Newest Study Guides

The first African-American poet to rise to that level of accomplishment and fame which critics designate as the status of “major poet” was Paul Laurence Dunbar. The most famous line of verse he ever wrote can be found in “Sympathy” although the...

Published in 2009, Love Begins in Winter is a short story collection by Anglo-American author Simon Van Booy. The collection won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award which, at 35,000, is the world's largest short story award. At the...

"Save as Many as You Ruin" is a short story written by Simon Van Booy. It was published in The Secret Lives of People in Love, the first short story collection that Van Booy published. These stories, set all over the Earth, all focus on the themes...

The Ballad of Reading Goal was among the last written works of Oscar Wilde. The poem was written after two years after Oscar Wilde was released from prison and the poem focuses on the execution of one of the prison inmate who was in the same...

An iconoclast in his time and one of the most brilliant writers of the Victorian era, Oscar Wilde had a plethora of his works published and well received. Unfortunately, he was incarcerated for “gross indecency” and had to spend a portion of his...

The Portrait of Mr. H. W. is a work of prose written by Oscar Wilde, originally published in 1889 in the Blackwood's Magazine. The text is often referred to as a story, however, it also contains elements of literary criticism and biography. The...

The Conservationist is Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer’s sixth novel, published in 1974. When awarding literature’s highest honor to Gordimer in 1981, the committee specifically singled out this novel along with Burger’s Daughter (1979) and July’s...

"Astronomer's Wife" was published in 1936. It was featured in a collection titled The White Horses of Vienna and Other Stories. The collection established Boyle on the literary scene as a promising talent and was unanimously praised by critics....

"The Country Husband" is a short story in the book written by John Cheever called 'The Stories of John Cheever', which was published in 1978. The Country Husband revolves around the character of Francis Weed, who is is married with children and...

“Goodbye, My Brother” kicks off the celebrated collection titled The Stories of John Cheever. The 1978 publication was award the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the next year and the 1981 release took home that year’s top paperback honor from the...

John Cheever’s highly anthologized short story “The Enormous Radio” belongs to the genre of fiction known as Magic Realism in which the normality of everyday life is infused with the unexplained of the fabulous. With this in mind, the story...

The Road to Wellville is a novel written by T. C. Boyle and published in 1993. This novel is titled after a booklet written by C. W. Post, the founder of a cereal business that soon became one of Kellogg's biggest competitors.

Boyle's novel is set...

Greasy Lake is a short story written by the American writer named T. Coraghessan Boyle. The short story appears in a collection published in 1985 with other 15 short stories.

The themes discussed in the collection range from what humans perceive...

“The Golem” is a short story, the genre of which is fantasy. Avram Davidson, who is the famous American writer, wrote it in 1955. E. Drozd translated this story into the Russian language. This story is suitable for readers of all ages.

Avram...

An upper-class member of New York high society, Edith Wharton did not need to write for a living because she was born among what would now be called the top tenth of the "one-percent": a set of fabulously wealthy families whose riches came from...

“Freedom on the Wallaby” is probably Henry Lawson’s most famous poem. Packed with the passion of political revolt, it is a radical act as much as it is a simple bit of verse. The stimulus for Lawson to compose the poem was the Australian shearers’...

The poem Andy’s gone with the cattle was published in 1888 in The Australian Town & Country Journal. The poem is written by the Australian writer Henry Lawson and the poem is followed by a sequel entitled Andy’s return, published in the same...

Henry Lawson’s sketch story “On the Edge of a Plain” features a recurring character who pops up time and again throughout the author’s canon. The character and at least a few of the incidents he get involved was partly inspired by a real-life...

Anyone coming to “A Child in the Dark, and a Foreign Father” before reading any of his other works would almost certainly come away with a distinctly different impression of the type of writer Henry Lawson was than those who concluded their survey...

"The No-Guitar Blues," written by Gary Soto, is a short story. It is about a boy named Fausto, who very much wants a guitar. He asks his parents, but they say that guitars are too expensive. He then tries to think of ways to get a guitar. After a...

Sharing its name with tale by Brothers Grimm, The Robber Bridegroom was noted short story writer Eudora Welty’s first novel, published in 1942. A mélange of myth and legend with generous allusions to tales both fairy-based and folk-based, Welty...

Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” was initially published in Atlantic magazine and then showed up in her 1941 collection of stories titled A Curtain of Green and Other Stories. The inspiration for the tale came during Welty’s days as a...

The Optimist’s Daughter was first presented to a once-idealistic society soured on the cynicism of assassinations, riots, and the comeback of Richard Nixon and took the form of a long short story published in the New Yorker in 1969. By 1972, an...

Eudora Welty is an American author born on April 13, 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi. As a child, she was continuously inspired by her mother, a teacher, and her father, an insurance executive. Welty’s mother instilled in her a love for reading and a...