AL - Chapter 8
Question 3: This novel takes place in Italy during World War One and the main characters are an American ambulance driver and an English nurse. Multiple Choice: - All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque - Light in August, by William Faulkner - Parade's End, by Ford Madox Ford - A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway - The Ambassadors, by Henry James
Answer: A Farewell to Arms (1929) was Hemingway's first best-seller. It tells the story of American ambulance driver Frederic Henry and his love affair with English nurse Catherine Barkley. They meet and fall in love while Frederic is convalescing in a Milan hospital. By the time Frederic recovers and goes back to his unit, Catherine is pregnant. In the end Frederic deserts the army and he and Catherine flee to Switzerland in a rowboat. Catherine and her unborn baby die, and Frederic is left alone. The story is partially autobiographic as Hemingway was an ambulance driver in Italy during WWI.
Question 18: This author's writings include: "Death of a Salesman", " All My Sons", and " The Crucible". Multiple Choice: - Samuel Beckett - Tennessee Williams - Eugene O'Neill - Arthur Miller - Edward Albee
Answer: Arthur Miller (1915-2005) was an American playwright. His best known play is Death of a Salesman (1949). One of his least popular plays is "After the Fall" (1964), which is based on his experiences during his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
Question 10: This book is a famous biography of a Sioux holy man. It goes into great detail about his visions. Multiple Choice: - Trail of Tears, by John Ehle - Indian Givers, by Jack Weatherford - The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull, by Robert M. Utley - Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown - Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt
Answer: Black Elk Speaks (1932) is the story of the Oglala Lakota medicine man, Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950). It provides an eye witness account of the Sioux experience with American expansion into the Dakotas. Some have criticized the book because it was written by a "white man" who had to rely on translators when conducting his research.
Question 11: This novel focuses on the experiences of a young Jewish boy growing up in the slums of New York in the early twentieth century. Multiple Choice: - Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser - The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair - Henderson the Rain King, by Saul Bellow - Call it Sleep, by Henry Roth - Native Son, by Richard Wright
Answer: Call it Sleep (1934) is a coming of age novel. In 1907, David and his mother arrive in New York from Austria, and receive an unfriendly welcome from his father. The story reveals, largely through David's eyes, the difficulties that a Yiddish speaking boy has settling into New York life. Gradually, the reader learns the reason for his father's anger and hostility toward David.
Question 20: This author's writings include: "The Iceman Cometh", "Long Day's Journey Into Night", and "Anna Christie". Multiple Choice: - Eugene O'Neill - Tennessee Williams - Samuel Beckett - Arthur Miller - Edward Albee
Answer: Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) was an American playwright. His play's are known for tragedy, personal pessimism, and for using realism. His most famous play, "The Iceman Cometh" (1939), takes place in a bar and the characters are a group of prostitutes and dead end alcoholics. O'Neill won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama multiple times.
Question 12: The late 1920s were an age of islands, real and metaphorical. They were an age when Americans by thousands and tens of thousands were scheming to take the next boat for the South Seas or the West Indies, or better still for Paris, from which they could scatter to Majorca, Corsica, Capri or the isles of Greece. Paris itself was a modern city that seemed islanded in the past, and there were island countries, like Mexico, where Americans could feel that they had escaped from everything that oppressed them in a business civilization. Or without leaving home they could build themselves private islands of art or philosophy; or else - and this was a frequent solution - they could create social islands in the shadow of the skyscrapers, groups of close friends among whom they could live as unconstrainedly as in a Polynesian valley, live without moral scruples or modern conveniences, live in the pure moment, live gaily on gin and love and two lamb chops broiled over a coal fire in the grate. That was part of the Greenwich Village idea, and soon it was being copied in Boston, San Francisco, everywhere. The lines above are from which of the following: Multiple Choice: - The Floating Opera, by John Barth - This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald - Call it Sleep, by Henry Roth - The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon - Exiles Return, by Malcolm Cowley
Answer: Exiles's Return (1934) is a non-fiction book which tells the story of American writers and artists (the lost generation) who flocked to Paris following World War I. American writers who relocated to Europe after WWI include: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gertrude Stein, who had moved to Paris in 1903, is the first to use the term "lost generation" to refer to writers who were greatly influenced by WWI.
Question 5: He lay flat on the brown, pine needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight. "Is that the mill?" he asked. "Yes." "I do not remember it." "It was built since you were here. The old mill is farther down; much below the pass." He spread the photostated military map out on the forest floor and looked at it carefully. The old man looked over his shoulder. He was a short and solid old man in a black peasant's smock and gray iron-stiff trousers and he wore rope-soled shoes. He was breathing heavily from the climb and his hand rested on one of the two heavy packs they had been carrying. The lines above are from which of the following: Multiple Choice: - The Curse of Capistrano, by Johnston McCulley - Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck - Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner - For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway - The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James
Answer: For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) is a novel. The story takes place in Spain during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). The main character is Robert Jordan, an American who travels to Spain to fight on the side of the Communists against the forces of Francisco Franco.
