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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 author does Gardner remark has a bad habit of breaking the vivid and continuous dream by pouring on the rhetoric in Chapter 1?
(a) Hemingway.
(b) Faulkner.
(c) Salinger.
(d) Joyce.

2. What is the honest answer to the question most young writer's ask of "Do I have what it takes to be a writer?" according to Gardner?
(a) "You'll know in time."
(b) "Definitely yet."
(c) "Definitely no."
(d) "God only knows."

3. In Chapter 1, Gardner writes that one is unable to write for everyone, "try to win the audience both of Saul Bellow and" whom?
(a) James Joyce.
(b) Charles Dickens.
(c) Stephen King.
(d) Anton Chekhov.

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

5. Gardner claims he has been happy writing since the age of what?
(a) 8.
(b) 16.
(c) 6.
(d) 12.

Short Answer Questions

1. Which title does Raymond Carver say is the only one he recalls of John Gardner's manuscripts in the Forward?

2. The two things that keep the common reader turning the pages, according to Gardner are story or what?

3. Who is one of the writers Gardner notes in Chapter 1 as having both a fine ear for language and also a fascination with the materials?

4. Who developed the style of the "epiphany story" in The Dubliners?

5. What kind of intelligence does Gardner say is important to the writer in Chapter 1?

(see the answer key)

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