Newest Study Guides

Kathleen Raine was a British poet and scholar and a founding member of the Temenos Academy. She was interested in different types of spirituality such as Platonism and Neoplatonism as well as her scholarly writing on other poets.

She wrote a large...

Grace Nichols was born in Guyana in 1950 and grew up in a small village until her eighth birthday. She went to college at the University of Guyana, and received a degree in Communications. She held multiple writing related jobs before immigrating...

Nosferatu is arguably the first great horror movie. Nearly 100 years after it was made, it can still inspire terror, revulsion, and dread. But we're lucky that we even have copies to see today.

The film was made under strange circumstances, to say...

Tenth of December is a short story collection written by acclaimed American author George Saunders. It contains the stories "Victory Lap," "Sticks," "Puppy," "Escape from Spiderhead," "Exhortation," "Al Roosten," "The Semplica Girl Diaries,"...

The Fisher King is a comedy-drama movie released in 1991 to critical acclaim. It was written by Richard LaGravanese and directed by Terry Gilliam and was the first movie that Gilliam directed that he had not also written. It was also the first...

According to a popular story, Frank O'Hara composed "Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]" on the Staten Island Ferry in 1962, en route to a reading with Robert Lowell at Wagner College. At the reading, O'Hara performed this poem, even though he had...

The genre of horror buddy comedy was not particularly common at the time that Ghostbusters was released, and it redefined the genre in unforeseeable ways. Star and writer Dan Aykroyd initially imagined that Ghostbusters would be a star vehicle for...

Goodfellas is perhaps one of the best-known and most-loved mafia films of all time. Released in 1990 and directed by Martin Scorsese, the film is based on Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy, about the real life of Henry Hill, and it takes many of its...

Singin’ in the Rain is generally regarded as Hollywood’s greatest original movie musical. Like The Wizard of Oz before it, Singin’ in the Rain is an original musical motion picture not based on an existing musical work. Unlike that fantasy about...

Some Like It Hot is a 1959 comedy film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. The film is based on the French movie Fanfares Of Love, a film with a nearly identical plot. Fanfares of Love, like Some Like...

Brown Girl Dreaming is an autobiography in verse written by Jacqueline Woodson, an African-American writer who grew up between Ohio, South Carolina, and New York in the 1960's and 1970's.

Brown Girl Dreaming was published in 2014 and was...

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 work of historiography by Jared Diamond. The book chronicles history from the beginning of humankind, attempting to explain why certain societies have survived and thrive, while so...

In 2014, Christopher Nolan's epic science-fiction odyssey Interstellar exploded into theaters with the kind of gravitas associated with only a handful of its genre predecessors. It was Nolan's first movie after finishing direction on the Dark...

Quicksand is a novel written by renowned author Nella Larsen, published in 1928. As there are direct links and correlations between the life of Nella Larsen and fictional character Helga Crane, both of whom are mixed race, this book can also be...

Perhaps no other work by William Shakespeare—and certainly none of the Bard’s tragedies—has been adapted for the stage or screen in a looser manner than Romeo and Juliet. The popularity of the play and its expansive potential for adaptation is in...

Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry was published in 1929, and is looked at today as one of the key novels in Harlem Renaissance Literature. At the time of its publication it was considered to be groundbreaking, because Thurman had the courage...

Home to Harlem (1928) is author Claude McKay's first published novel. It tells the story of young Jake Brown, the protagonist of the novel, after he deserts the United States Army and heads off to London and a writer who immigrates to Haiti after...

Exit West is Mohsin Hamid's 2017 follows a young couple, Saeed and Nadia, who live in a city in the midst of a civil war. Fearing for their safety, they are finally forced to flee the city through a series of doors that lead to other parts of the...

His Girl Friday was directed and produced by Howard Hawks in 1940, adapted from a stage play (and 1931 film) called The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Hecht and MacArthur, with the help of Charles Lederer, adapted the script from...

All About Eve was a critically acclaimed film in 1950 when it came out, and brought huge accolades for its cast as well as its director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz adapted the witty and sophisticated script from a short story called "The...

"The Liar" was published by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) in December 1963. It is the story of a man who deeply wants to understand himself and goes through a metamorphosis on his journey of self-discovery. The voice of the speaker is closely...

Uncle Vanya, Scenes of Country Life in Four Acts (1897) is one of Russian playwright Anton Chekov’s most notable dramas and a mainstay of the theater. The play is set at the estate of the first wife of Professor Serebryakov, where he and his...

Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 psychological horror film directed by Roman Polanski, with a screenplay adapted from Ira Levin's best's selling 1967 novel of the same name. It was Polanski's first feature to be distributed by a major Hollywood studio...