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.
First published in 1966, A Man of the People offers a critical perspective on the nature of politics, power, and greed. In his novel, author Chinua Achebe assumes an "outside" perspective in order to illustrate the profound effects of governmental...
First acted out in 1960, Happy Days is a classic play by Samuel Beckett. The play follows the stories of Winnie and Willie, two people that live simple (yet confusing), happy lives. This play is seen by viewers and critics alike as being very...
As Francis Ford Coppola recounted in an interview with Playboy, he used to joke that he would only make a sequel to The Godfather if it were going to be Abbot and Costello Meet the Godfather. For a long time, he found the idea of creating a sequel...
U.A. Fanthorpe was an English poet who graduated from St. Anne's College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry, Fanthorpe was highly praised for her work. Her most famous publications...
Bread and Wine is an anti-fascist novel, meaning that it looks down upon the system of totalitarianism, where one person is in complete control of the government and its functions. Originally published in 1936 in Switzerland, though in the German...
Much like its predecessor, Evil Dead 2 was critically and financially successful. On Rotten Tomatoes, critics approved of the film 98% of the time and audiences approved of the film 89% of the time. After giving the film 3 out of 4 stars,...
Billy Elliot is a 2000 film directed by Stephen Daldry, written by Lee Hall. It was produced by BBC Films and distributed by Universal Pictures. The film grossed $109,80,263 worldwide and was nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Original...
The History of the Franks is a comprehensive guide to the spread of Frankish culture throughout and up to the sixth century C.E. A large topic of the history is the Christianization of Western Europe, which was perhaps the largest event taking...
The play Bran Nue Dae was written by the Australian Jimmy Chi and was published in the year 1990. The play is meant to be performed as a musical and so it contains many musical pieces. Many attribute this characteristic to the fact that the author...
War Horse is a children's novel set in Wartime Europe; the narrative concerns events from before the declaration of World War I to shortly after the Germans surrendered to the Allies. The narrator of the novel is a horse called Joey, a cavalry...
June, 1981. A director responsible for two of the biggest box office hits of the 1970’s has teamed up with the producer of a film series that changed all the rules of Hollywood filmmaking. Together, these two titans of Hollywood—the wunderkinds...
"Lethe" can be found in H.D.'s 1924 collection Heliodora, which contains many other poems that allude to Greek mythology. Lethe is a fixture in Greek mythology—a river in Hades that causes those who drink the water to forget their past. Lethe was...
"Oread," one of H.D.'s earlier poems, was first published in the magazine BLAST in 1914 and has become one of her most anthologized works. Scholar Gary Burnett points out that the publishing history of the poem is notable. While "Oread" is one of...
Ferris Bueller's Day Off was released in 1986 by Paramount Pictures. The film was written and directed by John Hughes and stars Matthew Broderick with Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Jeffrey Jones and Jennifer Gray. It was produced by Hughes and Tom Jacobson...
"Would I have become friends with my father if I went to school with him?"
That question was the germ (courtesy of producer/co-writer Bob Gale) for a film that eventually became the science fiction classic Back to the Future (1985). Gale and...
If the general public was asked to list their five favorite romantic comedies, Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally (1989) would likely be on many of the lists. The Hollywood Reporter wonderfully sums up the feelings of those who love the film. In...
Before the release of 1999's The Matrix, directors Laurence and Andrew Wachowski (now Lana and Lilly Wachowski, respectively) were virtually unknown commodities. Their previous -- and first -- film, 1996's Bound, was well-received but made very...
“Fern Hill” was written in 1944 and published in 1946 in Thomas’s book Deaths and Entrances. It was written during what critics consider the last period of Thomas’s career, in which he concentrated on longer narrative poems with vivid imagery. It...
John Grisham is generally considered to be the gold standard of the legal thriller. The Street Lawyer is his ninth novel, and like his other work was critically well received, and almost guaranteed to be made into a blockbuster film, or at the...
George Chauncey completed his Ph.D. in history at Yale University. He's currently a professor of history at Columbia University, continuing the work of his grad school education after a brief period teaching at Yale. He's particularly interested...
Hilda Doolittle is known widely by her initials, H.D. “Evening" is one of the poems belonging to Sea Garden (1916), a book of poems in which H.D. examines the themes of gender, sexuality, feminism, and the human condition through the metaphor and...
“The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” was published as part of Dylan Thomas' first collection of poetry, 18 Poems, which was published to great acclaim in 1934, when Thomas was only 19 years old. The book helped Thomas earn a...
Dylan Thomas, who lived from 1914 to 1953 and was born in Swansea, Wales, is Wales’s most famous poet, a modernist poet whose writing also exhibited romanticist tendencies. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” written in 1947, is Thomas’s most...
Jorge Luis Borges: Poetry is a collection of the several poems written by Borges. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, which is his full given name, was a novelist, writer, poet, translator and text critic that was born in the late 1800’s...