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

2. 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) Plato.
(b) Kant.
(c) Heidegger.
(d) Nietzsche.

3. What is one of the philosophers who has maintained that words inevitably distance us from the brute existence, according to Gardner in Chapter 1?
(a) Plato.
(b) Nietzsche.
(c) Socrates.
(d) Kierkegaard.

4. Gardner compares Melville's Moby Dick with what in Chapter 1?
(a) To Have and Have Not.
(b) Emma.
(c) Anna Karanina.
(d) Omoo.

5. 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) Salinger.
(c) Joyce.
(d) Faulkner.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. Where had John Gardner taught before Chico State College?

3. What masterpiece of James Joyce does Gardner suggest typing out for language growth in Chapter 1?

4. What is the first thing that Gardner states a writer needs to have in Chapter 1?

5. What painter does Gardner remark in Chapter 1 never sold a painting in his life?

(see the answer key)

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