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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Where is the Lafargue Psychiatric Clinic?

2. What falls on Ellison and his wife while they sleep?

3. In "Blues People" how are the blues categorized?

4. What does the drunk of legend who lives on the corner like to yell?

5. What is the significance of printing Negro with a capital N?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Ellison say is the invisible man's discovery?

2. Where is "Minton's Playhouse" located?

3. Who does the song "They picked poor robin clean" remind Ellison of?

4. What captures the attention of many critics about "Blues People."

5. What type of food is served at Minton's?

6. What type of music does the upstairs singer practice all day?

7. Why does Ellison disagree with Jones when he says "A slave cannot be a man"?

8. What does Ellison believe is the primary American theme in both life and literature?

9. Who is Mahalia Jackson?

10. What does Ellison tell us about the matriarch, Mrs. Jackson, in "The Way It Is."

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

In "Hidden Name and Complex Fate" Ellison reveals that it was his father, who died when Ellison was three years old, who chose for him the name of a famous white poet and philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in doing so cast upon him a complex fate. What was that fate and how did it slowly reveal itself through Ellison's life? Why was it such a struggle to come to peace with? Why was it such a blessing and a curse?

Essay Topic 2

"Richard Wright's Blues" explores the history of southern Negro culture. What was the atmosphere Wright grew up in? What would he have been afraid of? Where did the violence, especially the beating and punishment from Negro parents upon their children, come from? How did this environment affect the young Wright? If he had stayed in the south would he have bloomed into the writer and thinker that he did? What did Ellison think about the chances of that happening?

Essay Topic 3

The final essay in the book was never published. It is a book review of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal who was brought in by the Carnegie Foundation to study the "Negro problem." What is Ellison's primary reaction to the book? What is positive in Myrdal's assessment? What does Ellison object to? Why do you think the review was never published?

(see the answer keys)

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