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.
Released in 1951, The African Queen is often considered the crowning achievement of director John Huston and finally brought star Humphrey Bogart his long-overdue Oscar for Best Actor. The film is an adaptation of the 1935 novel by noted writer C....
In 1939, Victor Fleming added two more credits to his already impressive list of directorial efforts. He would go on to win the Oscar for directing Gone with the Wind. He would also receive final credit for helming The Wizard of Oz despite the...
Lawrence of Arabia is an epic dramatic movie released in 1962, and directed by revered British director Sir David Lean (of course, he wasn't a "Sir" at the time of filming - that honor was not bestowed upon him until decades later after he had...
Eyes Wide Shut is a movie that first premiered in 1999. The movie was written by Stanley Kubrick and was nominated for one Golden Globe award. The film was based on the Austrian novel entitles Traumnovelle written by Arthur Schnitzler.
The story...
Barry Lyndon, released in 1975, is Stanley Kubrick’s follow-up to his highly controversial film adaptation of the novel A Clockwork Orange released three years previously. That film was, in turn, his follow-up to the mammoth event that was 2001: A...
Wim Wenders is a German director born on August 14, 1945 in the Rhine Province. Despite his clear love for art and literature as a child, after graduating from high school, he studied medicine at university. However, he dropped out midway to...
The Great Transformation is a nonfictional book by Karl Polanyi about the social and economic history. It was first published in the United States in 1944 by Farrar & Rinehart, and it is divided into three parts. It was later published in...
The Division of Labor in Society, published in 1893, is the English translation of Sociologist Émile Durkheim's doctoral thesis, De la Division du Travail Social.
In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim views society through the lens of the...
Emile Durkheim was a French sociologist born on April 15, 1858 in Lorraine, France. As a child, he grew up in a traditional Jewish household, but did not lead a spiritual lifestyle. He grew interested in how mental processes, rather than divine...
Erving Goffman was a sociologist and novelist born on June 11, 1922 in Alberta, Canada. As a child, he never had an interest in science, but rather wanted to pursue a career in the arts. After graduating from St. John’s Technical High School, he...
Thomas Kuhn was an American physicist born on July 18, 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was raised in a family that strongly valued science considering his father was an engineer and instilled in him a passion for the subject. After graduating from...
John Stuart Mill wrote the revolutionary essay “The Subjection of Women” with notes that it was strongly influenced by his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill. Modern scholars have questioned the legacy that husband constructed for wife in which he has been...
Andy Tennant is an American film director born on June 15, 1955 in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating from Homewood-Flossmoor High School in 1973, he attended the University of Southern California to study theater. His first venture into show...
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the final third of Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns that transformed Clint Eastwood from another TV star failing to make the leap to the big screen into pop culture icon. The first two films in this trilogy (a...
Cool Hand Luke is an American film directed by television journeyman Stuart Rosenberg. Released in November 1967, it was the first major studio production that Rosenberg ever directed. The film gestated during development with the guiding hand of...
The Annals was written by the ancient Roman orator and historian Tacitus between the years 118 and 123. Divided into 18 books (some divisions place it at 16 volumes), The Annals is a history of Rome in the first century stretching from the demise...
One-Bedroom Solo is a compilation of poetry and other works by Latina writer Sheila Maldonado. It was published in 2011 by Fly by Night Press, and is her debut poetry collection.
The poems Maldonado wrote in One-Bedroom Solo are deeply personal,...
Jason Koo is a New Yorker by birth and a Clevelander by nurture whose three collections of poetry published between 2009 and 2018 has received significant critical acclaim as well as a growing audience. Koo’s academic credentials are beyond...
Anne Carson is a renowned Canadian poet and scholar. After dropping out of the University of Toronto twice, she eventually earned her BA, MA, and PhD in Classics. She has taught at many popular universities within the US and Canada, such as the...
A View from the Bridge is one of Arthur Miller’s most famous plays, renowned for its intensity of passion and echoes of Greek tragedy.
The work grew out of Miller’s fascination with Red Hook, a Brooklyn neighborhood only a few blocks away from...
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a novel by Maggie O'Farrell that was first published in her native Britain in 2006. It is a courageous novel that deals with the complex and sometimes unspoken subject of madness, specifically in women, and the...
The seventh novel of American novelist Mitch Cullin, A Slight Trick of the Mind was published in April 2005. The audiobook edition won the Audio Publishers Association's 2006 Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction.
A Slight Trick of the Mind centers...
What's Eating Gilbert Grape focuses on a small town in Iowa called Endora, and tells the tale of a dyfunctional family living in this closed off community where small meaningless parts of everyday life hold literary significance. Published in...
Born in 1895 in Ukraine, Zoshchenko was a Soviet writer. He was a member of the literary group The Serapion Brothers, whose members were highly influenced by the works of science fiction writer and political satirist, Yevgeni Zamyatin. Humor...