HUMANITIES, September/October 2009
Volume 30, Number 5

1. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

A. George Eliot
B. Jane Austen
C. William Makepeace Thackeray
D. Samuel Richardson

2. The increasing scarlet & yellow tints around the meadows & river remind me of the opening of a vast flower bud—they are the petals of its corolla—which is of the width of the valleys—It is the flower of autumn, whose expanding bud just begins to blush.

A. Nathaniel Hawthorne
B. James Fenimore Cooper
C. Henry David Thoreau
D. Walt Whitman

3. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

A. John Lewis
B. Martin Luther King Jr.
C. Malcolm X
D. Barbara Jordan

4. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.

A. Theodore Roosevelt
B. William Bradford
C. Henry David Thoreau
D. John Muir

A. Ezra Pound
B. Robert Frost
C. T. S. Eliot
D. W. B. Yeats

6. He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

A. Henry James
B. Ralph Waldo Emerson
C. William James
D. Nathaniel Hawthorne

7. Last Autumn, on several occasions, I expressed my faith that we can make possible by democratic self-discipline in industry general increases in wages and shortening of hours sufficient to enable industry to pay its own workers enough to let those workers buy and use the things that their labor produces.

A. Eugene V. Debs
B. Franklin Roosevelt
C. Herbert Hoover
D. George Meany

8. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.

A. Samuel Johnson
B. James Boswell
C. Thomas Carlyle
D. Henry Fielding

9. The moon was sinking over the hills, the air was crystal clear, the wind was cool, and the songs of the insects among the autumn grasses would by themselves have brought tears.

A. Sei Shōnagon
B. Adikavi Pampa
C. Murasaki Shikibu
D. Scheherazade

10. A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.

A. Ernest Hemingway
B. Ian Fleming
C. Philip Roth
D. John Cheever

ANSWERS

1. A. George Eliot, letter to Maria Lewis, September 3, 1841. One of Eliot’s frequent and intimate correspondents was Lewis, her former governess. This letter was written almost two decades before Eliot set the London literati buzzing with her first novel, Adam Bede (1859). Eliot (née Mary Ann Evans) used a nom de plume to prevent critics from dismissing her work because of her sex and to obscure her unconventional love life.

2. C. Henry David Thoreau, journal entry, September 26, 1852. In 1849, Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers at his own expense. The book failed to enchant the public, and most copies were returned to Thoreau unsold. But the cold reception did not deter him. During 1852, Thoreau wrote more than seven hundred pages in his journal and revised the text that became Walden (1854).

3. B. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream” speech (August 28, 1963). On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before a crowd of more than 250,000 people, King delivered this rousing speech championing the cause of civil rights. A 1999 survey of scholars of American public address named it the most influential speech of the twentieth century.

4. D. John Muir, “The Yellowstone National Park,” the Atlantic Monthly (April 1898). In the 1890s, Muir, founding president of the Sierra Club, led the fight to have Yosemite declared a national park, like Yellowstone. An advocate for preservation, Muir clashed with Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, who favored sustainable use. The two men took to the pages of the nation’s leading journals to plead their case. Muir’s essay on Yellowstone was one of many that he penned for the preservationist cause.

5. B. Robert Frost, “My November Guest,” A Boy’s Will (1913). By his late thirties, Frost had published only a handful of poems. To forge the literary career he desired, Frost sold the family dairy farm and moved to London in 1912, hoping that British publishers would be more receptive to his realistic verse. Aided by Ezra Pound, Frost published his first collection, A Boy’s Will, followed by North of Boston (1914). When Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he was besieged by publishers.

6. A. Henry James, “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Library of the World’s Best Literature Ancient and Modern, Vol. XII (1896). In his essay, James discussed how Hawthorne’s biography influenced his writing, resulting in one of James’s better known quotations. James believed that Hawthorne was the consummate novelist because he could detach himself from the world. He also judged The House of the Seven Gables superior to The Scarlet Letter.  

7. B. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat: On the Purposes and Foundations of the Recovery Program” (July 24, 1933). In the fall of 1932, Roosevelt championed a blueprint for conquering the Great Depression that American voters found more appealing than the one offered by Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt used a fireside chat on the radio to defend the New Deal and build support for the National Recovery Administration (NRA). A key element of the New Deal, the NRA was intended to stabilize the economy through “codes of fair competition.” The Supreme Court ruled the NRA unconstitutional in 1935.  

8. A. Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759). Despite having achieved fame for his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Johnson constantly had to be bailed out of debtor’s prison. He wrote Rasselas in the span of one week to pay for his mother’s funeral and settle her debts. In the novella, Rasselas and his sister, both discontented by their life of pleasure, explore the world accompanied by the philosopher Imlac. The suffering of those the prince encounters makes him reevaluate the nature of happiness.   

9. C. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (1010). While a lady in attendance at the Japanese court, Murasaki wrote what is widely considered to be the first novel. The work was unusual for its time, not only because it was written by a woman, but also because it was written in Japanese (Chinese was the lingua franca of the Japanese court) and in prose. The beauty of nature is a prominent theme of the story, which recounts the life of Genji, a handsome courtier, and the women he loved.

10. D. John Cheever, The Journals of John Cheever (1991). In the pages of the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker at mid century, Cheever demonstrated his mastery of the short story and his ability to capture the mores of middle-class America. When Cheever’s journals were published, they revealed a man enchanted by nature, battling alcoholism, and struggling to reconcile his bisexuality with his family life.