Question 9: How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him, Shedding white rings of tumult, building high Over the chained bay waters Liberty -- Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that cross Some page of figures to be filed away; -- Till elevators drop us from our day ... The lines above are from which of the following: Multiple Choice: - O Captain! My Captain!, by Walt Whitman - Howl, by Allen Ginsberg - The Bridge, by Hart Crane - The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot - Richard Cory, by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Answer: Hart Crane (1899-1932) was an American modernist poet. The Bridge (1930) was inspired by New York's Brooklyn Bridge. Other poems by this poet include: For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen, and Voyages.
Question 15: This author's writings include: "Of Mice and Men", "The Grapes of Wrath", and "East of Eden". Multiple Choice: - George Orwell - John Steinbeck - William Faulkner - Ernest Hemingway - Tennessee Williams
Answer: John Steinbeck (1902-1968) was an American writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction. Altogether he wrote 27 books and won a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. One of his most famous works, Of Mice and Men (1937), is a novella and takes place in California during the Great Depression.
Question 16: This non-fiction book presents an in-depth exploration of the lives of three tenant farming families during the Great Depression. Multiple Choice: - The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck - Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans - To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee - And Their Children After Them, by by Dale Maharidge - The Other America: Poverty in the United States, by Michael Harrington
Answer: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939) -- Agee (a journalist) and Evans (a photographer) spent four weeks living with three white sharecropping families, immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Walker Evans's compelling photos of depression-era sharecroppers, reinforce James Agee's words.
Question 4: A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world. Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas. The lines above are from which of the following: Multiple Choice: - The Bostonians, by Henry James - The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler - Babbit, by Sinclair Lewis - Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe
Answer: Look Homeward, Angel (1929) is a coming of age novel by Thomas Wolfe. It is believed to be autobiographical and that the character Eugene Gant is based on Wolfe himself. This novel presents the story of a young man growing up in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina during the early part of the 20th century. The setting Altamont, Catawba, is a fictionalization of Wolfe's home town, Asheville, North Carolina.
Question 17: A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan Mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees-willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter's flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of 'coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark. The lines above are from which of the following: Multiple Choice: - Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner - To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee - Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck - For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, by Edward Albee
Answer: Of Mice and Men (1937) is a novella. It takes place in California and tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two unemployed migrant workers, who move from place to place in search of work during the Great Depression. They eventually find work on a ranch. Lennie is big and strong, but retarded and George looks after him. And Lennie has another problem, he likes soft things. One day when Lennie is stroking Curley's wife's hair, she starts screaming and he accidentally kills her. Other characters in this story include: Slim, Candy, Curley, and Curley's promiscuous wife.
Question 2: Characters in this work include: George Milton, Lennie Small, Candy, Slim, and Curley. Multiple Choice: - Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck - Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, by Edward Albee - The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer - The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner
Answer: Of Mice and Men (1937) is a novella. It takes place in California and tells the story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two unemployed migrant workers, who move from place to place in search of work during the Great Depression. They eventually find work on a ranch. Lennie is big and strong, but retarded and George looks after him. And Lennie has another problem, he likes soft things. One day when Lennie is stroking Curley's wife's hair, she starts screaming and he accidentally kills her. Other characters in this story include: Slim, Candy, Curley, and Curley's promiscuous wife.
Question 14: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Emma Goldman, Langston Hughes, and George Orwell all participated in which of the following: Multiple Choice: - The Korean War - Watsonville Riots - World War II - Spanish Civil War - Spanish American War
Answer: Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Nearly 3,000 Americans defied the US government to volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War, they called themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Ernest Hemingway's novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), is based on his experiences during this war.
Question 23: Characters in this work include: Amanda Wingfield, Tom Wingfield, Laura Wingfield, and Jim O'Connor. Multiple Choice: - The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner - The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer - Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, by Edward Albee - Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller - The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams
Answer: The Glass Menagerie (1944) is a play by Tennessee Williams. It gets its name from a collection of glass figurines. Laura, whose shyness caused her to drop out of high school and a subsequent secretarial course, spends most of her time with her collection of little glass animals.
Question 6: Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land--stole Sutter's land, Guerrero's land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, and possession was ownership. The Mexicans were weak and fled. They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land. Then, with time, the squatters were no longer squatters, but owners; and their children grew up and had children on the land. And the hunger was gone from them, the feral hunger, the gnawing, tearing hunger for land, for water and earth and the good sky over it, for the green thrusting grass, for the swelling roots. They had these things so completely that they did not know about them any more. They had no more the stomach-tearing lust for a rich acre and a shining blade to plow it, for seed and a windmill beating its wings in the air. They arose in the dark no more to hear the sleepy birds' first chittering, and the morning wind around the house while they waited for the first light to go out to the dear acres. The lines above are from which of the following: Multiple Choice: - The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck - The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O'Neill - The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner - A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams - The Crucible, by Arthur Miller
Answer: The Grapes of Wrath (1939), takes place during the Great Depression, the novel's main characters are the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by bank foreclosures, drought, and economic hardship. Characters include: Tom Joad, Casy, Ma Joad, Pa Joad, and John Amca.
