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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is it that widens Ellison's world in a dramatic way?
(a) Traveling abroad.
(b) Reading.
(c) Living with a white family.
(d) Athletics.

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

3. What does Huckleberry Finn recognize about the Negro character, Jim?
(a) Jim knows the landscape and can take Huck anywhere.
(b) Jim is not only a slave, but a human being.
(c) Jim is very ill and near death.
(d) Jim can make him lots of money if Huck will return him to his owner.

4. What assumption does Ellison start with when writing about Negro persons?
(a) They are his responsibility to explain.
(b) Men with black skins are unquestionably human.
(c) His task as a writer is to save them from the white world.
(d) Only he, as a Negro writer, can find truth and beauty in their lives.

5. What specific folk art form does "Black Boy" reflect?
(a) The blues.
(b) Folk sculpture.
(c) Modern dance.
(d) African ethnic mask making.

Short Answer Questions

1. Where and when is the essay "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" published?

2. Who is Richard Wright to Ellison?

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

4. How does Ellison describe his boyhood experience in Oklahoma?

5. Who names Ellison?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Ellison compare Wright's personal journey of blooming to?

2. What is the difference between the way Hyman and Ellison view "the darky" entertainer?

3. Ellison originally wanted to be a musician. What changed for him?

4. What does the Negro say when white America holds up twentieth century fiction and say "this is the American reality?"

5. What were some of the catastrophic events which occurred in Wright's life?

6. Why does Ellison choose to write about Faulkner?

7. When Ellison accepts the American National Book Award for "The Invisible Man" what does he say that the award is recognizing?

8. What does the phrase "beating that boy" refer to?

9. Why does Ellison consider Stephen Crane to be such a great artist?

10. In "Richard Wright's blues" how does Ellison describe the blues?

(see the answer keys)

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