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Consisting of 15,693 lines of verse, the Iliad has been hailed as the greatest epic of Western civilization. Although we know little about the time period when it was composed and still less about the epic's composer, the Iliad's influence on...

Hard Times was originally published in serial form, in a magazine called Household Words beginning on April 1, 1854. The last time that Dickens had published a work in serial form was in 1841 and when publication of Hard Times had begun, Dickens...

Franny and Zooey is a major piece of J.D. Salinger's Glass family saga. After his 1951 classic, The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger devoted his time to writing about this family of mystical prodigies in several stories from Nine Stories (1953) and...

The Eumenides is the third part of Aeschylus' great trilogy, the Oresteia. It has been said that Athens left the world two masterpieces of surpassing beauty: the Parthenon and the Oresteia. Aeschylus was the great father of drama in the West, and...

Endgame was written by Beckett in 1957 and translated in English in 1958. There are several differences between the French original and the English translation, notably the title and the scene where Clov spots the young boy. The play falls into...

World War I began in 1914 and ended on Nov. 11, 1918. Fought primarily between the Triple Alliance powers of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Triple Entente countries of England, France, Russia, Italy, and the U.S. (Italy defected...

Cervantes is considered one of the greatest writers of all time. Often, Cervantes is compared to Shakespeare. Both men have become "national literary treasures" glowing during "golden ages" of literature. Cervantes was writing along aside a number...

Anne's diary was written during the years 1942-1944. These years were the toughest times of World War II in Europe. To make sense of World War II, one must begin with the aftermath of World War I and the Versailles Treaty of 1919.

At the beginning...

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact motive Dumas had in mind when he wrote The Count of Monte Cristo. He wrote the novel in 1844 and it was published in 18 fragments between the years 1844-46. This was at the same time that Dumas embarked on his...

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was the last of Twain's novels written during the apex of his career. As a work it shows his more mature writing, hinting at some of the cynical and dark themes that he would obsess over in his final...

In 1846 Karl Marx was exiled from Paris on account of his radical politics. He moved to Belgium where he attempted to assemble a ragtag group of exiled German artisans into an unified political organization, the German Working Men's Association....

Recently named among the top 25 non-fiction works of the century, Richard Wright's Black Boy has made a strong impact on American literature with its strong commentary on the cultural, political, racial, religious, and social issues of 20th...

Melville finished his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, when he was all of thirty-two years old. Still a young writer, he had crafted one of the most incredibly dense and imaginative works in all of literature, a book now praised by many as the greatest...

The Bacchae was presented posthumously along with Iphigenia in Aulis and the lost Alcmaeon in Corinth in 406-405 BCE. The three plays were brought back to Athens by Euripides' son, Euripides the Younger. They were probably written around 407 BCE,...

Aristotle's Politics is one of the most influential and enduring texts of political philosophy in all of history. The Aristotelian tradition, following from the philosophy of Plato and continuing in the writings of Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas and...

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics was written around 340 BC. It is probably named after either his father or son, who were both named Nicomachus. Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle's most mature work on ethics. That the argument as presented in the book...

Anna Karenina was published in serial form from 1873-1877. It created a great stir in society?reports from the time claim that everyone in Russian Society was discussing the book and waiting eagerly for the next installment to appear. The critical...

The Ambassadors is divided into twelve sections called "books." In 1903, these sections were published, in serial form, in a journal called The North American Review. Later that year, the novel was published as a whole, though there were...

Agamemnon is only the first play of the great tragic trilogy, the Oresteia. Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia around 458 B.C.E.. It is his sole trilogy to survive intact. The two other plays, Choephori and Eumenides, and a lost satyr play called...

Absalom, Absalom! was published in 1936, after Faulkner's three seminal novels The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and A Light in August (1932). One of the strange things about this chronology is that two of the narrators of...