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.
The first type of writing that comes to mind you hear the name Ralph Waldo Emerson is probably not poetry. After all, Emerson’s towering stature in American letters is primarily derived from his essays. Therefore it should not be at all surprising...
American novelist Louisa May Alcott produced her 1866 novella Behind a Mask under the pseudonym of A.M. Barnard. Living in a discriminatory era, and writing for a partial society which favored Men authors over their female counterparts, adopting a...
A New York-born comic artist, James Sturm's 'America: God, Gold and Golems' is a series of three graphic stories first published in 2007. Each story explores less well-known aspects of American history: 'The Revival' is set during the religious...
The Moor's Last Sigh is a historical fiction novel by Salman Rushdie. This novel is his fifth novel and was published in 1995. Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian author and a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature. In France, he got the...
Many do not know of Kurt Wimmer's 2002 cult classic film Equilbrium. It tells the story of a futuristic world in all conflict, especially war, has been eliminated through the use of an insidious drug known as Prozium that inhibits emotion of all...
The Tripitaka, also known as Pipitaka, is the earliest collection of Buddhist writings. Initially these writings were composed orally and passed down by traditional teaching and re-telling. By the Third Century B.C., they were written in the...
The Breaks is the fourth novel by American author and screenwriter Richard Price. The story was published on 1983. Price wrote several novels and has been writing scripts for tv shows until now.
The novel narrates the story of a graduate student,...
Oscar Wilde published a volume of verse with the simplest and most direct of all possible titles: Poems. The opening poem of that collection features a title that is anything but simple and direct. In fact, were it not for the exclamation point...
Oscar Wilde was a Victorian iconoclast who stood at the vanguard of the aesthetic movement. His works, from his Comedy of Manners plays to his verse compositions such as "Requiescat," have changed the landscape of literature since the late 1800s....
Raymond Carver died in 1988 at the tragically early age of 50. Almost unique among American writers inhabiting his sphere of fame and influence, Carver never published a novel. His reputation as one of the foremost chroniclers of 20th century life...
The original winner of the 1926 Pulitzer Prize before the award was refused by the author, Arrowsmith is a 1925 novel by Sinclair Lewis. The book covers the topic of science culture, specifically the medical field, during the period.
The...
While Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim are both far better known, a sizable contingent of scholars and critics regard the masterpiece of Joseph Conrad’s fecund writing career to be the novel Nostromo. Among its admirers is the author of The Great...
If the correspondence was useful for no other purpose alone, reading the letters which passed between John Adams and his wife Abigail might qualify as the smoking gun in a trial to convict social media of killing the fine art of political...
Perhaps more famous for novels like Women in Love and short stories like “The Rocking Horse Winner” D.H. Lawrence is also a major figure in British poetry. Lawrence was highly influenced by the American poet Walt Whitman and, in fact, would often...
Tom and Viv is a movie directed by Brian Gilbert and adapted from a stage play of the same name by Michael Hastings. Hastings also co-wrote the screenplay with Adrian Hodges. It tells the story of the relationship between poet T.S. (Tom) Eliot...
If you did not know that this novel is a work of fiction you might find yourself googling the Madison High School shooting of April 22nd. This is the genius of Walter Dean Myers who was so disturbed by the Columbine High School shooting in 1999...
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) composed 'Anecdote of the Jar' in 1918 and it was published a year later. 'Anecdote of the Jar' by Wallace Stevens is a descriptive lyric. The poem mirrors the creative soul of the time in which it was composed.
What...
A native-born Lithuanian, Milosz grew up in Czarist Russia. His parents brought him up a humble servant of the Catholic Church, a relationship which he struggled with his entire life but to which he remained true. Returning to his homeland which...
Queen Elizabeth I was the third longest ruler of the England, reigning for 45 years. Over the course of nearly half a century of as supreme ruler of the powerful monarchy in the world, Queen Elizabeth had produced enough letters and speeches to...
In December 2013, the Guardian ran a review by Julian Barnes on his favorite novel of the year with the headline "Stoner: The Must-Read Novel of 2013." What was most interesting about this assertion is that the book which Barnes was reviewing was...
The Sniper is a short story written by the Irish novelist and short story writer Liam O'Flaherty. It was published in January 1923, in the middle of the Irish Civil war, which took place between 1922 to 1923. The story The Sniper too is centered...
Charlotte Bronte was a top-tier poet of nineteenth century England (the Victorian era). She was born during 1816 and died during 1855. Despite how talented she was, only two of her poems are widely cherished today, according to the Poetry...
The Mirror Maker was published in 1989 and is the translated English version of a select number of Primo Levi's previously published stories and essays. Levi would submit a new piece of literature to the centrist Italian newspaper La Stampa on a...
Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian stuck in Chicago in the Siege of Sarajevo in 1992, often portrays his main characters as Bosnian writers who try to adapt to a culture drastically different from one they were accustomed to. Hemon is most famous for his...