1. “At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring” — in what novel is this the opening sentence?
2. Billy Graham attracted his largest single-day audience — more than 1.1 million — in 1973. Where was it?
3. Which first name is more common in North Carolina than in any other state: Flake, Flay or Opie?
4. Thanks to a purchase from a Connecticut man, the Duke Homestead State Historic Site in Durham now boasts the world’s largest collection of what?
5. Accepting an honorary degree from Davidson, whence he had fled after a “miserable” freshman year, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist offered a vivid recollection: “Some say the 1940s were the period when America lost its innocence. I lost my innocence at 17, to a professional woman in a second-floor walk-up in Charlotte at the Green Hotel.” Who was he?
Answers below
1. “Cold Mountain” by Raleigh’s Charles Frazier. Published in 1997, it won the National Book Award for fiction and sold more than 1 million copies in hardback.
2. Seoul, South Korea.
3 Flake and Flay. West Virginia has a big lead in Opies.
4. Spitoons — more than 240 of them.
5. William Styron, whose experience in Charlotte would resonate in “Sophie’s Choice.”