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Zorba the Greek is a novel written by Nikos Kazantzakis that was first published in 1946. Kazantzakis is a Cretan author who is considered one of the most influential modern Greek writers in history. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in...

In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. She was also the first black woman of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize in any category. The honor was a culmination of her trajectory...

Ran is Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's rendering of Shakespeare's King Lear, mixed with an adaptation of the legends of the Japanese daimyō, Mōri Motonari. It was produced in 1985 to critical acclaim, and is widely considered one of the...

Milton wrote “Lycidas” a few months after his friend, Edward King, died in a shipwreck in 1637. The poem is a pastoral elegy—a form of poetry used to memorialize the dead—and has become one of the most famous reflections on loss in the English...

"To Wordsworth" is an altered Shakespearean sonnet, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and addressed to William Wordsworth, mourning Wordsworth's turn to reactionary politics exemplified by his 1814 book The Excursion.

In 1814, William Wordsworth...

Translations is a play written by Brian Friel in 1980. It is a play in three acts that looks at language, and the history of cultural imperialism in Ireland. It was first performed at the Guildhall in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1980, a decision...

David Mamet’s Oleanna premiered in May 1992, as the first production of Mamet’s Back Bay Theater Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The debut featured William H. Macy as John, an aloof and pretentious academic, and Rebecca Pidgeon as Carol, his...

Shutter Island (2010) is a psychological thriller directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Michelle Williams, and Max von Sydow. Released by Paramount Pictures, the film is adapted from Dennis...

Philip Sidney's "Ring Out Your Bells" first appeared under the title of "Dirge" (a song that laments the dead) in Sidney's 1598 volume Certaine Sonets. It may have been written after the marriage of Sidney's former fiancée Lady Penelope Devereux...

"Happy the Man" is one of John Dryden's most familiar short poems to the modern reader. And yet, this poem is not entirely of his own making. In addition to being a playwright and prodigious creator of unique poetic flights of fancy, Dryden began...

“Easter Wings” is perhaps 17th-century English poet George Herbert’s most beloved poem. It is famous for its shape: the words on the page are arranged like a pair of wings. Besides “Easter Wings,” Herbert is also well-known for a second...

The Emperor Jones is a play written by Eugene O'Neill and first produced in New York City in 1920. It tells the story of a black American man named Brutus Jones who, after killing another black man in a dice game, escapes jail and goes to a small...

Published in 1962, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Shirley Jackson’s final novel before her death in 1965. Told from the perspective of 18-year-old Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, it focuses on the lives of Merricat, her older sister...

"The Nightingale" by Sir Philip Sidney is a poem comprised of two twelve-line stanzas at a time when Italian meter and form were first entering the English literary tradition. Published in a 1598 folio of Sidney’s poems, Certaine Sonets, the poem...

Based on the novel of same name by Winston Groom, Robert Zemeckis' 1994 film Forrest Gump tells the story of a mentally and physically challenged man in 1960s Alabama, and his various foibles and incredible luck. It chronicles Forrest's early...

“The Listeners” is the most famous and frequently anthologized poem by Walter de la Mare, an author otherwise known mostly for his horror fiction and works for children. It first appeared in print in 1912 in de la Mare’s third collection of...

Brooklyn is one of Colm Tóibín's most popular and best-known works. Published in 2009, it achieved both critical and commercial success. It was translated into 22 languages, and sold more than a quarter of a million copies. It was longlisted for...

John Ford’s The Searchers is considered to be one of the greatest American westerns of all time. Released in 1956, it is based on a novel by Alan Le May and depicts a version of the Texas-Indian wars. A commercial as well as critical success, the...

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is a coming-of-age, young-adult novel written by Benjamin Alire Saenz and published in 2012. The story takes us back to 1987, where we meet two young Mexican-American boys residing in El...

Trumpet is a novel written by Jackie Kay in 1998. It was the first novel she wrote, and it won the 1998 Guardian Fiction Prize.

Trumpet begins with the death of Joss Moody, a highly successful jazz musician, and documents the different reactions...

Published in 1998, Sindiwe Magona's novel Mother to Mother was inspired by the death of Fulbright Scholar Amy Biehl who was killed in South Africa while trying to organize the nation's first truly democratic elections. Biehl was murdered very...

Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote "The Blessed Damozel" when he was 19 years old. It was one of the very first poems of his career, and it later became one of the most influential poems of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The first version of "The Blessed...

Published in 1970, The Bluest Eye came about at a critical moment in the history of American civil rights. Morrison began Pecola's story as a short piece in 1962; it became a novel-in-progress by 1965. It was written, as one can see from the...

A 1987 novel by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah is considered one of the most significant postcolonial novels in recent times. This is his fifth novel and one of the prominent works to have emerged in his canon. It was...