CLEP® practice test

Free CLEP American Literature Practice Test (2026)

This is a set of 25 original practice questions that follow the official CLEP American Literature content outline and its topic weights, each with a short explanation.

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  • 5 topics from the official outline
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25 questions

Question 1 of 25Henry James's Daisy Miller (1878) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881) are central examples of his "international theme," which centers on
Question 2 of 25In this passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836), what idea does the image of the "transparent eye-ball" express? "Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."
Question 3 of 25N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn won the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an event often seen as the start of
Question 4 of 25Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) was published in London with a statement, signed by a group of leading Boston men, printed before the poems. What was that statement for?
Question 5 of 25Read these opening lines of Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear and Loving Husband": "If ever two were one, then surely we. / If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee. / If ever wife was happy in a man, / Compare with me, ye women, if you can." Which device most shapes these lines?
Question 6 of 25At the end of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," the narrator flees as the mansion splits apart and sinks into the dark lake beside it. The collapse is fitting because the "House" of the title means
Question 7 of 25Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street (1984) tells the story of Esperanza Cordero through
Question 8 of 25In Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1921), the speaker says "I've known rivers" and tells of bathing in the Euphrates, building a hut near the Congo, raising the pyramids above the Nile and hearing the Mississippi sing. The "I" of the poem is best understood as
Question 9 of 25In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" (1894), Louise Mallard hears that her husband has died in a railroad accident and, alone in her room, feels a growing joy at being free. When he walks in alive, she collapses and dies, and the doctors decide that her weak heart could not bear the joy of seeing him. The ending is an example of
Question 10 of 25John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) alternates chapters about the Joad family with short chapters about
Question 11 of 25Ernest Hemingway placed the remark "You are all a lost generation" at the front of The Sun Also Rises (1926) and credited it to
Question 12 of 25Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890) follows Peyton Farquhar's escape from a hanging and his long journey home to his wife. The final sentence reveals that
Question 13 of 25Claude McKay wrote this poem in the summer of 1919, amid violent attacks on Black communities in American cities: "If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, / While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, / Making their mock at our accursèd lot." The poem ends: "Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!" Its form is
Question 14 of 25In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's farmer-narrator explains what makes an American mainly by describing
Question 15 of 25Read this short poem by Stephen Crane, from War Is Kind (1899): "A man said to the universe: / 'Sir, I exist!' / 'However,' replied the universe, / 'The fact has not created in me / A sense of obligation.'" The poem's view of the universe is best described as
Question 16 of 25Walt Whitman wrote this poem after the death of Abraham Lincoln in 1865: "O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, / The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won," The poem is unusual among Whitman's works because it
Question 17 of 25In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), the narrator's husband, a physician, forbids her to work or write and keeps her shut in an upstairs room to cure her nervous illness. The story is best read as a criticism of
Question 18 of 25In his essay "Tragedy and the Common Man" (1949), written the same year as Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller argued that
Question 19 of 25In 1950, Gwendolyn Brooks became the first Black writer to win a Pulitzer Prize, for
Question 20 of 25In "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), later known as "Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau describes a night he spent in jail. Why had he been jailed?
Question 21 of 25In the preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne says a novel aims at "a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary course of man's experience," while a romance "has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer's own choosing or creation." Hawthorne calls his book a romance mainly to
Question 22 of 25Billy Pilgrim, who has come "unstuck in time" and who survives the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, is the main character of
Question 23 of 25Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) is told mainly through
Question 24 of 25William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (1930) is told by an unnamed "we" who speak for the town of Jefferson. This choice of narrator mainly lets Faulkner
Question 25 of 25In Edward Taylor's poem "Huswifery," the speaker asks God to make him into a spinning wheel and a loom so that he may at last be clothed in holy robes. This long, surprising comparison of salvation to making cloth is best called

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