Free American Literature MCQs with Answers

222 American Literature MCQs from English Literature, each with the correct answer and a written explanation of why it is correct. Free and unlimited, with no account needed.

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222 questions · page 11 of 12

  • A. A person who has two black parents.
  • B. A person who has one Meranto parent and one black.
  • C. A person who has two Delfigo parents.
  • D. A person who has one white parent and one parent who is a Mulatto

Explanation: A quadroon was traditionally defined in nineteenth-century racial terminology as a person with one white parent and one parent who was a…

Correct answer: A person who has one white parent and one parent who is a Mulatto
  • A. A genrous village chief who is known for his kindness
  • B. Hare's grandfather
  • C. A god who protects and guides Hare on his many adventures
  • D. A tyrannical village chief who is known for his elbow blades

Explanation: Sharp-elbow is presented as a cruel village chief whose elbows have blades, making him a threatening figure in the Hare tale.

Correct answer: A tyrannical village chief who is known for his elbow blades
  • A. Establish a new government
  • B. first agreement on self governing
  • C. Religious freedom
  • D. Sovereignty

Explanation: The Mayflower Compact was an early agreement among the Pilgrims to establish and accept self-government in their settlement.

Correct answer: first agreement on self governing
  • A. American myths
  • B. non separating puritan
  • C. City upon a hill
  • D. All are correct

Explanation: Winthrop was a non-separating Puritan, and his “City upon a Hill” sermon became a major source of American national mythology.

Correct answer: All are correct
  • A. Bear
  • B. Coyote
  • C. Snake
  • D. Hare

Explanation: In the Winnebago tradition, Hare is the trickster figure, often known for cleverness, mischief, and adventures.

Correct answer: Hare
  • A. A European fairy tale
  • B. A local ghost story
  • C. An Indian legend
  • D. A European ghost story

Explanation: The passage describes Rip Van Winkle in Washington Irving’s story, which draws on European folklore and fairy-tale traditions.

Correct answer: A European fairy tale
  • A. John Smith
  • B. Coronado
  • C. Columbus
  • D. De Vaca

Explanation: Christopher Columbus described Cuba as an island called “Colba” in his accounts of exploration.

Correct answer: Columbus
  • A. Sherwood Anderson
  • B. F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • C. Saul Bellow
  • D. Wallace Stevens

Explanation: F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely regarded as the representative writer of the Jazz Age because his fiction portrays its wealth, parties…

Correct answer: F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • A. Maine
  • B. Massachusetts
  • C. Georgia
  • D. Ohio

Explanation: Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Brunswick, Maine, where she lived in the early 1850s.

Correct answer: Maine
  • A. They have the power to fix things themselves
  • B. Men are more powerful
  • C. Both are correct
  • D. None of the above

Explanation: Maria W. Stewart saw Black women as agents of racial uplift who could educate, organize, and improve their communities through their own…

Correct answer: They have the power to fix things themselves
  • A. By ferry
  • B. On a makeshift raft
  • C. In a stolen canoe
  • D. Hopping rafts of ice

Explanation: In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Eliza escapes across the frozen Ohio River by jumping from one floating block of ice to another.

Correct answer: Hopping rafts of ice
  • A. Slave narrative
  • B. Indian autobiography
  • C. Sermon
  • D. Trancendentalism

Explanation: The slave narrative commonly follows a checkmark-shaped movement from enslavement and suffering through escape or resistance to freedom…

Correct answer: Slave narrative
  • A. Tennessee
  • B. Kentucky
  • C. Alabama
  • D. Mississipi

Explanation: The Shelby farm in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s *Uncle Tom’s Cabin* is located in Kentucky.

Correct answer: Kentucky
  • A. The devastation of the indies
  • B. Flor Y Canto
  • C. A Very Old Man with Enormous wings
  • D. Hopskotch

Explanation: Bartolomé de las Casas wrote *A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies*, a denunciation of Spanish cruelty toward Indigenous…

Correct answer: The devastation of the indies
  • A. Joseph Smith, Jr
  • B. Jerry Smith
  • C. Hiram Smith
  • D. John Smith

Explanation: The historical figure associated with capture by Native Americans and rescue by Pocahontas is John Smith, an early English colonist and…

Correct answer: John Smith
  • A. Anti-Slavery
  • B. Father of american poetry
  • C. Pro Slavery
  • D. Father of American Liteature

Explanation: Samuel Sewall is remembered for *The Selling of Joseph* (1700), one of the earliest American antislavery publications.

Correct answer: Anti-Slavery
  • A. They did not want to disassociate from the Church of England
  • B. Separate from church of England
  • C. Start their own beliefs
  • D. Create seperation

Explanation: Non-separating Puritans wished to reform the Church of England from within rather than break away from it.

Correct answer: They did not want to disassociate from the Church of England
  • A. Father of Free verse
  • B. Father of american poetry
  • C. Pro Slavery
  • D. Father of American Liteature

Explanation: Emerson is widely regarded as a foundational figure in American literature and thought, especially through Transcendentalism.

Correct answer: Father of American Liteature
  • A. Hawthrone
  • B. Stewart
  • C. Thoreau
  • D. A and B

Explanation: Emerson encouraged and mentored Henry David Thoreau, who became a major Transcendentalist writer.

Correct answer: Thoreau
  • A. Emily Dickinson
  • B. Paul Dunbar
  • C. John Greenleaf Whittier
  • D. Walt Whitman

Explanation: Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, in 1819 and became a major American poet through Leaves of Grass.

Correct answer: Walt Whitman