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.
Main Street is a novel by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1920.
The satirical novel criticizes the small-town lifestyle, classing it amongst Lewis' contemporaries as somewhat bleak in nature.The reception amongst real-life small-town residents was...
Pushing The Bear is an historical novel by Diane Glancy. It explores the lives of the Cherokee in the years spanning 1838-1839duribg their forced removal from their land along the Trail of Tears.
Glancy adheres strictly to historical accuracy and...
American Knees is a fictional novel written by Shawn Wong published in 1995 by Simon & Schuster. In 2005, it was re-issued by the University of Washington Press.
The novel was first published when Wong was 45. When asked about the title in an...
Published in 1992 by Southern Methodist University Press, this novel is an historical account from a subjective humanized perspective rather than an objective event analysis. The novel delves in the American history through 1931 mining camp of...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was an 18th century philosopher. His doctrines predominantly pertain to politics and the function of government, his most important work being The Social Contract. He was interested in adapting society to be most...
Particularities of the author:
Until 1995, Bolaño was a practically unknown author. Finding himself in a precarious economic situation, he sent the manuscript of “Nazi literature in America” to various publishers, finally being accepted by Seix...
Albert Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942 in French which was translated first into English by Just O'Brien in 1955. The book is a philosophical essay in four parts, "An Absurd Reasoning," "The Absurd Man," "Absurd Creation," and "The...
"The Kreutzer Sonata" is Leo Tolstoy's novel, published in 1890 and immediately censored by the tsarist authorities. The book proclaims the ideal of abstinence and describes in the first person anger of jealousy. The name of the story gave number...
Premiering in 1905 and published in 1907, Major Barbara is a three-part play written by George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright, and critic. The plot revolves around a young woman named Barbara who is in the Salvation Army, and her efforts to...
In 1942, Albert Camus published “The Myth of Sisyphus”, an essay about absurdism, which revolutionized the absurdist movement and inspired the theater of the absurd. Some of the early plays included “The Maids” by Jean Genet, “The Bald Soprano” by...
My Bondage and My Freedom, published in 1855, is an example of a genre of literature known as the slave narrative. This genre flourished from around 1760 and though the first few decades after the abolition of slavery. One of the most famous...
The Complete Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse is collection of fairy tales written by Hermann Karl Hesse, a German poet and novelist as well as a Nobel-Prize winning laureate, and was published in 1995 by Bantam Books. The stories have mainly been...
Karl Marx gets all the press, but it is important to realize that much of the writing which established the communist ideology was either co-written by Friedrich Engels or based on concepts and research established and conducted by Engels. Then...
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is a book written in 1883 by Howard Pyle. The story revolves around an archer who is extremely skilled and goes by the name of Robin Hood. He and his companions, called the Merry Men, live in Sherwood forest and...
The story goes that it was Robert Redford—who already was committed to bringing the book to the screen—who suggested to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that they abandon the idea of writing All the President’s Men from...
Published in London in 1767, The Man of Feeling made its author famous and became his most well-known work. The author of this story was a true man of his time and fell under the influence of sentimentalism. However, the idea of sentimentalism had...
Ivanhoe is most immediately notable within the expansive canon of Sir Walter Scott by virtue of its being his very first attempt at writing a tale exclusively devoted to a British subject. In fact, one is hard-pressed to get much more intensely...
He Knew He Was Right was written by the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, and was first published in Strahan and Co in 1869. The novel found great success among literary circles of that time and is one of Trollope's most famous works, alongside...
Published in 2002 and written by William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault is a novel telling the story of a girl named Lucy. The book is split up into three sections that make up her life: her childhood, her maturing into adulthood, and her older...
Jean Rhys was an English author born on August 20, 1890 in Dominica, British West Indies. At age 16, she moved to England to attend the Perse School for Girls, but was intensely mocked for her foreign accent. She also enrolled at the Royal Academy...
Tim O’Brien is an American novelist born on October 1, 1946 in Austin, Minnesota. After high school, he attended Macalester College to study political science and was subsequently drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. He served from 1969 to 1970...
Published in 1997, School Days is novel that tells of the colonial world that the author Patrick Chamoiseau, one of the greatest writers in French and Caribbean literature, experienced in Fort-de-France, Martinique.
As the Colonial Period was...
Three Lives is a novel that was written by Gertrude Stein and published in 1909. This book was Stein’s first published book, and it depicts three lower-class women in the fictional town of Bridgepoint, which is based on the city of Baltimore. The...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the most outstanding representative of the radical wing of the French Enlightenment, and was one of the founders of European sentimentality. His ideological differences with the leading figures of the era often took the...