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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. Who is Ellison named after?
(a) Ralph Kramden.
(b) Ralph Waldo Emerson.
(c) Ralph Winston Ellison.
(d) Ralph Roosevelt Ellison.

2. What writers does Ellison wish had been included in the "Primer for White Folks"?
(a) More Negro writers.
(b) Hispanic authors.
(c) Major, widely-read American authors.
(d) Young unknown writers.

3. What are Crane's parents like?
(a) Fundamentalist Christians.
(b) French born intellectuals.
(c) Libertine alcoholics.
(d) Marxist sympathizers.

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) Only he, as a Negro writer, can find truth and beauty in their lives.
(d) His task as a writer is to save them from the white world.

5. What does Ellison believe is the true "Negro experience?"
(a) A life of unremitting suffering and pain.
(b) There isn't one. Negro persons live diverse and varied lives.
(c) A codified, suffocating existence which cannot be understood by others.
(d) The opposite of the "white experience."

Short Answer Questions

1. What is minstrel show black face?

2. What book does Hemingway believe all modern American fiction sprang from?

3. What are the three major section of the "Primer for White Folks?"

4. How does Ellison describe the writer Malraux?

5. Who names Ellison?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why was the young Ellison drawn to reading?

2. What does the second half of the title "Hidden Names and Complex Fate" refer to?

3. As a child Ellison imagined himself as a "Renaissance man." What does that mean?

4. Though "Black Boy" presents a brutal and violent world, what else does it manage to convey about the young Wright?

5. What is the common image of the Negro in contemporary literature according to Ellison?

6. What does Ellison find so remarkable about Crane?

7. Why does Ellison choose to write about Faulkner?

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

9. What is Ellison's basic quarrel with Hyman?

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

(see the answer keys)

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