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.
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...
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...
"If We Must Die" is writer Claude McKay's most famous poem, showing his deft use of the form most associated with his work, the sonnet. McKay composed the poem in response to the outburst of racial violence in the summer of 1919, dubbed "The Red...
Her is a 2013 American romantic science-fiction film directed, produced, and written by Spike Jonze. The film follows Theodore, a lonely man in the final stages of a divorce. His career is writing "beautiful handwritten letters" on behalf of other...
Perhaps O'Hara's most celebrated poem, "Having A Coke With You" describes an afternoon spent in the park with a lover.
After returning from a trip to Spain in 1960, O'Hara wrote "Having A Coke With You" following an afternoon he spent with dancer...
Released in 2016, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was a near-instant success, receiving widespread acclaim for its sobering depiction of white, working-class Americans experiencing a collective identity crisis. It remains a controversial book, with...
After the explosive release of Awakenings in 1973, Oliver Sacks waited over a decade to publish a second book. His next two books were released within a year of one another: A Leg to Stand On in 1984, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in...
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is a children's book published in 1972, and is to date one of author Judy Blume's most famous works. It is the first book in the Fudge Series, which follows the experiences of a 9-year-old fourth grader named Peter...
Although “In an Artist’s Studio” was published posthumously in 1896, the poem’s composition occurred on December 24, 1856, a date which has proved useful for scholarly interpretation. Since its publication, scholars have assumed that Rossetti’s...
The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals was written in 1785, four years after Kant had written his magnum opus, The Critique of Pure Reason. In the Groundwork, Kant aims to extend the insights of the Critique. Where the Critique inquired into...
The Reluctant Fundamentalist joins the list of what has already proven a rather fertile genre that should prove to become only more and more fertile as time moves on and sensitivities become less delicate. The central event of the story is the...
My Brilliant Friend is the first novel in a four part series known as the "Neapolitan Quartet." The series includes My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost...
The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas’s first novel, debuted as number one on The New York Times bestseller list when it was published in February 2017. Thomas developed the novel from a short story she wrote for her senior project in Belhaven University’...
Whiplash is a 2014 movie drama written and directed by Damien Chazelle. It tells the story of Andrew Neiman, a talented young drummer who is attending a prestigious conservatory and studying jazz. He is taken under the wing of a brilliant and...
"Song (Love a child is ever crying)" appears in Lady Mary Wroth's sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, published in 1621 as a companion text to the prose romance The Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus features more...
Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (The original French title is Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes) by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is a famous critique of modern society. Also...
Clear Light of Day is perhaps Anita Desai’s most beloved work, notable for its lush prose and compelling, compassionate look at the inner lives of an Indian family. It is also her most autobiographical work, taking place in the same area where she...
Author Elie Wiesel wrote Night (1960) about his experience that he and his family endured in the concentration camps during World War II between 1944 and 1945, primarily taking place the notorious camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. More than just...
Nosferatu is arguably the first great horror movie. Nearly 100 years after it was made, it can still inspire terror, revulsion, and dread. But we're lucky that we even have copies to see today.
The film was made under strange circumstances, to say...
The Fisher King is a comedy-drama movie released in 1991 to critical acclaim. It was written by Richard LaGravanese and directed by Terry Gilliam and was the first movie that Gilliam directed that he had not also written. It was also the first...
According to a popular story, Frank O'Hara composed "Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]" on the Staten Island Ferry in 1962, en route to a reading with Robert Lowell at Wagner College. At the reading, O'Hara performed this poem, even though he had...
The genre of horror buddy comedy was not particularly common at the time that Ghostbusters was released, and it redefined the genre in unforeseeable ways. Star and writer Dan Aykroyd initially imagined that Ghostbusters would be a star vehicle for...
Goodfellas is perhaps one of the best-known and most-loved mafia films of all time. Released in 1990 and directed by Martin Scorsese, the film is based on Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy, about the real life of Henry Hill, and it takes many of its...