Question 22: HICKEY. [suddenly bursts out] I've got to tell you! Your being the way you are now gets my goat! It's all wrong! It puts things in my mind -- about myself. It makes me think, if I got balled up about you, how do I know I wasn't balled up about myself? And that's plain damned foolishness. When you know the story of me and Evelyn, you'll see there wasn't any other possible way out of it, for her sake. Only I've got to start way back at the beginning or you won't understand. [He starts his story, his tone again becomes musingly reminiscent.] You see, even as a kid I was always restless. I had to keep on the go. You've heard the old saying, "Ministers' sons are sons of guns." Well, that was me, and then some. Home was like a jail. I didn't fall for the religious bunk. Listening to my old man whooping up hell fire and scaring those Hoosier suckers into shelling out their dough only handed me a laugh, although I had to hand it to him, the way he sold them nothing for something. I guess I take after him, and that's what makes me a good salesman. The lines above are from which of the following: Answers: Explanation: Multiple Choice: - The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O'Neill - The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner - Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller - The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck - A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams
Answer: The Iceman Cometh (1939) is a play by Eugene O'Neill and the setting is Harry Hope's saloon in 1912. Theodore Hickman, the main character, is a traveling salesman who visits the bar once a year and buys free drinks for the other patrons (a bunch of burned out alcoholics and prostitutes). But this year, "Hickey" has given up drinking and tries to convince the other characters to join him in his sobriety. Other characters include: Willie Oban, Pat McGloin, Ed Mosher, Jimmy Tomorrow, Rocky, and Hugo Kalmar.
Question 8: Characters in this work include: Theodore Hickman (Hickey), Harry Hope, Ed Mosher, Captain Cecil Lewis, and Jimmy Tomorrow. Multiple Choice: - A Streetcar Named Desire, by Tennessee Williams - The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O'Neill - The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck - The Crucible, by Arthur Miller - The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner
Answer: The Iceman Cometh (1939) is a play by Eugene O'Neill and the setting is Harry Hope's saloon in 1912. Theodore Hickman, the main character, is a traveling salesman who visits the bar once a year and buys free drinks for the other patrons (a bunch of burned out alcoholics and prostitutes). But this year, Hickey has given up drinking and tries to convince the other characters to join him in his sobriety.
Question 21: They sat on the Terrace and many of the fishermen made fun of the old man and he was not angry. Others, of the older fishermen, looked at him and were sad. But they did not show it and they spoke politely about the current and the depths they had drifted their lines at and the steady good weather and of what they had seen. The successful fishermen of that day were already in and had butchered their marlin out and carried them laid full length across two planks, with two men staggering at the end of each plank, to the fish house where they waited for the ice truck to carry them to the market in Havana. Those who had caught sharks had taken them to the shark factory on the other side of the cove where they were hoisted on a block and tackle, their livers removed, their fins cut off and their hides skinned out and their flesh cut into strips for salting. The lines above are from which of the following: Multiple Choice: - The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner - The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway - The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams - The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James
Answer: The Old Man and the Sea (1951) is a novella, and is the last of Hemingway's books to be published in his lifetime. The main character is Santiago, a poor, aging fisherman who has gone for 84 days without catching any fish. Other characters in this work include: Manolin, Joe DiMaggio, Perico, and Martin.
Question 7: Characters in this work include: Jason Compson III , Caroline Bascomb Compson, Quentin Compson III , and Dilsey Gibson. Multiple Choice: - The Golden Bowl, by Henry James - The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O'Neill - The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck - The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner - The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
Answer: The Sound and The Fury (1929) is noted for its use of stream of consciousness narration. This Southern Gothic novel focuses on Compson family, former Southern aristocrats who are struggling to deal with the dissolution of their family and its reputation. It takes place in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha county.
Question 1: Characters in this work include: Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn, and Romero. Multiple Choice: - The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles - The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway - The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner - Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather - An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
Answer: The Sun Also Rises (1926) is a modernist novel about a group of American and British expatriates who travel from Paris, France to Pamplona, Spain to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights.
Question 13: All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. The line above is from which of the following: Multiple Choice: - Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, by Stephen Crane - The Crucible, by Arthur Miller - Green Hills of Africa, by Ernest Hemingway - Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis - Howards End, by E.M. Forster
Answer: The famous quote is taken from "Green Hills of Africa" (1935). This book presents a nonfiction account of a safari Hemingway took in East Africa with his wife in 1933.
Question 19: "Aw, woman, stop dat talk 'bout conjure. Tain't so nohow. Ah doan want Jawn tuh git dat foolishness in him. " "Cose you allus tries tuh know mo' than me, but Ah ain't so ign'rant. Ah knows a heap mahself. Many and many's the people been drove outa their senses by conjuration, or rid tuh deat' by witches." "Ah keep on telling yuh, woman, tain's so. B'lieve it all you wants tuh, but dontcha tell mah son none of it." The lines above are from which of the following: Multiple Choice: - Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Hurston - The Sound and The Fury, by William Faulkner - Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain - The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Answer: Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was an African American author and is associated with the Harlem Renaissance. She is best known for her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God written in 1937. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston was known for her ability to write in the dialect of the rural South.
