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Published in 1976--the year America was celebrating all the nice history making up its bicentennial--Flight to Canada is a parody or satire or pastiche of the slave narrative by Ishmael Reed that draws attention to the inherent flaws in a genre...

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper published her first volume of poetry when she was just 16, carved out fame on the anti-slavery lecture circuit by publically speaking on the subject in excess of two hours without consulting a written text or notes and...

Published in 1900, The House Behind the Cedars was the first published novel by Charles Chesnutt. One of the testaments to the status that the African-African writer had achieved after a career of highly regarded short stories published in the...

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life is a 1846 work of travel literature by Herman Melville. Typee was both Melville’s first book and his most popular during his lifetime.

Typee is a blend of fiction and nonfiction which has frustrated critics for...

Rifles for Watie is a 1957 children’s novel about the American Civil War. Unlike most historical fiction works regarding the same topic, Rifles for Watie takes place west of the Mississippi River. The book also includes characters based on real...

At Fault is Kate Chopin’s first novel which was written between July 1889 and April 1890. Upon completion, she submitted it to Bedford’s Monthly; a literary journal that made room for one novel in each issue. Upon rejection, Chopin decided to...

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Background David Hume published An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in 1748. He was a respected empiricist philosopher, meaning he believed that all thought is based upon experience. Credited with...

The Birds premiered at the theater of Dionysus at Athens as part of the festival taking place in that city in what would have been March of 414 B.C. As proof that some things never change, today this comedy is generally agreed to be one of the...

Tristram Shandy is, almost beyond argument, the most unusual, outrageously experimental and subversive novel that most people who possess basic literacy skills could ever read. While James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake definitely outstrips this novel in...

Geoffrey Trease is a well-known twentieth century poet and children's novelist. He has a prolific career which is dominated by his historical fiction. Revered for his candid approach to history for children, he presents historical settings in his...

Published in 1944 when Somerset Maugham was 70 years old, The Razor’s Edge would come to be considered the last of his major works of fiction. The philosophical awareness that any man naturally arrives at by the advanced age at which Maugham...

Published in 1857, Barchester Towers is Anthony Trollope’s sequel to The Warden and almost certainly the most well-known of the author’s Barsetshire series. Ostensibly a portrait of life the clerics in a “cathedral town” the renowned social...

Eleanor H. Ayer is an American novelist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her book Parallel Journeys. She was born and raised in Vermont, and was inspired to write at an early age by her mother's career as a teacher. After graduating...

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy was published the very same year as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Both novels present a portrait of what it meant to be an American in the early part of the 20th century, but in reading one can be...

Under the Jaguar Sun is a novel written by Italo Calvino and published in 1986. Calvino is an Italian author and journalist. This novel was first written and published in Italian, but it was soon translated into English in 1988. In fact, Calvino...

Published in 1894, The Story of a Modern Woman was written by Ella Dixon. The novel was actually first printed in a series in The Lady’s Pictorial. The book was written in the late Victorian age in England, and is one of the works in the New Woman...

Tracks is a novel that was written by Louise Erdrich and was published in 1988. It is the third book in a series of four books that tell the story of four Anishinaabe families that are all somehow connected to each other. All of them live on an...

Some novelists knock it out of the park on their first try and spend an entire career trying to live up to the great promise. Other writers must take time to mature and grow before it all comes together toward the end of their life. Very few...

The infinitely rebellious writer known as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) would have been one of those real life people who show up as disguised as fictional characters in works by others if she hadn’t been a a writer herself. In an age...

The novel Cold Mountain was published in the year 1997 by the American author Charles Frazier and is generally regarded as a historical romance, with the action being set during the American Civil War.

The main character of the novel is an...

Published in 1999, A Star Called Henry is a novel written by Roddy Doyle, an Irish author. A Star Called Henry is the second book in “The Last Roundup” series. The protagonist of the novel is named Henry Smart. Smart, as a child, lived in the...

Set against the stark background of World War II, City of Thieves is a historical fiction novel by David Benioff published in 2008. Centering around two young boys in Soviet Russia and their daring quest, the story qualifies for the Bildungsroman...

Theodor Fontane had enjoyed a long career as a travel writer, almost been executed as a spy and enjoyed a twenty-year long gig as a theater critic before he found the ideal medium for his literary expression. Fontane did not publish his first...

Although the origin of this novel was published under anonymous, it is assumed that the author was Madame de Lafayette, born Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne. In the year 1650, she was the maid-of-honour to the Queen and began to learn how to...