Authors by debut book
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Order these authors by the year their first book was published. Drag or tap it onto the line
Authors
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Authors
Authors by debut book
Order these authors by the year their first book was published. You place all 24 cards on one timeline, one at a time. Three wrong guesses ends the run.
24
Cards
3
Lives per run
release years and dates
Ordered by
Cards only
Card reveal
How the authors by debut book timeline works
Every card names a writer, with the title of their first book printed underneath, and you order the writers by the year that debut was published. One writer starts on the timeline, debut year in view. Each new card goes into a gap you choose among those already placed. Choose well and the year appears; a wrong call moves the writer to their true place and takes one of your three lives.
The writers range from Regency and Victorian novelists and the Russian masters through the modernists and genre pioneers to contemporary names. Keep in mind you're dating a first book, not a masterpiece: many famous authors published something modest well before the work that made them. The debut title on the card is the clue to lean on. Writers whose lives overlapped but who started at different ages are where it gets tricky.
Want a longer game? On the deck tree you can tick this deck alongside any other one measured in release years and dates, and they shuffle into a single timeline together.
What's in the deck
Here are 24 of the 24 cards you might be dealt. Their values stay hidden until you place them.
- Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility
- Charles Dickens The Pickwick Papers
- Fyodor Dostoevsky Poor Folk
- Leo Tolstoy Childhood
- Mark Twain The Innocents Abroad
- Arthur Conan Doyle A Study in Scarlet
- H.G. Wells The Time Machine
- Virginia Woolf The Voyage Out
- F. Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise
- Agatha Christie The Mysterious Affair at Styles
- Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises
- George Orwell Down and Out in Paris and London
- J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit
- Ray Bradbury Dark Carnival
- Isaac Asimov Pebble in the Sky
- Kurt Vonnegut Player Piano
- Gabriel García Márquez Leaf Storm
- Cormac McCarthy The Orchard Keeper
- Margaret Atwood The Edible Woman
- Toni Morrison The Bluest Eye
- Stephen King Carrie
- Haruki Murakami Hear the Wind Sing
- J.K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
- Zadie Smith White Teeth
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