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

2. Why does Ellison begin the speech by referring to Ernest Hemingway?
(a) Hemingway is a writer Ellison strongly identifies with.
(b) Hemingway is often misspelled and therefore hidden.
(c) The name Hemingway is a pseudonym.
(d) Hemingway once called Ellison by the wrong name, Emerson.

3. For Ellison a primary difference between Twain and Hemingway is what?
(a) Twain was an abolitionist and Hemingway was a prohibitionists.
(b) Twain was creative and Hemingway factual.
(c) Hemingway writes about his own personal myth and Twain writes about the national myth.
(d) Twain was trained in writing and Hemingway was not.

4. Why does Ellison's family live in a middle class white neighborhood in Oklahoma City?
(a) His mother, a single parent, is a custodian in an apartment building there.
(b) There is no Negro neighborhood in Oklahoma City.
(c) Ellison's father made a great deal of money in the railroad business.
(d) Ellison's family has always been well to do and had nice houses.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. What is Ellison's original career direction?

2. What does Ralph Ellison's father hope that Ralph will grow up to be?

3. What work of literature seizes Ellison's young mind early on?

4. Where is Richard Wright born?

5. Where does Ellison grow up?

Short Essay Questions

1. What was Ellison's writing process for "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke?"

2. Did Richard Wright influence Baldwin or Ellison?

3. How did a library for Negro persons emerge in Oklahoma City?

4. What does Ellison critique about the authors included in the Primer?

5. Where do Ellison and Hyman divide in their understanding of black face minstrel performance?

6. What were the two greatest influences upon Crane's life, in Ellison's estimation?

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

8. What is different about Oklahoma and the relationship of different races when compared to the South or even to Texas?

9. What is the "hidden name" Ellison is referring in the title of his speech to the Library of Congress in 1064?

10. What does Ellison find so remarkable about Crane?

(see the answer keys)

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