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GE Moore is an English philosopher born on November 4, 1873 in Upper Norwood, London. Moore grew up in a family of academics - some were poets, other were professors, and all were dedicated to the arts and humanities. He received his primary...

George Lippard wrote The Quaker City with the express purpose of creating a controversial and infamous exposé of criminal underworld of Philadelphia that would be embraced by a scandalized public and perhaps lead to wholesale reform. At least,...

Horatio Alger was an American writer and an author of more than one hundred books, most of which were written for young readers. His best known work is called Ragged Dick and was published in 1867. The plot of this book follows a formula made so...

Though Hardy is known more for his novels and poetry, the short fiction canon of Thomas Hardy nearly reaches the half-century mark. The overwhelming bulk are those available in just four collections published between 1888 and 1913: Wessex Tales, A...

The Return of the Soldier is a novel written by Rebecca West in 1918. The novel revolves around the story of Chris Baldry, an upper class gentleman who has returned from the war to his wife Kitty Baldry. Kitty Baldry is a perfect representation of...

Play with Repeats is the seventh play written by British playwright Martin Crimp. It was first staged in 1989 at the Orange Tree Theatre in London, where Crimp had debuted all his previous work.

Crimp was born to a working-class family in eastern...

S/Z was published in 1970 and written by Roland Barthes, a French philosopher and writer. Barthes dabbled in quite a few schools of theory, and made significant contributions to quite a few, including semiotics, social theory, anthropology, and,...

In 1917 Edith Wharton moved out of her fictional comfort zone of life among the New York City elite and took her profound imagination to New England in the novel Summer. Over the course of four months in North Dormer, Massachusetts, a teenage girl...

T’was a plague that gave birth to William Shakespeare’s long narrative poem “The Rape of Lucrece.” Between June 1592 and May 1594, acting companies were banished from London and the theater essentially became non-existent. The reason for this was...

The Pioneers was published in 1823 and holds a significant place in American letters: it is the novel that launched the famous Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. This is the book that introduced the world to Natty Bumppo, one of the...

The Short Tales of Joseph Conrad is a collection of eight examples of shorter fiction by the esteemed writer of Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. Conrad was born in Poland and moved to England, where he became a naturalized citizen. Much of his life...

First published in 1757, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was a treatise on aesthetics that had a tangible impact on the Romantic and Gothic movements. Burke, through this work, was...

The Shadow Line was one of the last pieces of long prose that Joseph Conrad ever produced. At 30,000 words, it is a long piece, but as to whether it is actually a long short story or a short novel is up for debate. The general consensus is that,...

The only work written by the ancient Roman historian Livy was a multi-volume history of Rome that modern scholars consider to be long as literary value, but rather wanting in historical fact. At one time the full history written by Livy spanned...

Robert Lowell was born into a reputable family on March 1, 1917 in Boston, Massachusetts. His ancestors included famous poets, politicians, and military personnel. He was education at prestigious academies in Boston, where he became interested in...

The Romance of the Rose is an allegorical romance composed in two parts by two different writers over the course of half a century (more or less) during the 13th century. Gillaume de Lorris contributed the opening 4,000 lines (more or less) around...

The Skull Beneath The Skin is a 1982 detective novel by British crime writer P.D. James and featuring her renowned female private detective Cordelia Gray. The novel is set on fictional Courcy Island on the Dorset Coast, in a Victorian castle that...

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was born to a doctor and his wife in the northern French town of Rouen. Like Frederic in his 1869 novel Sentimental Education, Flaubert studied law in Paris as a young man. Like Freredic, he also never practiced law....

The Selected Tales of Henry James represent a concerted effort to provide a cross section of the wealth of talent that was the short fiction of Henry James. Speaking of size, there is a good reason why the narratives in this collection are termed...

The Name of the Rose is the first novel of Italian writer, professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna Umberto Eco. It was first published in Italian in 1980.

The novel is presented as an embodiment of the theoretical ideas of Umberto Eco’...

Experimental novelist Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities was published in 1972 as a series of “overhead conversations” between Kublai Kahn, Notorious Mongol Emperor and Marco Polo, noted explorer. Although categorized as a novel, that description...

The Mezzanine is a 1988 novel by American novelist Nicholson Baker, an author who specializes in "stream of consciousness" style writing, as clearly demonstrated in this story.

The Mezzanine can be most basically summarized as what goes through an...

Old Times is categorized as one of the Harold Pinter’ “memory plays” that characterized his evolution and development in the 1970’s through a series of productions that took a step back from the more cerebral experimentation of the playwright’s...

In 1967, Angela Carter won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her novel The Magic Toyshop. The novel is considered an essential component in the evolutionary process in which Carter became a progenitor of a more avant-garde offshoot of Gothic...