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.
Many critics and film historians point to April 24, 1944 as the birth date of film noir, for it was on that date that Double Indemnity premiered. As is the case with so many other things to come out of Hollywood, film noir may be shaving a year or...
Willa Cather described the result of her bold experimentation into advancing the art of the novel in Death Comes for the Archbishop as “altogether a new kind of thing.” Reviewers, critics, scholars, and academicians have described the work in a...
Released in 1946, Notorious is a rather uncharacteristic Hitchcock film, in that it does not employ many of the horror-filled tropes of his other films, but it is nonetheless considered to be one of his greatest works and touted as one of his...
Stagecoach came out in 1939 to critical acclaim. It marked the first film of many in which director John Ford used Monument Valley as a backdrop for his narrative. It is also the film that made the iconic actor John Wayne a star. The film was shot...
Maya Angelou’s “Africa” was originally published in 1975 in her second volume of poetry, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well. At the time of its publication, Angelou had already established herself as a prolific writer of both prose and verse....
What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a 1993 American drama movie. The film, directed by Lasse Hallström, stars Johnny Depp, Juliette Lewis, Darlene Cates, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Hallström's realistic aesthetic, often dubbed cinéma vérité, allowed the...
In 1992, Samuel Huntington first presented the central argument of what would become The Clash of Civilizations in a lecture. Huntington was the first scholar to argue that cultural identity would be the most important factor in shaping global...
Released in 1954, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront is considered by many to be one of the greatest American films ever made. While Kazan and his legacy have been complicated and in many ways tarnished by the fact that he testified against friends...
Eugene O’Neill’s famed Mourning Becomes Electra is a complex and tragic play in three parts. Set in New England at the close of the Civil War, it was first published and staged in 1931. The play is based off Aeschylus’s Greek tragedy The Oresteia...
Maya Angelou’s “Alone” was originally published in 1975 in her second volume of verse, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well. By the time of the book’s publication, Angelou had already established herself as a prolific writer of both prose and...
Directed with true brilliance and care by Robert Mulligan, To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1962 American film adapted from Harper Lee’s 1960 semi-autobiographical, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of the same name. The film stands as one of the few screen...
Tarr is a classic fiction written by Wyndham Lewis and published in 1918. It is considered his first novel. Lewis is an English painter and writer and is known for his Vorticist movement. He was one of the founders of Vorticism, which disagreed...
There Will be Blood is often referred to as a film adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, but it's far from a direct adaptation. The names of the characters in the film do not correspond to those in the book, and the events in the novel that...
Francisco de Quevedo (Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Santibáñes Villegas) was born in Madrid, Spain 1580. He died 64 years old in 1645. He was a nobleman, writer and politician. Fracisco de Quevedo is known as one of the most important writers of...
Point Omega is a novella written by American novelist and playwright Don DeLillo. Released in 2010, it is DeLillo's fifteenth published work.
The short book recounts the tale of Richard Elster, a scholar who served in the military to write about...
A Very English Scandal is a non-fiction, true crime novel by John Preston, arts editor and television critic of the Sunday Telegraph. Published in May 2016, it tells the story of the Jeremy Thorpe Affair, a scandal that occurred in the...
Floyd Salas is an American boxer and author of several works of fiction, including What Now My Love. He was born to a Spanish family in 1931. Raised in Denver, Colorado, Salas remarked that he "grew up in a house of books." Identified as a gifted...
Markus Zusak began his career as a successful writer of young adult fiction, but for his fifth novel, Zusak set out to relate the experiences of his parents growing up during World War II for an adult audience. Zusak has said that much of the...
Inanna is an ancient goddess with earliest roots in Mesopatamia. She was worshipped in cults in Akkadia, Assyria, and Babylon as well. Her fame lasted from around 4000 B.C. until 5000 A.D. She is the goddess of love, fertility, and beauty as well...
Director Alex Garland's mind-bending, intellectual sci-fi Annihilation released to controversy. Allegations of whitewashing and studio meddling plagued the film, yet it was a massive critical success -- but did dismally financially.
Nevertheless,...
The Exorcist is the most profitable horror movie of all time, and possibly one of the most disturbing. It was released in 1973, and stars Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Max von Sydow and Jason Miller. It was developed from the book of the same name...
Martin Buber’s most influential work, I and Thou, was originally published in German as Ich and Du in 1923 and was translated into English in 1937. It is the foundational text of what has come to be called the philosophy of dialogue. This covers...
The Archaeology of Knowledge is Foucault’s historiographical treatise—his theory of how to study history—and it was first published in French in 1969. It lays out Foucault’s method for doing history, in particular how to assemble and interpret the...
The German Girl is a historical fiction novel written by Armando Lucas Correa. Correa is a Cuban author and journalist, and this novel was first published on October, 2016.
In terms of narrative, The German Girl takes place in two distinct yet...