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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 1, The Writer's Nature, Pages 34-72.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What was Gardner's first wife's name?
(a) Emily.
(b) Joan.
(c) Nora.
(d) Sarah.

2. Of which writer does Gardner say, "the brilliant language with which he describes a minor character cannot help but suggest that the words he chooses are more important to him than the token secretary behind the desk"?
(a) William Faulkner.
(b) F. Scott Fitzgerald.
(c) John Updike.
(d) Dylan Thomas.

3. Who is the author of Piers Plowman?
(a) Salinger.
(b) Langland.
(c) Miller.
(d) Joyce.

4. What does Gardner claim is helpful, if it can be kept in partial control, to keep the novelist driven?
(a) A tendency to prove himself.
(b) A psychological wound.
(c) A tendency to drink.
(d) A need for love.

5. Which author does Gardner say has a style at parties to take to the floor at any cost, telling funny stories?
(a) Stanley Elkin.
(b) Bernard Malamud.
(c) Joyce Carol Oates.
(d) Truman Capote.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Gardner say "breeds success" in Chapter 1?

2. What author does Gardner remark has a bad habit of breaking the vivid and continuous dream by pouring on the rhetoric in Chapter 1?

3. Gardner states that in the works of Shakespeare, language always serves character and what?

4. Gardner writes in Chapter 1 that when the central character is a victim there is no what?

5. In Chapter 1, Gardner states that "In a literary culture where the very notion of a 'masterpiece' is commonly thought" what?

(see the answer key)

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