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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. Who is the author of All the King's Men?
(a) William Faulkner.
(b) Robert Penn Warren.
(c) Franz Kafka.
(d) Ernest Hemingway.

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) "Definitely yet."
(b) "You'll know in time."
(c) "God only knows."
(d) "Definitely no."

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

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

5. Of whose writing does Gardner say that no reader can doubt the impulse to capture real life, "the special quality of country-Welsh craziness"?
(a) Shakespeare.
(b) John Updike.
(c) Samuel Beckett.
(d) Dylan Thomas.

Short Answer Questions

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

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

3. What does Gardner claim is helpful, if it can be kept in partial control, to keep the novelist driven?

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

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

(see the answer key)

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