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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 3, Publication and Survival.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is the name of the writer's conference where Gardner has frequently worked with writing assistants?
(a) Silver Mountain.
(b) Last Dinner.
(c) Peabody.
(d) Bread Loaf.

2. Which is one of the great graduate programs for writers that Gardner refers to in Chapter 2?
(a) NYU.
(b) Carnegie Mellon.
(c) Oxford.
(d) Stanford.

3. Who wrote Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy?
(a) Theodore Dreiser.
(b) Ernest Hemingway.
(c) William Faulkner.
(d) Raymond Carver.

4. 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) Nietzsche.
(b) Plato.
(c) Socrates.
(d) Kierkegaard.

5. Which writer, although thought of as a solitary genius, spent time working in close community with Ford Maddox Ford?
(a) Henry James.
(b) Ernest Hemingway.
(c) Stephen Crane.
(d) Joseph Conrad.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who wrote Bartelby the Scrivener?

2. The main commitment of famous writers as teachers is what?

3. What publishing house did Gardner send Grendel to first?

4. Of which writer does Gardner say, "the brilliant language with which he describes a minor character cannot help but suggest that the words he chooses are more important to him than the token secretary behind the desk"?

5. To whose poetry and prose had Gardner made allusions to in the novel Grendel?

(see the answer key)

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