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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 of Over the Edge does Gardner cite in Chapter 1?
(a) Franz Kafka.
(b) James Joyce.
(c) Harlan Ellison.
(d) Kurt Vonnegut.

2. What does Gardner state in Chapter 1 that we call a writer who cares more for language than the other elements of fiction?
(a) Tedious.
(b) Bad.
(c) Mannered.
(d) Stylized.

3. Where did Raymond Carver move to Chico, California from?
(a) Arkansas.
(b) Wyoming.
(c) Connecticut.
(d) Washington.

4. Gardner notes in Chapter 1 that all writing requires some measure of a ____ state.
(a) Confident.
(b) Brave.
(c) Fearful.
(d) Trance.

5. To whose poetry and prose had Gardner made allusions to in the novel Grendel?
(a) Lord Byron.
(b) William Blake.
(c) Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
(d) Percy Shelley.

Short Answer 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?

2. Who wrote Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy?

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

4. What does Gardner say we call a writer who has less feeling for his characters than we feel they deserve?

5. Gardner claims he has been happy writing since the age of what?

(see the answer key)

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