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.
Sarah Dessen is an American writer born on June 6, 1970 in Evanston, Illinois. Dessen’s parents were both English professors who inspired her love for literature early on in her childhood. After high school, she attended Greensboro College for a...
The Forest of Hands and Teeth is American author Carrie Ryan's breakout novel. It is a young adult fiction novel set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian future in which zombies roam the earth and threaten those who are still human.
The novel follows...
Annie on My Mind is a novel written by Nancy Garden in 1982. The novel mainly revolves around the story of Liza Winthrop and Annie Kenyo, who first meet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and instantly become friends. Throughout the story, their...
How many novels have been written expressly for the purpose of getting married? Probably not a lot and at the top of the pack of that precious few sits This Side of Paradise which F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote because he needed the money for his...
Settlers of the Marsh is a novel first published in 1925 and written by Frederick Philip Grove. Grove was Canadian author and translator, especially while he was still living in Germany, where he translated a large volume of works. Once he moved...
The Struggle of the Naga Tribe is a play written by Indonesian poet, activist, actor, director and playwright W.S. Rendra. Many of Rendra's plays in the 1970s, including this one, were banned as the content of his work was a criticism of the...
The Black Stallion was published in 1941 and was written by Walter Farley whilst he was still in high school. It was published whilst he was an undergraduate at Columbia University and was an instant hit. Farley based the character of Alec Ramsay...
Virginia Hamilton published her young adult novel M.C. Higgins, the Great in 1974 and thereupon set a new standard for honors in that field. Hamilton became the first African-American writer in history to win the nation’s highest honor for...
The novel Volkswagen Blues is a novel that was written by Jacques Poulin. It was originally published in French in 1984 and was translated into English in 1988. The novel was well acclaimed, being nominated for the Governor General's Award for...
The Trumpet of the Swan is a book by acclaimed children's writer E.B.White. It was published in 1970 and tells the story of a trumpeter swan named Louis who is born mute. Over the course of the story, Louis tries to compensate for his lack of...
Joseph Campbell was a comparative mythologist who realized after years of studying that there was a dominant archetype for all human myths and stories. He set out to study many different cultures and their various ancient myths before concluding...
The Vercelli Book is an Old English codex, or book, compiled in the late 10th century and written in Anglo-Saxon square minuscule. Individual texts within the codex were originally written earlier--some possibly over two centuries before the the...
Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs holds a very unusual distinctive place in literary history. It is the first, last, and only utopian novel centering on African-American society published prior to the 20th century. Griggs was a college...
The legend of Tarzan was born from desperation and boredom. Edgar Rice Burroughs desperately wanted to be a writer, but had run through a long list of miscellaneous jobs: railroad cop, storekeeper, gold prospector, lightbulb peddler, and even...
The Taqwacores is Michael Muhammad Knight’s first novel, originally published in zines. After being endorsed by different labels and people, the novel was published by Autonomedia. The Taqwacores is a fictional novel that tells of an Islamic punk...
The Belle's Stratagem (A Comedy in Five Acts) was written by talented author Hannah Cowley and was published by Oliver and Boyd. Cowley was born during 1743 and died during 1809. This creative work is a romantic comedy that turned out to be the...
Mr. Popper's Penguins, written by Florence and Richard Atwater, was written in 1938. It is a children's classic now.
Richard Atwater wrote the book before he fell ill with a stroke and was disabled, where his wife, Florence Atwater finished and...
Sherman Alexie is an American novelist born on October 7, 1966 in Spokane, Washington. As a 6-month-old baby, he suffered from a brain condition called hydrocephalus and underwent surgery that successfully fixed his disability. Alexie grew up on...
Christopher Paolini began reading fantasy novels at 10 and started to work on Eragon when he was only 14years old. He quickly stopped, realizing that he had no idea how to write a full-length novel, let alone a series. Paolini read all the books...
C.S. Lewis was a British novelist born on November 29, 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. Lewis was raised in a devout Christian family, but he identified as an atheist in his teens. However, as an adult, he once again found comfort and solace in religion,...
Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes was first performed in 467 BCE, as the third play of the trilogy satyr-drama "Sphinx." Unfortunately, we only possess this play from the trilogy, and we do not possess more than one play from any of Aeschylus' other...
After twenty-five previous novels over the span of three decades, Joyce Carol Oates accomplished something with We were the Mulvaneys in 1996 that she’d never done before: she hit the number-one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Although...
Writer and essayist Jonathan Franzen came to fame with his third novel The Corrections, published in 2001. The Corrections has been heralded as a timely and astute prediction of the frantic, cynical and anxious mood that would dominate American...
East, West (1994) is an anthologized work, one of the most distinctive works to have been written by Salman Rushdie. The anthology consists of a myriad of short stories and is divided into three sections - “east”, “west”, and “east, west”. The...