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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Part 1, The Seer and the Seen, Section 5.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Ellison say the greatest difficulty for the Negro writer is?
(a) Find a subject worthy of his time and effort.
(b) Get someone to publish him because most of the publishers were white.
(c) Reveal what he truly feels rather than serving up what Negroes are supposed to feel.
(d) Capture the Negro speech idiom and put it down on paper.

2. Why do Crane and his wife move to England?
(a) He was wanted for several crimes.
(b) To escape rumors that she was an ex-madam.
(c) It was more civilized.
(d) It was more exotic to Crane than New York.

3. Other white cultures have black face type entertainment, but what is different about American black face?
(a) The American history of inclusive entertainment makes it acceptable.
(b) American black face is always light and fun.
(c) American black face is performed by Negro actors only.
(d) The American history of slavery makes it a "ritual of exorcism."

4. As a child what do Ellison and his boyhood friends believe they are to do?
(a) Be whoever they would and could be.
(b) They were doomed to hard manual labor and suffering.
(c) Negros could never equal the lives of white Americans.
(d) Negros had no chance of doing anything interesting in life.

5. Where is Richard Wright born?
(a) In a log cabin located in the heart of Nebraska.
(b) On a train as it traveled from Georgia to Maine.
(c) In the New York City Negro hospital
(d) On a Mississippi plantation.

Short Answer Questions

1. How many children are in Stephen Crane's birth family?

2. What does Falkner understand about racial social code of the South?

3. Why does Ellison's family live in a middle class white neighborhood in Oklahoma City?

4. Why does Oklahoma hold some freedom and equality for Negroes at the time Ellison lived there?

5. How does Ellison describe Wright's autobiography "Black Boy?"

(see the answer key)

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