The Starbucks coffee chain is named after a character in what classic novel? A - The Great Gatsby
B - Lord of the Rings
C - Moby-Dick
D - The Scarlet Letter
Answer: C - Moby-Dick According to Starbucks co-founder Gordon Bowker, an advertising colleague once told him that names that began with “st” work well. And when Bowker and co-founder Zev Siegl were brainstorming names for their new coffee store, Bowker happened to look at an old mining map that showed a town named Starbo in Washington state. That, in turn, made him think of the first mate on the narrator’s whaling ship in “Moby-Dick”: Starbuck. But “Moby-Dick” has nothing to do with coffee. In Herman Melville’s classic novel, the word “coffee” only appears five times, and none of the mentions refer anyone drinking it. Regardless, the Starbucks website explains that the name “evoked the romance of the high seas and the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.” Before settling on “Starbucks,” Bowker and Siegel considered another Moby-Dick name-check — the name of the whaling ship itself. But as one person allegedly objected at the time, “No one's going to drink a cup of Pee-quod!”