Q 01/05

Which flowers do Claudia and Frieda MacTeer plant, believing blooms will save Pecola's baby, in The Bluest Eye?

A) Sunflowers

B) Zinnias

C) Marigolds

D) Petunias

Answer · why

C) Marigolds

Marigolds never come up that year, and the adult Claudia opens the novel admitting that she and her sister long blamed themselves for the failure.

Q 02/05

Which child star's face is on the cup Pecola Breedlove keeps refilling with milk at the MacTeers' in The Bluest Eye?

A) Shirley Temple

B) Judy Garland

C) Deanna Durbin

D) Margaret O'Brien

Answer · why

A) Shirley Temple

Shirley Temple enchants Pecola so much that she drinks three quarts of the family's milk just to keep holding the cup, while Claudia cannot stand the ...

Q 03/05

In which Ohio town on Lake Erie, Toni Morrison's own birthplace, is the novel The Bluest Eye set?

A) Sandusky

B) Ashtabula

C) Toledo

D) Lorain

Answer · why

D) Lorain

Lorain is where Morrison was born in 1931, so she was ten years old there in the autumn of 1941, when the story begins.

Q 04/05

Which award did Toni Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye, become the first Black woman to win in 1993?

A) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

B) Nobel Prize in Literature

C) National Book Award

D) PEN/Faulkner Award

Answer · why

B) Nobel Prize in Literature

The Nobel Prize in Literature reached her 23 years after her debut novel appeared, and no Black woman of any nationality had won it before.

Q 05/05

Which series of school reading primers supplies the opening passage and chapter headings of The Bluest Eye?

A) McGuffey Readers

B) Dick and Jane

C) Janet and John

D) Alice and Jerry

Answer · why

B) Dick and Jane

Dick and Jane's cheerful white family opens the book, and garbled scraps of the same passage head the later chapters, an ideal home set against the Br...