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Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote Weep Not, Child while studying at at Leeds University in England in 1962. Weep Not, Child was the second novel Ngugi wrote, although it was published before his first, The River Between. It follows the tragic story of...

The Red Badge of Courage, a coming-of-age tale set in an unnamed battle of the Civil War (most likely the Battle of Chancellorsville), is Stephen Crane's most famous novel. Serialized in 1894 and published in 1895 when he was only 23, the novel is...

Mythology is perhaps the most highly acclaimed modern collection of Greek and Roman (and even some Norse) myths. Written by Edith Hamilton in 1942, the collection draws on classical and other ancient sources to retell a wide variety of tales. In...

Exeter Book, or the Codex Exoniensis, is a 10th Century book, or codex, that contains most of the surviving Anglo-Saxon poetry. Only four collections of Old English verse exist, out of which the Exeter Book is the largest and most impressive....

Middlesex, published in 2002 by Jeffrey Eugenides, is the story of Cal Stephanides, an intersex person born in 1960 to a Greek-American family living in a wealthy suburb of Detroit. Thanks to a recessive gene passed down by his inbred family, Cal...

The Analects of Confucius, Lun Yu, or simply, The Analects, were written about 500 BC and are traditionally attributed to Confucius. However, much of the actual text was written by his students over a time period spanning the thirty to fifty years...

The Satanic Verses is a magical realist epic with three major plotlines. The first of these plotlines follows two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, after they miraculously survive a plane crash over the English Channel. The...

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel. It was published in two installments in 1837 in the Southern Literary Messenger but was not completed due to Poe’s firing from the magazine. The full novel was...

Though D. H. Lawrence's third published novel, Sons and Lovers (1913) is largely autobiographical. The novel, which began as "Paul Morel," was sparked by the death of Lawrence's mother, Lydia. Lawrence reexamined his childhood, his relationship...

The Pilgrim’s Progress is John Bunyan’s most enduring legacy. The book, which went through eleven editions in the author’s lifetime, has never subsequently been out of print. Though it now appears as two parts in one volume, the parts were...

In the Skin of a Lion covers the years 1913 – 1938, and is set in the city of Toronto and surrounding rural areas. It is a time of industrialization and growth for Toronto, a change that could not be accomplished without the labor of immigrants.

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Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, stands as one of the great slave narratives, in the company of Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick...

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W.W. Denslow, is without a doubt one of the most beloved children's books of all time. Its 1939 film adaptation is equally renowned; it routinely appears on lists of the...

Published in 1955 and initially dismissed by critics and audiences, Pedro Páramo has since established itself as the precursor to a new phase of Latin American writing, as well as a superlative example of modernism in contemporary literature.

The...

The Maze Runner is the first book in a dystopian science-fiction trilogy aimed at the young adult reader. The story follows Thomas, a teenage boy, who awakens in an elevator with no memory of the past except his own name. When the doors open he...

Tartuffe, first performed as a three-act play before King Louis XIV in 1664, and then in its official five-act version in 1669, is perhaps Moliere’s greatest accomplishment. Its piercing commentary on hypocrisy and impiety, its light-hearted wit...

By the time Sarah Orne Jewett published The Country of the Pointed Firs in two parts in The Atlantic in 1896, she was already a respected and well-known author. She had been receiving reviews from major figures such as William Dean Howells for...

Thomas Hardy published his fourteenth novel, Jude the Obscure, as a magazine serial in 1895. It was released in book form in November of that year. Hardy's previous novels and short stories had been extremely popular, with the exception of Tess of...

The White Devil is one of the two most popular plays written by John Webster, the other being The Duchess of Malfi. The White Devil was first performed in 1612 at the Red Bull theater, where it was largely considered a failure. It is unknown why ...

Le Morte d’Arthur is an epic written by Sir Thomas Malory, a “knight prisoner,” published around 1485.

Le Morte d’Arthur tells the epic tale of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. The Arthurian legend, however, significantly predates ...

Published in 2003, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time has won more than 17 literary awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, sold more than 10 million copies and grossed 14 million in 2004 alone.

Haddon admits that he...

Harold Pinter was working as an actor in England when he stayed briefly at a dilapidated boardinghouse that would serve as his inspiration for both The Birthday Party and The Room. As he has explained in many published works, he wrote more from...

A Journal of the Plague Year is one of Daniel Defoe's most popular and strangest works; it is an amalgam of history and fiction that attempts to relate what life was like in London during the plague of 1665-66. Published in 1722, nearly 57 years...

The House of Bernarda Alba was written in 1936 during a flurry of creative activity for Lorca. He liked to say that his plays took years to form in his mind, and then a matter of weeks to write. Though this claim is not represented in the process...