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Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman is perhaps the Nobel-Prize-winning playwright's greatest and most enduring work. Published in 1975, the work is often studied and performed in colleges and universities, as well as staged worldwide.

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The Real Inspector Hound is a one-act play modeled after the parlor mystery genre that was extremely popular at the time. Written between 1961-62, it is considered one of Tom Stoppard’s early works. The play is actually a play-within-a-play: the...

George Etherege’s Man of Mode is one of the most renowned plays of Restoration England. Critic Gamini Salgado wrote, “Its chief merit consists in the uncompromising realism with which it investigates the implications of Restoration libertinism.”

Marie Lu spent most of her youth writing, although Legend is her first published novel. In writing Legend, Lu was inspired by the stage version of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. Hugo's work and its subsequent adaptations follow Jean Valjean,...

Nietzsche regarded Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be one of his most important works. Ultimately, it is a work about overcoming the self. It combines inverted allusions to the Bible with Greek mythology and ancient Persian religion.

Nietzsche composed...

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Downis the poignant story of a young Hmong girl suffering from epilepsy who is caught in the cultural chasm between her family and her rationalist American doctors. The story shows the tragic consequences of a...

Pushkin, already an established poet, began writing Eugene Onegin in 1823 while exiled from the capital to southern Russia. He published parts of each chapter in serialization as he wrote them before printing each complete chapter in booklet form....

Burmese Daysis George Orwell's first novel, and a searing critique of British imperialism. It is notable for deriving its plot and themes from the events of Orwell's own life.

In 1922 Orwell traveled to Burma to become an English police officer....

"The Devil and Tom Walker" first appeared in author Washington Irving's 1824 collection of short stories,Tales of a Traveller, in the "Money-Diggers" section. Though it is still widely known, it is not quite as famous as some of his other works,...

The Garden Party and Other Storiesby Katherine Mansfield was first published in 1922 by Constable and Co., a notable publishing house in London. The work was dedicated to her husband, John Middleton Murry. The collection of short stories was the...

This collection of short stories includes some of Ray Bradbury's most famous and cherished works. Many are from his 1950 short story collection, The Martian Chronicles, which chronicles the colonization of Mars by men from Earth. Although The...

Chinese Cinderella is the story of Adeline Yen Mah's youth as the unwanted daughter of a rising businessman in the midst of a great transformation within Chinese society. Adeline’s affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother...

Silencewas published in 1966 and is often regarded as Endo's finest achievement. It won the Tanizaki prize in Japan the year it was published.Silencetells the story of a young Portuguese priest, sent to Japan in the 1600s when Christians in Japan...

Equus,written in 1973, is one of Peter Shaffer's most celebrated plays. It tells the story of a boy who has a strange, religious fascination with horses. He is treated by a psychiatrist who, in turn, realizes some things about himself during these...

In a letter to the Daily Chronicle dated 28 April 1898, Shaw explained the conversations that led him to writeMrs. Warren's Profession.His friend, actress Janet Achurch, had pointed him to the short storyYvetteby Guy de Maupassant as a possible...

Emerson lived and wrote in the days of Westward expansion, religious upheaval, and domestic and international political ferment.

He and his generation grew up during the War of 1812, the Annexation of Texas, the Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the...

The Wars is a 1977 novel by Timothy Findley about the experiences of a young Canadian officer in World War I. Findley dedicated the novel to his uncle, Thomas Irving Findley, who fought in the First World War and survived. Findley drew upon...

Three Cups of Tea, originally published in 2006, struck a chord with the American public almost immediately, rocketing to the New York Times bestseller list for four years. A story infused with adventure, set in the little-known Baltistan region...

"The Rover," alternatively known as "The Banish't Cavaliers," is the most frequently read and performed of Aphra Behn's plays (Burke, 118). First performed by the Duke's Company at the Dorset Garden Theatre in 1677, the play was initially...

Educating Rita is one of playwright Willy Russell’s most well regarded works, as well as one of the most popular works for the theater of the late 20th century. Russell based the play on his own experience of growing up in a working class...

One of James Baldwin’s earliest works, “Sonny’s Blues” is a perennial favorite of college anthologies and perhaps his most widely read short story. Initially published in 1957, it was included in the 1965 collection entitled Going to Meet the Man....

Left to Tell is Immaculée Ilibagiza's memoir about her ordeal surviving the Rwandan Genocide. The book was published in 2006, 12 years after the 1994 genocide that claimed one million lives in 100 days. Immaculée recounts her life leading up to...

Cyrano de Bergerac is one of the most famous 19th century works for the stage. It has been staged countless times and is still a mainstay of high school, college, and professional theater. It has also received a great deal of scholarly attention...

Originally published in 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments revealsAdam Smith's comprehensive system that explains where morality arises from, how people make moral decisions, and what constitutes virtue. This philosophical tract was written...