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Louise Brooks was an American silent-film actress born on November 14, 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas. She endured a hostile upbringing due to her emotionally-unavailable parents, who failed to provide her with any attention or discipline. In...

A brand new approach to acting started appearing with greater frequency in Hollywood movies and on the Broadway state in the 1940s and 1950s. Personified by such legendary stars as Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean and Shelley Winters....

In 1925, schoolteacher John Scopes was put on trial in the state of Tennessee for teaching evolution in its schools. In the trial that followed in Dayton, Tennessee, the chaotic atmosphere and intense press coverage earned it the label "Monkey...

The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short stories by legendary British writer Angela Carter, whose untimely death in 1992 brought her work extensive critical attention. It was first published in 1979, at which time it won the Cheltenham Festival...

J.M. Synge wrote The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, to be produced at Ireland's Abbey Theatre, which he had helped to form. Though it is today one of the English-language drama's most widely-anthologized works, it was hardly a success at...

Scholars widely acknowledge Christina Rossetti as one of the greatest Victorian poets and the foremost poet of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She excelled in using words to invoke the particular aesthetic of the movement. She based some of her...

The poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is among the greatest of English literature. Many of his poems are mainstays of literature courses, and most have attracted copious critical attention. His poems are renowned for, among other things, their bold...

A River Runs Through It is a collection of three short stories written by the American writer Norman Maclean. The stories were published in 1976 by University of Chicago Press. A few years later, in 1989, an illustrated version was published by...

Rumi was a Persian poet who was alive during the 13th century. During his lifetime, Rumi did much more than just write poetry that has survived over the centuries. He was also a scholar of Islam and a theologian whose work influenced more than...

This history book is about the rise and fall of the Comanche empire. Because of its members' highly mobile nature, their ability to ride long distances and attack unpredictably, and their warlike society, the Comanche Nation was one of the most...

A Year in the South: 1865: The True Story of Four Ordinary People that Live Through the Most Tumultuous Twelve Months in American History, was written by Stephen V. Ash, an educator, historian, and author. Ash is a Civil War scholar, a background...

Tony Harrison, the author of the poems that make up this collection, is an English poet and playwright. Through his poetry, Harrison has brought up many controversies and has presented them in an artistic way that creates new perspectives as well...

Few films can be said to maintain that mysterious quality of being “ahead of their times” several decades after their initial release. 2001: A Space Odyssey is such a movie and its presence within that tiny crowd is all the more impressive...

Strange Pilgrims is a novel published in 1992 and written by Gabriel García Márquez in the 1970s. García Márquez was born in Colombia, but was exiled for a time period himself from the country. García Márquez has also won the Nobel Prize and is a...

What sets Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code apart from other novels is not the number of websites and social media pages devoted to it; many novels benefit from such dissemination of information about it. No, what sets Brown’s novel apart from...

Camus was influenced by a diverse collection of foreign authors and philosophies in the 1930s. The mood of nihilism was high. Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky had remained significant in thought since the turn of the century. German phenomenology was...

Zlata's Diary is a book written by Zlata Filipovic. It is a first-person account in journal form penned by Zlata as an eleven and twelve-year-old eyewitness to the war between the Croats, the Serbs and the Muslims in her home-town of Sarajevo. The...

Your Inner Fish was written Neil Shubin and published in 2008. The book was named the best book of the year by the National Academy of Sciences. Shubin has authored two books, Your Inner Fish and The Universe Within. Shubin is a researcher and a...

World War Z is a 2006 parody of the oral history genre of historical non-fiction which purports to relate the story of mankind’s ultimate showdown with the zombie apocalypse in the words of various survivors. The concept of mixing satire within...

The Tipping Point is social critic Malcolm Gladwell’s insightful examination into the increasingly important concept of what has come to be known since the book’s publication in 2000 as “going viral.” Gladwell’s own definition of the tipping point...

The Killer Angels was written by Michael Shaara and was first published in 1974. Though The Killer Angels was not immediately popular during Shaara’s lifetime, the novel won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Despite this award, the novel was...

Eric Schlosser wrote Fast Food Nation to reveal the dark truth about the food that Americans consume on a daily basis. In this two-part journey we discover the history behind fast food, the big names who helped create this fast food culture, how...

Stargirl is a young adult novel written by Jerry Spinelli that narrows in on the personalities and issues of students in high schools. The book earned the Parents Choice Gold Award; a New York Times Bestseller, an ALA Top Ten Best Books Award...

Silent Spring was written by Rachel Carson, an author and a marine biologist who worked for the US Fish and WIldlife Service. The environmental science work was published in 1962, spurring the environmental conservation movement and helped the...