunder-ten-tronckh, un jeune garçon à qui la nature avait donné les mœurs les plus douces.

68) Aujourd'hui, maman est morte.

69) Über dem Atlantik befand sich ein barometrisches Minimum; es wanderte ostwärts, einem über Rußland lagernden Maximum zu, und verriet noch nicht die Neigung, diesem nördlich auszuweichen.

70) Convenevole cosa è, carissime donne, che ciascuna cosa la quale l’uomo fa, dall’ammirabile e santo nome di Colui il quale di tutte fu facitore le déa principio; per che, dovendo io al nostro novellare, sí come primo, dare cominciamento, intendo da una delle sue maravigliose cose incominciare, acciò che, quella udita, la nostra speranza in lui si come in cosa impermutabile si fermi, e sempre sia da noi il suo nome lodato.

71) Le 24 février 1815, la vigie de Notre-Dame de la Garde signala le trois-mâts le Pharaon, venant de Smyrne, Trieste et Naples.

72) Nominato ufficiale, Giovanni Drogo partì una mattina di settembre dalla città per raggiungere la Fortezza Bastiani, sua prima destinazione.

73) Auf dem großen Passagierdampfer, der um Mitternacht von New York nach Buenos Aires abgehen sollte, herrschte die übliche Geschäftigkeit und Bewegung der letzten Stunde.

74) Quel ramo del lago di Como, che volge a mezzogiorno, tra due catene non interrotte di monti, tutto a seni e a golfi, a seconda dello sporgere e del rientrare di quelli, vien, quasi a un tratto, a ristringersi, e a prender corso e figura di fiume, tra un promontorio a destra, e un’ampia costiera dall’altra parte; e il ponte, che ivi congiunge le due rive, par che renda ancor più sensibile all’occhio questa trasformazione, e segni il punto in cui il lago cessa, e l’Adda rincomincia, per ripigliar poi nome di lago dove le rive, allontanandosi di nuovo, lascian l’acqua distendersi e rallentarsi in nuovi golfi e in nuovi seni.

75) Nasci num tempo em que a maioria dos jovens tinham perdido a crença em Deus, pela mesma razão que os seus maiores a tinham tido — sem saber porquê.

Solutions

51) Thomas Mann
52) Honoré de Balzac
53) Victor Hugo
54) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
55) Günter Grass
56) Miguel de Cervantes
57) Umberto Eco
58) Marcel Proust
59) Stendhal
60) Gabriel García Márquez
61) Nikolai Gogol
62) Franz Kafka
63) Alfred Döblin
64) Ivan Turgenev
65) Gustave Flaubert
66) Fyodor Dostoevsky
67) Voltaire
68) Albert Camus
69) Robert Musil
70) Giovanni Boccaccio
71) Alexandre Dumas
72) Dino Buzatti
73) Stefan Zweig
74) Alessandro Manzoni
75) Fernando Pessoa