The American Dream in Literature Quiz

Grade 12 · English · Quiz

10 questions on how American writers have engaged with, critiqued, and reimagined the American Dream.

Questions

Who wrote The Great Gatsby?
1. Ernest Hemingway
2. F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. John Steinbeck
4. Theodore Dreiser
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Answer: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, drawing on his own experience of wealth, social aspiration, and the Jazz Age.
In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby was born into old money and inherited his wealth.
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Answer: False
Gatsby is a self-made man — he invented himself and acquired his wealth through illegal bootlegging, making him new money trying to enter old money society.
Which of the following themes is most central to Death of a Salesman?
1. The immigrant pursuit of citizenship
2. The failure of the American Dream to deliver on its promises
3. The conflict between capitalism and communism
4. The triumph of individualism
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Answer: The failure of the American Dream to deliver on its promises
Miller's play is a systematic dismantling of the Dream's ideology, showing how it destroys a man who believes in it completely.
Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun centers on the ___ family's dream of buying a house in a white neighborhood.
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Answer: Younger
The Younger family — Lena, Walter Lee, Ruth, Beneatha, and young Travis — pool a life insurance check to buy a home, facing both systemic racism and internal disagreement.
The Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby symbolizes:
1. The spiritual emptiness behind the wealth and glamour of the Eggs
2. The industrial power of American capitalism
3. The immigrant neighborhoods of New York City
4. The decay of the old South
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Answer: The spiritual emptiness behind the wealth and glamour of the Eggs
The Valley of Ashes, presided over by the billboard eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, represents the moral and human cost of the Eggs' careless wealth.
John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men ends with George and Lennie successfully achieving their dream of owning a farm.
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Answer: False
The novel ends in tragedy — George shoots Lennie to spare him a more brutal death, and their dream of a farm dies with him.
The phrase 'American Dream' was popularized in which decade?
1. 1900s
2. 1920s
3. 1930s
4. 1950s
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Answer: 1930s
Historian James Truslow Adams popularized the phrase in his 1931 book The Epic of America.
Nick Carraway serves as the ___ in The Great Gatsby, observing and reporting the events of the novel.
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Answer: narrator
Nick Carraway is a first-person narrator whose Midwestern values and outsider status make him both an observer and an unwitting participant in the tragedy.
What does Langston Hughes suggest might happen to a dream that is continually deferred?
1. It grows stronger over time
2. It eventually comes true through perseverance
3. It may dry up, fester, or explode
4. It transforms into a different dream
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Answer: It may dry up, fester, or explode
Hughes offers several visceral images — raisin in the sun, festering sore, rotten meat, heavy load — before ending with the explosive final question.
The American Dream, as critiqued in 20th century literature, is often shown to be more accessible to white Americans than to people of color.
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Answer: True
Texts from Hughes to Hansberry to Morrison document how the Dream's promises were structurally denied to Black Americans through redlining, the GI Bill's unequal application, and systemic discrimination.

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