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Some writers purposely look for anonymity. J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon are the poster boys for this type of avoidance of the limelight and the trappings of fame. Other writers toil in obscurity until they are “discovered” late in their...

The Shape of Water—released in 2017—is rare in Guillermo Del Toro's oeuvre as a film that's relatively optimistic. It's also the first film of Del Toro's to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, which it did in 2018. The film also snagged awards...

The story of fireman Guy Montag first appeared in "The Fireman", a short story by Ray Bradbury published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951. Montag's story was expanded two years later, in 1953, and was published as Fahrenheit 451. While the novel...

“Affliction I” is one of 17th-century English poet George Herbert’s most memorable and loved poems. Herbert was a Welsh poet and priest. His single collection of poems, known as The Temple, was published in 1633 after his early death at the age of...

Written in 1942 by Italian author Dino Buzzati, The Seven Messengers is a collection of short stories. In the book, there are nineteen short stories, beginning with the first, "The Seven Messengers. Other stories include "The Assault on the Great...

Although The Comet is set in a futuristic New York City after the release of toxic gases by an unknown enemy, the story is really a study in relationships, specifically, those that take place between people of different ethnicities. It tells the...

"The Flowers" is a short story written by Alice Walker, published in 1973 as part of the collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. It is only two pages long—565 words total. "The Flowers" describes the carefree life of Myop, a...

James Albert Michener was an American author born on February 3, 1907 in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Doylestown High School, he attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania to study Arts degree in English and...

The little fictional town of Manawaka was created by Margaret Laurence at the age of fourteen when she had her first short story published after winning a competition in the Winnipeg Free Press. This began a respected and heralded career that...

Although he has written and published more than one hundred books, Walter Dean Myers is most famous for being the author of Monster, a book in memoir form about a school shooter. His works of fiction are usually directed at a young adult audience,...

“since feeling is first” was published in E. E. Cummings’s 1926 poetry collection is 5. Released at perhaps the height of the poet’s career, is 5 features poems that exemplify Cummings’s iconoclastic, experimental, witty, and often satirical...

"Havisham" appears in Carol Ann Duffy's fourth collection of poems, Mean Time, published in 1993. Havisham is written from the perspective of the character Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. The poems included in Mean...

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is Frank Capra's 1939 political "dramedy" starring a then-unknown James Stewart as Senator Jefferson Smith, a naive but good-hearted Western man with the political idealism to take down corruption in Washington. The...

Sissinghurst Castle in the county of Kent, England is renowned for both its beautiful landscaped gardens and for the speed with which tickets for its annual garden tours are sold out. Both of these factors are due to the landscaping design and...

Born in 1940 in Sussex, England, Angela would be dead from lung cancer by 1992. Today, Carter is notoriously one of the most studied writers of the 20th century, but even as late as the day she died she was, in the words of her most infamous fan...

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is an American play co-authored by American playwrights Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence. Robert Lee is not to be confused with the Confederate general of the same name. The main character of the play is Henry...

Out of the Silent Planet is a science-fiction novel first published in 1938. Written by famous British author C.S. Lewis, the novel details the story of Dr. Ransom, who is on a planet that definitely is not Earth. The novel is a bit like H.G....

The Other Wes Moore is both a New York Times Bestseller and a Wall Street Journal Bestseller that was published in 2011 about two men who are both named Wes Moore. The story follows the author and his life, which is the first Wes Moore. This Wes...

Written by author and activist Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma asks the race a fundamental question: what should we, as the human race, have for dinner? The answer, Michael Pollan says, is ultimately very complicated and goes far back into...

First published in 1961, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie could be considered Muriel Spark's most famous novel. Spark was born and spent her childhood and early adulthood in Scotland, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her sixth novel, is set on home...

Written by famed Australian author Ruth Park, Playing Beatie Bow (originally released in 1980) tells the story of a young woman named Abigal who is incredibly distraught over her parents' separation. After an incident on the playground, Abigal...

A People's History of the United States is the sort of book that you don't see in traditional literature, because it would have been banned, burned, or outright not published. Rather than taking the more "politically correct" approach at political...

Published some time during the first century CE, Medea is a work from Ancient Roman writer Seneca. The piece is about 1000 lines long, and details the events of fictional character Medea. The reason that "Medea" doesn't exactly sound Roman is...

The last years of Yeats' life were defined by two conflicting concepts. At the one hand, he felt distain for the in his eyes failure of the democratic process in Ireland and the destruction of Irish nobility. On the other hand, he underwent a...