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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. What resemblance does Morgan see in Henry Ford?

2. What does Father observe about the game of baseball as opposed to the way they played at Harvard twenty years before?

3. Where do Father and The Boy go in spite of the tension surrounding Coalhouse's being at large?

4. Why is Houdini's mothers grave covered with a mound of small stones?

5. Who does Morgan want to meet?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Sarah try to do to help Coalhouse?

2. What remarkable innovation in manufacturing took place about this time?

3. What is keeping Father busy that summer?

4. Why is Emma Goldman arrested after Coalhouse takes over the museum?

5. What does Younger Brother do that the family is completely unaware of?

6. Why does Father return alone to New York, leaving the family in Atlantic City.

7. What does Morgan think about making automobiles available to the masses?

8. What brings Younger Brother back to life after his breakup with Evelyn?

9. What does Father decide to do to make up for the time he has not spent with The Boy?

10. How does Mother's and Father's relationship change in Atlantic City?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Look up information of minstrel shows which were popular in America from the late 1800s through the 1930s. Describe them and give your opinion about them as entertainment. Even Scott Joplin performed in minstrel shows during his lifetime. Al Jolson, a Jewish man, became famous blacking his face and performing in minstrels. It was of course a demeaning representation of black people as a whole and contributed to the stereotype of the race that went on into the movies until the late 1950s. Discuss how much you think such entertainments delayed the civil rights movement in America.

Essay Topic 2

Write about how Doctorow uses The Boy and The Girl to represent change in the novel. Perhaps because he is a young boy when the novel begins wearing sailor suits and grows into the beginnings of young manhood where he discovers girls, change is most noticeable in The Boy. When they meet in Atlantic City, neither of them recall looking eye-to-eye years ago on the street in New Rochelle. Tateh first becomes aware of The Girl's maturation on the train trip out of New York. Show how this growing up process works as a good benchmark for the passing of time in the novel.

Essay Topic 3

Write a paper explaining the difference between an anarchist and a socialist. These strange bedfellows come together in the meeting Tateh takes Evelyn to. Anarchists oppose any form of government and socialists promote total government control. Explain why Tateh did not agree with anarchism or communism. Why was he a socialist? Then decide if his later affluence changed his political ideas and why.

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