25 MCQs on American Poets and Writers

1. Who is known as the "father of American poetry"?
   a) Walt Whitman
   b) Edgar Allan Poe
   c) William Cullen Bryant
   d) Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
   Answer: c) William Cullen Bryant
   Explanation: Bryant’s "Thanatopsis" is considered one of the earliest major American poems.
2. "Leaves of Grass" is a seminal work by:
   a) Ralph Waldo Emerson
   b) Walt Whitman
   c) Robert Frost
   d) Emily Dickinson
   Answer: b) Walt Whitman
   Explanation: It celebrates the individual and the democratic spirit.
3. Who wrote the poem "Because I could not stop for Death"?
   a) Sylvia Plath
   b) Emily Dickinson
   c) Marianne Moore
   d) Hilda Doolittle
   Answer: b) Emily Dickinson
   Explanation: It’s one of Dickinson's most famous meditations on death and immortality.
4. Who authored The Scarlet Letter?
   a) Herman Melville
   b) Edgar Allan Poe
   c) Nathaniel Hawthorne
   d) Washington Irving
   Answer: c) Nathaniel Hawthorne
   Explanation: A classic of American Romanticism, exploring sin and guilt in Puritan society.
5. Which novel is considered a defining text of the Harlem Renaissance?
   a) Native Son
   b) Their Eyes Were Watching God
   c) The Color Purple
   d) Beloved
   Answer: b) Their Eyes Were Watching God
   Explanation: Written by Zora Neale Hurston, it explores Black womanhood in the South.
6. Who is known for the novel Moby-Dick?
   a) Herman Melville
   b) Mark Twain
   c) Henry James
   d) William Faulkner
   Answer: a) Herman Melville
   Explanation: A symbolic epic of obsession and the American experience.
7. Robert Frost is best known for writing about:
   a) Urban life
   b) Rural New England
   c) War and conflict
   d) Feminist themes
   Answer: b) Rural New England
   Explanation: His poems reflect nature and simple life with philosophical depth.
8. Who wrote Song of Myself?
   a) Ezra Pound
   b) Walt Whitman
   c) Wallace Stevens
   d) T.S. Eliot
   Answer: b) Walt Whitman
   Explanation: Part of "Leaves of Grass," celebrating the self and humanity.
9. Who is the author of The Waste Land, though born in America?
   a) Robert Lowell
   b) Wallace Stevens
   c) Hart Crane
   d) T.S. Eliot
   Answer: d) T.S. Eliot
   Explanation: Though he later became a British citizen, Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri.
10. Who wrote The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas?
    a) Anne Sexton
    b) Sylvia Plath
    c) H.D.
    d) Adrienne Rich
    Answer: b) Sylvia Plath
    Explanation: It's a semi-autobiographical novel exploring mental illness.
11. Mark Twain’s real name was:
    a) Samuel Langhorne Clemens
    b) Henry David Thoreau
    c) Washington Irving
    d) Stephen Crane
    Answer: a) Samuel Langhorne Clemens
    Explanation: Twain is known for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.
12. "I, too, sing America" is a poem by:
    a) Langston Hughes
    b) Claude McKay
    c) Paul Laurence Dunbar
    d) James Baldwin
    Answer: a) Langston Hughes
    Explanation: A major voice of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes celebrated Black identity.
13. Who wrote The Road Not Taken?
    a) Wallace Stevens
    b) Robert Frost
    c) Carl Sandburg
    d) Allen Ginsberg
    Answer: b) Robert Frost
    Explanation: One of the most quoted American poems, often misinterpreted.
14. Who wrote The Grapes of Wrath?
    a) F. Scott Fitzgerald
    b) John Steinbeck
    c) Upton Sinclair
    d) William Faulkner
    Answer: b) John Steinbeck
    Explanation: A powerful depiction of the Dust Bowl migration.
15. "Howl" is a poem by:
    a) Robert Creeley
    b) Allen Ginsberg
    c) Jack Kerouac
    d) Lawrence Ferlinghetti
    Answer: b) Allen Ginsberg
    Explanation: It became an anthem for the Beat Generation.
16. Who is the author of Beloved, a novel exploring the legacy of slavery?
    a) Alice Walker
    b) Maya Angelou
    c) Toni Morrison
    d) Gloria Naylor
    Answer: c) Toni Morrison
    Explanation: Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
17. Henry James is best known for writing:
    a) Modernist poetry
    b) Gothic fiction
    c) Psychological novels
    d) Nature essays
    Answer: c) Psychological novels
    Explanation: His work explores consciousness and moral complexity.
18. Ernest Hemingway's writing style is often described as:
    a) Sparse and understated
    b) Ornate and flowery
    c) Academic and dense
    d) Symbolic and abstract
    Answer: a) Sparse and understated
    Explanation: His “iceberg theory” shaped modern fiction.
19. Which writer created the character of Nick Carraway?
    a) F. Scott Fitzgerald
    b) John Updike
    c) Truman Capote
    d) William Faulkner
    Answer: a) F. Scott Fitzgerald
    Explanation: Carraway narrates The Great Gatsby.
20. Who is the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain?
    a) Ralph Ellison
    b) James Baldwin
    c) Richard Wright
    d) W.E.B. Du Bois
    Answer: b) James Baldwin
    Explanation: Baldwin’s first novel deals with identity, religion, and family.
21. Who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple?
    a) Alice Walker
    b) Toni Morrison
    c) Maya Angelou
    d) Lorraine Hansberry
    Answer: a) Alice Walker
    Explanation: The novel explores African-American womanhood.
22. Who wrote the poem A Supermarket in California, featuring Walt Whitman as a character?
    a) Ezra Pound
    b) Allen Ginsberg
    c) Robert Lowell
    d) Carl Sandburg
    Answer: b) Allen Ginsberg
    Explanation: The poem blends nostalgia, consumerism, and sexuality.
23. Which poet is known for the long poem Paterson?
    a) Wallace Stevens
    b) William Carlos Williams
    c) Hart Crane
    d) John Ashbery
    Answer: b) William Carlos Williams
    Explanation: It’s a modernist epic rooted in American life and speech.
24. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a central figure in which movement?
    a) Realism
    b) Gothic
    c) Transcendentalism
    d) Minimalism
    Answer: c) Transcendentalism
    Explanation: Emerson emphasized self-reliance and nature.
25. Invisible Man is a novel by:
    a) James Baldwin
    b) Richard Wright
    c) Ralph Ellison
    d) August Wilson
    Answer: c) Ralph Ellison
    Explanation: A landmark novel exploring race, identity, and invisibility in society.