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.
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was to the manor born among the Bostonian elites in 1821. He would eventually establish long-term correspondences with such literary elites of New England as Hawthorne and Longfellow. While attending Harvard, his tutor...
Elizabeth Bishop was born to become a poet. Like so many of the greatest names in American poetry, Bishop is a New Englander who came into the world in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. Almost immediately commenced a series of events of that would...
Nella Larsen; Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories was published in 2001. Nella Larsen wrote a couple short stories, and Quicksand and Passing, two books. However, as she could not find a publisher for her third book, she stopped writing and began...
Due to his chronological placement at the end of the line in the extensive use of the heroic couplet behind John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson, George Crabbe is often referred to as the last of the Augustan poets. His specialty was...
Comfort Woman is Nora Okja Keller's debut into full-length literature. Following her award winning short story "Mother-Tongue," Comfort Woman stays true to Keller's mission to speak the unspeakable concerning the plight of Japanese women...
Translated into English, the title of this epic Germanic poem means “Song of the Nibelungs.” A fact that is utterly meaningless, of course, unless you know that the Nibelungs were an ancient dynasty whose conquering by the hero is the subject of...
The Secret Scripture is a novel published recently in 2008 and written by Sebastian Barry. For this novel, Barry was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008, one of the two times that he has received the honor. In addition, The Secret...
The poems of Gwendolyn Brooks can effectively be separated into two distinct and starkly divided epochs. The line which bifurcates these two radically different periods in the life and work of Brooks slices through the year 1967 with the point of...
Published in 2009, The Year of the Flood is the second novel in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. In this speculative fiction trilogy, Atwood vividly describes a possible future created by ruthless corporations, disregard for the environment,...
The Woman in the Dunes is a novel crafted by Japanese writer and playwright Koko Abe and published in 1962. It is the story of a teacher interested in insects who went in search of a rare instance of the Spanish fly. Stumbling on a remote village,...
Isaac Rosenberg almost seemed destined to die a cruelly ironic death as if being mocked by the gods from the day he was born in 1890. He was Jewish, economically deprived, wracked by poor health and of such an impressive physical stature that when...
John McCrae was a Canadian poet, artist and author. He was also a soldier in World War I, which greatly influenced his poetry. His poems are drawn from his first hand experiences on the front line and his times treating the wounded soldiers.
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The Revolt of “Mother” and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by Mary Wilkins Freeman that was originally published in 1974. There are eight stories in this collection, and they are called “The Revolt of Mother,” “A New England...
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a semi-autobiographical novel by Jeannette Winterson, first published in 1985. It draws on Winterson’s own experience growing up in the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, Lancashire. The protagonist and...
A young adult novel by the American writer Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese (1977) falls under the category of crime fiction and chronicles around the protagonist, Adam Farmer (Paul Delmonte).
This novel opens up to a scene in which Farmer is...
Travel Team is a novel for young adults written by renowned sports journalist Mike Lupica. Drawing from his own experiences as a short guy who was constantly under-estimated because of his lack of height, Lupica tells the story of highly gifted...
A Long Way from Chicago was written by Richard Peck, a writer, playwright, and speaker, in 1998 and won a Newbury Honor in 1999. Its sequel, A Year Down Yonder, was published in 2000 and won the Newbery Medal in 2001.
The book tells the story of...
Written in 1897 and published in 1903, Such Is Life is a novel written by Joseph Furphy. The book is the fictional diary of the protagonist and narrator Tom Collins. Taking place in Australia, the diary recounts the lives of the people who live in...
For the Term of His Natural Life is a book written by English-born Australian author Marcus Clarke. It was written in the middle 1870s and is part novel, part history book and gives a vivid and realistic account of the brutality of the colonial...
First published in 1966 by Margaret Laurence, a Canadian author, A Jest of God tells of a 34-year-old schoolteacher named Rachel Cameron who lives with her mother.
Rachel feels trapped in the deceit and pettiness of her small town that includes...
Anyone who has seen the 1941 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon has already also read it…to a point. The most famous and beloved film version of the story of Sam Spade on the trail of the black bird is actually one of...
Dennis Scott was born in Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, in 1939. He was educated at Jamaica College, and later at the University of the West Indies, where he received a B.A. in English. a He published his first collection of poetry in 1973. The...
Mother Night is based on personal experience, for it is a well-known fact that Vonnegut saw the horrors of the war with his own eyes. This work was published in 1961, for it took him some time to reflect on his role in the war. He also knew about...
Hunters in the Snow and Other Stories, also published as The Stories of Tobias Wolff, is a collection of short stories by Professor Tobias Wolff at the University of Stanford. The collection was first published in 1990 by Bloomsbury Publishing.
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