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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Ellison believe writing is?
(a) A way to criticize others.
(b) Ethical instrument.
(c) Channeling of higher beings.
(d) Mindless activity.

2. What is the relationship between Ellison and Stanley Hyman?
(a) Cousins who grew up together in Oklahoma.
(b) Friends and intellectual sparing partners.
(c) Professors competing over the same university job.
(d) Writers who abhor each other's work.

3. How does Ellison start writing?
(a) His mother asks him to write the story of her life.
(b) Ellison fails to get into the jazz band he wants so he writes about it.
(c) Richard Wright asks him to review a novel for Wright's magazine.
(d) Ellison is commissioned by the New York City Opera to write a libretto.

4. Who is Richard Wright to Ellison?
(a) Source of Ellison's inspiration and success.
(b) Spiritual father who nurtured and guided Ellison's writing.
(c) Hero and the mentor of all Ellison's work.
(d) Friend for whose magazine he wrote his first book review and short story.

5. Who is Henry Bowman Otto Davis?
(a) Author of "Radios and Communication, a guide."
(b) Editor of the first magazine which published Ellison.
(c) Father of Ellison's grade school nemesis, Horatio Davis.
(d) Little white boy known as Hoolie befriended by the young Ellison.

6. How does Ellison describe the philosopher Kierkegaard in the "Stephen Crane.." essay?
(a) Household god for many contemporary novelists.
(b) Philosopher king who wrecked the castle.
(c) Pinnacle of the romantic poets of the 1950s.
(d) The keeper of Sophocles flame.

7. What does Ellison say the greatest difficulty for the Negro writer is?
(a) Capture the Negro speech idiom and put it down on paper.
(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) Find a subject worthy of his time and effort.

8. How does Ellison describe Wright's autobiography "Black Boy?"
(a) An angry young man's immoderate tale of delusion.
(b) Another failed attempt to pierce the great wall between races.
(c) A non-white intellectual's statement of his relationship with Western culture.
(d) The Negro answer to "Huckleberry Finn."

9. Who names Ellison?
(a) His parish priest.
(b) A passing stranger.
(c) His father.
(d) The midwife that delivered him.

10. What type of jug does Ellison say Howe imagines Negro people to be in?
(a) Jug of beer in which they are drowning.
(b) Heavy jug that takes two men to lift it.
(c) Steel jug waiting for a black messiah to come and blow off the cork.
(d) Empty jug with no way out.

11. Where is the essay "Stephen Crane and the Mainstream of American Fiction" published?
(a) In the Harvard Review of Literature, 1950.
(b) In the Atlantic Monthly.
(c) It was never published.
(d) As an introduction to "The Red Badge of Courage" 1960 printing.

12. Where does Ellison grow up?
(a) Oklahoma City.
(b) Dallas.
(c) New York City.
(d) New Orleans.

13. Who is Stephen Crane?
(a) A novelist born just after the Civil War.
(b) A English gentleman who has fast holdings of land, slaves and wealth.
(c) A 20th century novelist and author of "Here today, gone tomorrow."
(d) Ellison's first English professor who wrote "Black like me."

14. What does Falkner understand about racial social code of the South?
(a) Destructive to both Negro and white parts of society.
(b) It is fragile and illusionary.
(c) It will never change.
(d) Here today, gone tomorrow.

15. Why does Ellison reject the "hard-boiled" novel style of writing?
(a) Too boring for what he wants to say.
(b) Focused on detectives and criminals.
(c) Primarily a white form of writing.
(d) Full of physical violence, social cynicism and understatement.

Short Answer Questions

1. What are the three themes of "Shadow and Act" according to the Introduction?

2. What work of literature seizes Ellison's young mind early on?

3. Where might Crane have gotten information about the Civil War?

4. Why does Ellison choose to write "Invisible Man" in a non-naturalistic way?

5. Who is Irving Howe?

(see the answer keys)

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