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Which of the following writers was not an influential twentieth-century African-American novelist?
Don DeLillo is a white novelist known for works such as Underworld and White Noise.
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What is the subject of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men?
Although Warren denied them, parallels were often drawn between Louisiana governor Huey Long’s rise to political power and the life of his novel’s characters.
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Which of the following is not another work by the author of Infinite Jest?
The Corrections is a 2001 novel by Jonathan Franzen. The Broom of the System (1987), A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (1997), Consider the Lobster (2005), and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) are all works by David Foster Wallace.
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Who is the author of the short story “Cathedral”?
“Cathedral,” (1983) a story about a blind man and a husband and wife, is one of the most famous works by American writer Raymond Carver (1938-1988).
Don DeLillo wrote White Noise (1985), Saul Bellow wrote Herzog (1964), Thomas Pynchon wrote Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Thomas Wolfe wrote The Right Stuff (1979).
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To what genre does The Bushwhacked Piano belong?
The Bushwhacked Piano (1971) falls into the category of the picaresque, as it follows the comical misadventures of a central character (Nicholas Payne) through a series of farcical events.
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Who is the author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter?
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) is the first novel by American author Carson McCullers (1917-1967).
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During what decade was The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter published?
The novel, McCullers’ first, was set in the 1930s and published in 1940.
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Which of the following is another work by the author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter?
The Ballad of the Sad Café is a 1951 collection containing a novella, poems, plays, and several short stories. (The rest of these titles belong to short stories by Southern writer Flannery O’Connor.)
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The title of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter comes from a poem by which Scottish poet?
Carson McCullers’ title is taken directly from Fiona Macleod’s 1896 poem “The Lonely Hunter.” This answer gives you a helpful clue to narrow down the answer choices: The poet must be Scottish. Dylan Thomas was Welsh, W.B. Yeats was Irish, and Mary Astell was English.
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There was a contention as far as a suit (in which, piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell, that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours, by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him, that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? But who takes off his eye from a comet, when that breaks out? who bends not his ear to any bell, which upon any occasion rings? But who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?
The larger prose piece from which this passage was taken provided the title for a novel by which of the following authors?
The line "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee" appears later in this sermon and provided the title for Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Adapted from "Meditation XVII" in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall Steps in My Sicknes by John Donne (1624)
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Which of the following authors is not a Southern Gothic writer?
Hemingway was an expatriate who wrote terse, emotionally complex novels set mainly in Europe. He is not an exemplar of the Southern Gothic style, which is known for its setting of the American South and its use of macabre and grotesque events (often to provide social commentary).
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The author of Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, this Southern writer was an invalid for much of her life.
This is Flannery O’Connor, a Southern Gothic writer who suffered from lupus and is perhaps best known for short stories such as “Good Country People,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and “Parker’s Back.” Her works are deeply invested in moral and ethical questions and in probing psychological examinations of her often poor, uneducated Southern characters.
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Which of the following novels is not set during a war?
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is set during World War II, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is set during the end of World War II, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are set during World War I and the Spanish Civil War, respectively. Only Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is set during peacetime.
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This author set many of his novels in the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. Who is he?
This is William Faulkner. Yoknapatawpha comes from a Cherokee phrase and is based on real places in Mississippi, and many of his novels—such as Absalom! Absalom!, Light in August, As I Lay Dying, and _The Sound and the Fury—_are set here.
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Which American writer is famous for a novel depicting the migration and struggles of the Okies during the Dust Bowl?
This is John Steinbeck, and the novel in question is the 1939 Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning Grapes of Wrath. It is set during the Great Depression and centers on a family of indigent tenant farmers who move from Oklahoma to California.
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Which of these writers is known for his dark, brooding western novels and polysyndetic sentence style?
This is Cormac McCarthy, whose novels include All the Pretty Horses, Blood Meridian, The Road, and No Country For Old Men. His work often features apocalyptic settings, largely male casts, and dialogues of untranslated Spanish.
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This 1958 novel features a storyline about an adult man who becomes obsessed with and begins a sexual relationship with a preteen girl.
This is Vladimir Nabokov’s highly controversial Lolita. Although the book was largely regarded as pornographic and received little critical acclaim when it was first published, it has since become one of the most highly regarded novels of the twentieth century.
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This Dominican novelist won the 2008 Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
The writer in question is Junot Díaz. His other works include story collections titled Drown and This Is How You Lose Her, and much of his short fiction revolves around Dominican-American immigrants.
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A classic American novel by this author depicts the glittering, empty lives of flappers and their ilk in the Hamptons of the early twentieth century.
This is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925.
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Who, by 2014, was the only African-American writer to win both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes?
This is Toni Morrison. Her novels, which include The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Sula, and Song of Solomon, feature deeply developed characters and examinations of race and history.
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