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Famed children’s author Linda Sue Park published A Long Walk to Water in 2010. Based on the true story of Salva Dut, a Sudanese “Lost Boy,” it interweaves the tales of Dut with those of a fictional young girl named Nya. Dut’s story takes place in...

Pather Panchali was inspired by filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s desire to create more realistic films with actual locations and natural actors about real Indian issues. While traveling in London, Ray saw Bicycle Thieves, an Italian film directed by...

“Sonnet 24: Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is part of her collection of poems entitled Sonnets from the Portuguese. The collection of 44 sonnets was published in 1850 and dedicated to her husband,...

Along with Elia Kazan's East of Eden, which was released six months earlier, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause is best known for forging James Dean's legacy as a screen icon. Dean, Ray, writer Irving Shulman, and a cast of committed young stars...

The Philadelphia Story remains one of the best-loved romantic comedies—more specifically, a “comedy of remarriage”—of the 20th century, and features a stunning cast of Hollywood heavyweights delivering some of the most crystalline dialogue in...

Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 film noir, melodrama, and dark comedy directed by visionary filmmaker Billy Wilder, who also co-wrote the screenplay with one of his longtime collaborators, Charles Brackett. The duo initially conceived the film as a...

The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir written by the American writer Joan Didion. Most known for her literary journalism, Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking as a personal account of her grief not long after the death of her...

Tuck Everlasting is a classic tale about a family that does not age and is immune to injury and illness, and one girl who chooses to fiercely protect their secret.

Natalie Babbitt's inspiration for writing this book came from an experience with...

It Happened One Night is a pre-Code romantic comedy beloved for its charm, its picaresque style, and the glowing performances of its two stars, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. It is considered to be one of the first "screwball comedies," a...

In 1928, MacLeish produced what many consider to be the defining manifesto for modernist poetry, “Ars Poetica,” with the famous concluding line insisting that

“A poem should not mean / But be.”

One of the conventions of modernism was, perhaps...

Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey is a beloved hybrid of bildungsroman, travel writing, political commentary, and diary. It achieved even more prominence when turned into a popular film in 2004, and has...

James M. Cain, the author of the book on which Mildred Pierce is based, is one of several great American crime writers of the 1940s, a group that included Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich. The novel Mildred Pierce was a...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” is part of the volume Sonnets from the Portuguese. The collection of 44 sonnets was published in 1850 and dedicated to her husband, the poet Robert Browning. This...

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of stories relating to the infamous character Sherlock Holmes, a notable detective who investigates various mysteries and crime set in the 1900s. George Newness publishing company first published...

Wall Street is a 1987 film, directed and co-written by Oliver Stone. At the time of its release, New York finance was riding high and many were talking about the rise of the "yuppie" generation—young professionals who were profiting off the stock...

A charming but also deeply philosophical novella for children, The Little Prince was first published in the United States in April 1943, and published in France only in 1946, two years after its author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry died. Today a...

Published in 1979, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler appeared near the end of Italo Calvino’s career. This literary work is considered one of his greatest, especially for the nontraditional style and structure that almost spits in the face of...

An irreverent science-fiction adventure novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy constitutes the first installment of a five-book “trilogy” by Douglas Adams. The story is derived largely from a radio show, the scripts of which Adams compiled to...

Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis was published in 1999. Like his main character Bud, Curtis grew up in Flint, Michigan.

Curtis drew many of the book's events from the actual circumstances of the Great Depression and stories of the 1930s...

Tucker: The Man and His Dream is one of the more lauded films of Francis Ford Coppola's from the 1980s. The backstory for the project dates all the way to Coppola's childhood, when his father invested in the Tucker car company, an innovative...

In 1928, Charlie Chaplin's The Circus was released to positive reviews. However, things were starting to change, as silent films were getting replaced with "talkies"—movies with sound. The first talking picture, called The Jazz Singer, was...

Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” appears as the last poem in his career-altering book Life Studies, published in 1959, but as Lowell described to Al Alvarez, a fellow writer and critic, the poem was the first in the book to be completed. The final...

Lost in Yonkers is a play by Neil Simon, a highly acclaimed work that bridged his career into the 1990s and established his reputation as one of America’s major playwrights of the latter 20th century. In the 60s and 70s, Simon's reputation had...

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one of the most famous and beloved works of children’s literature. It was published in 1972, eight years after the original. Elevator continues the story of...