Most Popular Study Guides

Beauty and the Beast and Other Tales includes a story of Beauty and the Beast that was extended by the author. This version is the most well known, the plot of it is used for most movies covering the story.

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont is a...

Animal Farm was published on the heels of World War II, in England in 1945 and in the United States in 1946. George Orwell wrote the book during the war as a cautionary fable in order to expose the seriousness of the dangers posed by Stalinism and...

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, published in 1937, is one of the author's most widely read novels, largely due to its ubiquitous presence in the high school curriculum. As a result, this mythic story of two opposites - the clever, wiry George...

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...

Journals are commenced for a number of reasons. Sometimes they are begun as diaries which offer a psychological trail into self-reflection and a more intuitive level of self-awareness. Other journals offer the opportunity to write down immediate...

Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's first novel, published in 1813. Some scholars also consider it one of her most mature novels.

Austen began writing Pride and Prejudice under the title First Impressions in 1796, at the age of twenty-one. She...

Hawksmoor is a mystery novel written by the English author Peter Ackroyd. It was first published in 1985. Ackroyd's work mostly covers a societal issue or historical recaps. He won many awards for his literary works. Hawksmoor mainly narrates the...

Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was written after Hosseini traveled back to his native Afghanistan to examine for himself the nation’s situation in the aftermath of decades of turmoil. In early 2007, Hosseini told Time...

The Hunger Games is the first novel in a trilogy that also includes Catching Fire and Mockingjay. Together, they are known as the Hunger Games Trilogy. This first novel has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than sixty weeks, and...

The Slave was a novel written by Polish author Isaac Bashevis Singer and was published in 1962. Singer was born in 1902 and died in 1991. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature sixteen years after the novel was published.

The Slave talks about a...

Camara Laye's The Dark Child is a 1953 French-language memoir about the author's childhood in Guinea. The son of a protective mother and a mystical-minded blacksmith and goldsmith father, Laye writes with affection about Malinke-Muslim traditions...

Sir William Golding composed Lord of the Flies shortly after the end of WWII. At the time of the novel's composition, Golding, who had published an anthology of poetry nearly two decades earlier, had been working for a number of years as a teacher...

'Tis a Pity She's a Whore is an early modern English tragedy written in the early 1620s by John Ford. It was first published in 1633 and in its original published form was entitled 'Tis Pitty Shee's a Whoore. It was first performed between 1629...

The early nineteenth century was not a good time to be a female writer -- particularly if one was audacious enough to be a female novelist. Contemporary beliefs held that no one would be willing to read the work of a woman; the fantastic success...

Eileen is writer Otessa Moshfegh's successful debut novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Eileen follows an unhappy and disturbed...

The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is widely considered to be F. Scott Fitzergerald's greatest novel. It is also considered a seminal work on the fallibility of the American dream. It focuses on a young man, Jay Gatsby, who, after falling in...

Although J.D. Salinger has written many short stories, The Catcher in the Rye is Salinger's only novel and his most notable work, earning him great fame and admiration as a writer and sparking many high school students' interest in great...

"Shakespeare Behind Bars" is a movie documentary that tells the story of the most unlikely Shakespeare Company in the world. It was one of only sixteen documentaries out of six hundred and twenty four submissions to be selected for its world...

Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit (released in 2017) nominally tells the story of the 1967 Detroit Race Riots and the horrible Algiers Motel incident in which police officers murdered several unarmed people - both white and black. More broadly, though, ...

George Farquhar is an Irish writer born in Derry, Ireland in 1677. At a young age, Farquhar demonstrated a natural capacity for writing. At 7 years, he was writing short stories and always thinking up ideas for a new play. After graduating grade...

Throughout the twentieth century, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has become famous not only as one of Twain's greatest achievements, but also as a highly controversial piece of literature. In certain Southern states, the novel was banned due...

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird during a very tense time racially in her home state of Alabama. The South was still segregated, forcing blacks to use separate facilities apart from those used by whites, in almost every aspect of society....

Gulliver's Travels, a misanthropic satire of humanity, was written in 1726 by Jonathan Swift. Like many other authors, Swift uses the journey as the backdrop for his satire. He invents a second author, Captain Lemuel Gulliver, who narrates and...

In his short novella Signs Preceding the End of the World (originally published in Spanish but later published in English), which The Guardian said "From its opening pages... this marvelously rich, slim novel is working on many levels," author...