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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 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 need for love.
(c) A psychological wound.
(d) A tendency to drink.

2. Gardner suggests the young writer get a first-rate freshman composition book such as An American Rhetoric by whom?
(a) Michael A. Morris.
(b) W. W. Watt.
(c) James A. Richards.
(d) Stuart Waterman.

3. Which philosopher maintained that nothing a writer writes means anything, "all the words are a lunatic blithering," since all language is by nature false and misleading?
(a) Heidegger.
(b) Kant.
(c) Nietzsche.
(d) Plato.

4. Which title does Raymond Carver say is the only one he recalls of John Gardner's manuscripts in the Forward?
(a) Grendel.
(b) The King's Indian.
(c) Nickel Mountain.
(d) The Life and Times of Chaucer.

5. In Chapter 1, Gardner states that "In a literary culture where the very notion of a 'masterpiece' is commonly thought" what?
(a) Dangerous.
(b) Impossible.
(c) Immature.
(d) Barbaric.

Short Answer Questions

1. What book was Gardner writing when he remembered the altered sense coming over him while in the last chapter?

2. Gardner states in Chapter 1 that Canterbury Tales is a disguised what?

3. What magazine does Gardner suggest for good literary work in Chapter 1?

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

5. What word does Gardner use to mean a phrase is worn out and overused?

(see the answer key)

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