Newest Study Guides
Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a silent horror film that was directed by Robert Wiene in 1920 and was distributed by Decla-Bioscop in the Weimar Republic, Germany. The film stars Werner Krauss as the titular Dr. Caligari, a psychologically...
"The Snowflake Which is Now and Hence Forever" by Archibald MacLeish was written later in MacLeish's life, and was, in some ways, an answer to the philosophical, poetic and existential questions he had been posing for years in his other work....
The 400 Blows is the debut film of French director Francois Truffaut. The film was released in 1959 in France and was an unexpected success. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and at the Cannes Film Festival...
Billy Wilder's The Apartment is one of the most iconic Hollywood comedies of all-time. Released in 1960, it came only a year after the huge success of Wilder's Some Like it Hot. Because Some Like It Hot had done so well with critics and audiences,...
Get Out is a satirical horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele. Prior to making Get Out, Peele was best known as a comedian, and half of the sketch duo Key & Peele, beloved for entertaining and sharp satirical sketches on Comedy...
Memento is a psychological thriller directed by Christopher Nolan, written by his brother, Jonathan Nolan, and produced by Suzanne and Jennifer Todd. It was released on September 5, 2000.
Leonard Shelby, the protagonist, is in search of the person...
William Langland wrote the poem Piers Plowman over the course of about twenty years in the Late Middle Ages, completing the earliest version in the mid-1360s, and longer revised versions in the late 1370s and mid-1380s. Fifty-two early manuscripts...
Anne Bradstreet's work is renowned for her technical accomplishment, her deep engagement with religious faith and doubt, her personal insights on life in the New World in the 17th century, and her ruminations on a woman's role in a patriarchal...
Catching Fire is the second book in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy, published by Scholastic Press in 2009 between The Hunger Games and Mockingjay. The novel begins a few months after protagonist Katniss Everdeen and her counterpart, Peeta...
Many critics describe Blood Meridian as one of the most important novels of the 20th century. It is a revisionist Western in which McCarthy explores the era after the Mexican-American War. During this time, vigilante, mercenary gangs patrolled the...
Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 non-fiction book Blink is about how people use their adaptive unconscious – the part of the brain that operates rapidly based upon little information – to make important decisions. Gladwell considers how and why some people...
After retiring from teaching writing at a variety of New York City high schools, Frank McCourt was determined to write about his early life in Ireland before coming to America. The result, Angela's Ashes, was published in 1996 by Scribner and sold...
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business is a book of media ecology written by educator and media theorist Neil Postman. It has remained both popular and in-print since it was first published in 1986. The book...
Gennifer Albin's second novel, Altered, explores one girl's experience navigating the dysfunctional social and political systems of a completely controlled dystopian society. Published in 2013, Altered is the second book in the Crewel World...
All the Light We Cannot See was written by Anthony Doerr in 2014 and was published by Scribner. All the Light We Cannot See was Doerr's fifth novel.
The inspiration for the novel came when Doerr was on a trip with a friend whose cell phone broke....
Bleak House was begun at Tavistock House, Dickens' London home, in November 1851, continued at Dover, and completed at Boulogne in August 1853. It was originally published in nineteen monthly parts, the last of which was double the size of the...
Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty in 1877. It was to be her first and only book. Sewell, who grew up in Quaker family of north England, was an invalid for most of her life. Since she could not stand for long periods of time, she learned how to ride...
Big Fish is a 2003 movie directed by Tim Burton. It tells the story of a Paris-based journalist named Will Bloom who comes home to Ashton, Alabama, when he hears that his father, Edward, is terminally ill with cancer and has been taken off...
Bicycle Thieves (often listed under the title The Bicycle Thief) is a landmark 1948 Italian neorealist film directed by Vittorio De Sica. The film was adapted from Luigi Bartolini’s novel of the same name by Cesare Zavattini, who was one of De...
First published in 1946, All the King's Men was directly influenced by Robert Penn Warren's firsthand experiences with fascism in Benito Mussolini's Italy and radical populism in governor Huey P. Long's Louisiana.
In 1934, in the middle of the...
The Bhagavad Gita is one of the fundamental texts of Hinduism, and documents the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna as Arjuna prepares to go into battle against the Kauravas for battle of the kingdom of Hastinapura.
The Gita is written in...
Published in 2016 by award-winning American author, Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad is a gripping account of a runaway slave, Cora, as she makes her way through a fictionalized American landscape. Throughout her journey to freedom, Cora...
The Trojan Women, also known as the Troades, was composed by the Greek playwright Euripides in 415 B.C.E. in response to the Athenian massacre on the island of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. Melos had been attempting to maintain its...
Looking for Richard is a 1996 film directed by Oscar-winning Hollywood actor Al Pacino. It is an exploration of Pacino's love for Shakespeare, particularly Shakespeare's Richard III, and it playfully intersperses documentary-style interviews with...