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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...

The nature of Dylan Thomas lies in the tragic characteristics of the drama extending to his life. It is plagued by tales of alcoholism, jealousy, and penury. Yet, despite engaging in excessive self-indulgence, Thomas launched himself into writing...

The Laramie project is a play written by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project and first staged in 2000 at the Ricketson Theatre in Denver Laramie.

The play is set in Laramie and was inspired by the real case of an American...

Ten Little Indians is a 2004 collection of short stories by Sherman Alexie. The collection is composed of nine short stories that tell of the struggles of the Spokane tribe, a Native American tribe that lives in Washington state. Though there are...

Western philosophy in the 18th century was characterized by the emergence of oppositional thought to ancient notions of epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. Immanuel Kant occupies a central role in the generation of several radical new...

Since its publication in 1781, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has established itself as one of the essential volumes in the history of philosophical literature. The complex work stands on its own as the equal of such other foundational...

Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Galapagos, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and then attended Cornell University. However, he dropped out at the beginning of 1943 and joined the US Army.

Published in 1985, Galapagos is a novel that describes life...

King Leopold’s Ghost was written by Adam Hochschild and was first published in the fall of 1998. After being refused by nine different publishing houses, the tenth house accepted it and the novel became an international bestseller and won the Mark...

The House of the Scorpion was written by Nancy Farmer and published in 2002 by Atheneum Books. It is the first of two books in the series, and is a combination of the science fiction and YA genres. It is set in the future and largely takes place...

George Bernard Shaw was moved to write his The Doctor’s Dilemma in order explore fully the paradox of how a man can be a genius but still lack honor. It is this tragic circumstance of the individual that moved to Shaw to view the play as a comedy...