The Inheritance Games Study Guide

Jennifer Lynn Barnes was born on October 19, 1984 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After graduating high school in 2002, she attended Yale University. Between her freshman and sophomore years at Yale, she wrote Golden, a novel about a teenage girl who can perceive auras. The novel was published in 2006, the same year she graduated from Yale. She went on to graduate study at Yale, earning her PhD in 2012. During college and graduate school, she published more than half a dozen novels. She went on to become a professor of psychology and professional writing at the University of Oklahoma. In addition to her ongoing scholarship on such topics as fiction and cognition, fiction and moral judgment, and fiction and belief, she has also published many more novels as a professor—including the New York Times bestseller The Inheritance Games (2020).

The Inheritance Games is about an eccentric billionaire, Tobias Hawthorne, who unexpectedly wills almost his entire fortune to a housing-insecure high-school student named Avery Kylie Grambs. The world’s first billionaire is widely believed to be American businessman John D. Rockefeller Sr. (1839–1937), who started the Standard Oil Company in 1870; scholars estimate that by 1937—at the tail end of the Great Depression (c. 1929–1939)—he was worth approximately $1.4 billion. (Tobias Hawthorne likewise made a large amount of his money in oil.) Since 1987, Forbes magazine has published annually a list called The World’s Billionaires, detailing the names and approximate net worths of everyone in the world worth more than $1 billion. As of 2024, Forbes estimated that there were 2,781 billionaires in the world. The richest of those billionaires is Bernard Arnault, who had at the time a net worth of approximately $233 billion. (By contrast, Tobias Hawthorne is worth $46.2 billion.) Meanwhile, per the National Center for Homeless Education, more than 1 million high-school students in the U.S. alone were housing insecure (like fictional protagonist Avery Kylie Grambs) in 2020–2021, around the time The Inheritance Games was published.

The Inheritance Games (2020) is the first of a three-book series that also includes The Hawthorne Legacy (2021) and The Final Gambit (2022). In addition to this original trilogy, Jennifer Lynn Barnes has published a companion novel, The Brothers Hawthorne (2023), that retells the events of the trilogy from the perspectives of Grayson and Jameson Hawthorne. Finally, she has published a sequel to the original trilogy called The Grandest Game (2024). In The Inheritance Games, protagonist Avery Kylie Grambs and love interest Jameson Hawthorne discover a clue to the mysterious puzzle game they are solving inside Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c. 1604), also known as Faust. The play retells a German legend about a dissatisfied scholar named Faust who sells his soul to a devil in exchange for the devil’s temporary service, which Faust uses to gain forbidden knowledge and unusual experiences. The allusion to Faust in the novel may suggest that working-class protagonist Avery is a Faust figure in danger of spiritual corruption by the massive inheritance she has received, though the inheritance gives her the opportunity to access exciting and unusual experiences. Finally, The Inheritance Games is (among other things) a YA novel about income inequality and class differences, as its working-class heroine unexpectedly inherits billions of dollars from eccentric Tobias Hawthorne while Tobias’s coddled descendants are dispossessed. Other recent YA novels that deal with themes of money, class, and income inequality include Joelle Wellington’s Their Vicious Games (2023), about a scholarship student of color at a New England private school, and Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka’s Heiress Takes All (2024), about a teenage girl who plans to rob her rich father after he disinherits her.