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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Which author wrote A Tale of Two Cities?
(a) Melville.
(b) Steinbeck.
(c) Bedlow.
(d) Dickens.

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

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

4. What kind of intelligence does Gardner say is important to the writer in Chapter 1?
(a) Mathematics.
(b) Storyteller's.
(c) Psychological.
(d) Philosophical.

5. What painter does Gardner remark in Chapter 1 never sold a painting in his life?
(a) Van Gogh.
(b) Matisse.
(c) Picasso.
(d) Monet.

6. Gardner notes in Chapter 1 that Mercutio's madness is fantastic and what?
(a) Unbalanced.
(b) Justified.
(c) Phantasmic.
(d) Ironic.

7. What is, according to Gardner, the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked?
(a) Strangeness.
(b) Beauty.
(c) Love.
(d) Honor.

8. Who is the author of The Turn of the Screw?
(a) James Joyce.
(b) Dylan Thomas.
(c) Henry Melville.
(d) Henry James.

9. Who wrote Finnegan's Wake?
(a) Flaubert.
(b) Joyce.
(c) Robbe-Grillet.
(d) Nabokov.

10. Where had John Gardner taught before Chico State College?
(a) DePaul University.
(b) Oberlin College.
(c) New York University.
(d) University of Ohio.

11. Who is the author of Death in Venice?
(a) Herman Melville.
(b) William Shakespeare.
(c) Clifford Odets.
(d) Thomas Mann.

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

13. Who developed the style of the "epiphany story" in The Dubliners?
(a) McKinley.
(b) Beckett.
(c) Conrad.
(d) Joyce.

14. The two things that keep the common reader turning the pages, according to Gardner are story or what?
(a) Mood.
(b) Theme.
(c) Character.
(d) Argument.

15. What is the name of the man who moves next door to his teenage daughter in Gardner's hypothetical story in Chapter 1?
(a) James.
(b) Frank.
(c) Bill.
(d) Bob.

Short Answer Questions

1. Gardner writes in Chapter 1 that when the central character is a victim there is no what?

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

3. In what novel does Gardner note the rooftop scene as being one of surprise in Chapter 1?

4. What author does Gardner remark has a bad habit of breaking the vivid and continuous dream by pouring on the rhetoric in Chapter 1?

5. 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"?

(see the answer keys)

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