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Gorgias is one of the earliest of Plato’s dialogues, dating back to a period in the 4th century B.C.E. when the Sophists' rhetoric reached a fever pitch of popularity in Athens. Sophistry was viewed by Plato as the epitome of false rhetoric...

Victorian poet Christina Rossetti was well-known for her ability to craft poetry that remains at once deeply philosophical, yet fully accessible to many readers. Oftentimes, her religious themes and fascination with the ephemerality of experience...

"Wind," published in Ted Hughes' first collection The Hawk and The Rain (1957), operates on two levels of poetic meaning. On the surface, the poem narrates a destructive storm. However, the poem's final stanzas suggest that Hughes uses the storm's...

The Wizard of Oz remains, to this day, one of the most iconic American films of all time. Production was complicated and huge in scale, with a revolving door of directors coming in to work on the film, an ambitious undertaking unprecedented in...

Raging Bull is a 1980 drama directed by one of the most respected American directors, Martin Scorsese. A complex and subtle film about the tragic and violent life of a prizefighter, it was based on boxer Jake LaMotta's autobiography. Actor Robert...

Mean Girls is a high school teen comedy released in 2004 by Paramount Pictures, starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams. Mark Waters directed the script written by Tina Fey, adapted from the self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind...

Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned by the Soviet government in 1925 to direct a film commemorating the 20th anniversary of the unsuccessful revolution of 1905. Eisenstein originally envisioned this project as an eight-part episodic film which...

The Giving Tree is a children's illustrated book, written by Shel Silverstein, and published on in 1964 by Harper & Row. The book was widely acclaimed for dealing with mature themes and conveying a deep moral of sacrifice and unrequited love.

Goodnight Moon was written by Margaret Wise Brown with illustrations by Clement Hurd and published in 1947. Although today considered a classic of children’s literature that is more likely than not to be found in a home with a pre-school child as...

The City of Embers, written by Jeanne DuPrau, is the first in the eponymous series, and was published in 2003 under the genre of children's science-fiction. The book was followed by three sequels and a comic book to follow in 2012, illustrated by...

Moon Over Manifest is children’s novel based on real historical events that happened in The United States. It is the first book written by Clare Vanderpool and was published on May 2, 1995. The story centers around a young girl named Abilene, and...

Ramona Quimby has a vivid imagination and alot of spunk, which sometimes earns her the rather unfair reputation of being a bit of a pest. Of course, she doesn't mean to be a pest. Circumstances conspire with each other to make her seem that way....

In 1964 Shel Silverstein was a uniquely prolific and productive writer of children’s books. On the heels of his first such book published a year earlier, 1964 saw the publication of four books for his juvenile audience including perennial...

James Moloney is an Australian-born writer, whose work is largely aimed at children and young readers, although he has written novels for adults. Since his first book was published in 1992, Moloney has been nominated for a large number of literary...

Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” was originally published in 1978 in her third volume of poetry, And Still I Rise. The poem was also featured that same year in Cosmopolitan magazine. At the time of its publication, Angelou was already well known...

First published in The Liberator in 1921, "America" is Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay's powerful reflection on both the attraction and the antagonism he felt toward the nation in which he spent much of his adult life. Written while McKay was...

In Time is a 2011 sci-fi action thriller written and directed by Andrew Niccol. The film was produced by Marc Abraham, Eric Newman along with Niccol and was made for an estimated $40,000,000 budget and returned $173,930,596 in gross sales...

Graham Greene published Brighton Rock as one of his "entertainments," geared towards a popular audience, in 1938. He is reported to have started writing the novel as a simple detective story, but the depth and complexity of spiritual torment felt...

Written and directed by Federico Fellini, 8 1/2 is an Italian avant-garde film released in 1963. Its title derives from its position as the eighth and a half film that Fellini directed (if one considers his two short films and a collaboration each...

Even if you have never heard of Rashomon, you are still likely familiar with the plot of this 1950 Japanese film directed by the master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Television shows as diverse as All in the Family, The X-Files and King of the Hill...

Author and cancer doctor Rachel Naomi Remen's 2001 novel My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging tells readers stories of kindness and joy. She tells a story about her Rabbi grandpa, a man that saw life in a very...

For many relatively young readers, Stephen Chbosky's novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower is one of the most important books of their lives. Naturally, when a film version of the 1999 novel was first announced - originally with the legendary John...

Our Mutual Friend is the last novel Charles Dickens completed during his lifetime; The Mystery of Edwin Drood was left incomplete when the author died in 1870. The novel was published in 20 parts spread over 19 months (the final installment was a...

First published in 1920, Claude McKay's "The Lynching" stands as a powerful condemnation of one of the most horrific chapters of American history. A form of unlawful killing carried out by mobs, lynchings increased in the years after...