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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Part 1, The Seer and the Seen, Section 6.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What are Crane's parents like?
(a) Marxist sympathizers.
(b) Libertine alcoholics.
(c) French born intellectuals.
(d) Fundamentalist Christians.

2. Why does Ellison's family live in a middle class white neighborhood in Oklahoma City?
(a) Ellison's family has always been well to do and had nice houses.
(b) Ellison's father made a great deal of money in the railroad business.
(c) There is no Negro neighborhood in Oklahoma City.
(d) His mother, a single parent, is a custodian in an apartment building there.

3. As a child what is Wright unable to distinguish between?
(a) Day and night.
(b) Right and Wrong.
(c) His fair-skinned grandmother and the white women of the town.
(d) When to be quiet and when to speak.

4. What is the relationship between Ellison and Stanley Hyman?
(a) Writers who abhor each other's work.
(b) Cousins who grew up together in Oklahoma.
(c) Professors competing over the same university job.
(d) Friends and intellectual sparing partners.

5. What is the Negro child taught to see the white man as?
(a) Wise and loyal.
(b) A being from another planet.
(c) Omniscient, omnipotent and as relentless as a Mississippi flood.
(d) Something to be ignored.

Short Answer Questions

1. Where is the essay "Richard Wright's Blues" published and when?

2. What does the phrase "to finger its jagged grain and to transcend it" refer to?

3. Who is Henry Bowman Otto Davis?

4. Why does Ellison choose to write "Invisible Man" in a non-naturalistic way?

5. Why does Ellison consider Stephen Crane a great artist?

(see the answer key)

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