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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through 5-9.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How did Gene the magistrate handle an overzealous Methodist clergyman?
(a) Gene had policemen follow the clergyman wherever he went.
(b) Gene created trumped-up charges to render him no longer a problem.
(c) Gene ruled that the clergyman was within his rights to practice in the Jewish ghetto.
(d) Gene ruled that religion was essential to the functioning of a democracy.

2. Which decade, according to the author, was Mencken at his best?
(a) The 1910s.
(b) The 1920s.
(c) The 1940s.
(d) The 1930s.

3. Charlie the policeman was charged with which task, in "Recollections of Notable Cops"?
(a) Finding and arresting at least a dozen drunkards every shift.
(b) Organizing the annual policeman's ball.
(c) Recruiting craftsmen to refurbish the jail.
(d) Investigating a serial pursesnatcher.

4. What was the "last straw" that forced Mencken to quit the organization in #16?
(a) An evangelical teen in the reading room.
(b) The fact that the running track was rectangular.
(c) A painful accident with the horizontal bar.
(d) The relentless shouting of his gym teacher.

5. What was Alistair Cooke's relationship to H. L. Mencken?
(a) A political enemy.
(b) A journalist and friend.
(c) A childhood acquaintance.
(d) A poet whom Mencken greatly admires.

Short Answer Questions

1. What cheeky nickname did Mencken give Theodore Dreiser?

2. In "The Baltimore of the Eighties," why does Mencken's mother lament about a trip to the market?

3. In which city did Mencken grow up?

4. In "Gore in the Caribees," what was Mencken's perspective on the revolution in Cuba?

5. Why was Theodore Dreiser compared to Franz Schubert by Mencken?

(see the answer key)

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