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.
Uncle Tom’s Children is a novel written by Richard Wright that was first published in 1938 and republished in 1940. As the reader may recognize, Wright titled his book after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was...
Zora Neale Hurston was an African American writer who lived mainly during the 1900s. She wrote everything from novels to short stories, contributing to the dynamic African American literary scene. She published four novels and over fifty short...
What could be a worse fate for a modern American female poet than to be lumped into a nebulous, chauvinistic and ever slightly misogynistic pool of cess stereotyped as a “domestic poet.” Anyone unfamiliar with the term coming across it from the...
Born in Jamaica where he first published two collections of poem for juveniles, Claude McKay migrated to the U.S where he attended both Tuskegee Institute and Kansas State Univ. before becoming an essential and integral part of the Harlem...
The knock against Marge Piercy’s poems—despite the plethora of work produced by this most prolific of American writers—has always been that she is too willing to sacrifice artistry for polemics. While true that Piercy is a staunchly feminist...
Shadows on the Rock is a 1931 novel by Willa Cather. The “rock” of the title is Quebec City which becomes the setting for a tale of some of the earliest French settlers in the New World. The novel really does not have much of a plot per se and...
Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer is Steven Millhauser's most successful novel. Published in 1996, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. Needless to say, critics greeted Millhauser's latest with...
Anil's Ghost is the fourth novel written by the Sri-Lankan born Canadian author Michael Ondaatje; it was published in English by McClelland & Stewart Publishers on March 30, 2000. The title was not pulled out of the blue. Anil's Ghost could be...
Patrick D. Smith (1927-2014) writes predominantly historical fiction. Hailing from Florida, his writing tends to focus upon the American south and America's frontier days. He attended college at the University of Mississippi before pursuing his...
Top Girls is one of Caryl Churchill’s most well known plays. It premiered at the Royal Court Theater in London on August 28, 1982, and won the Obie Award for Best Play of the Year. In its first run at the Royal Court, the cast included Gwen Taylor...
Thornton Wilder is the author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which was originally published during 1927. It was published again during 2003 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics. It tells the story of a monk, Brother Juniper, witnessing a tragic...
The Other Boleyn Girl is an historical novel by British author Philippa Gregory. It is loosely based on the life of 16th Century Aristocrat Mary Boleyn, the sister of Anne Boleyn, but beyond that little of her is known. Gregory's novel is inspired...
Delillo was already a well-accomplished author some time before his '97 release, Underworld. Having already won many awardsincludinga Pulitzer Prize and a Gugenheim fellowship, Delillo had already risen in the ranks garnering comparison to Thomas...
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill, is an erotic novel written by John Cleland and was first published in 1748. The novel is considered "the first original English prose pornography, and the first pornography to use the form...
Though The Beggar's Opera has earned a reputation for its ironically rambunctious exploration of amoral characters, crime syndicates, and overt sexuality, John Gay originally intended it primarily as a political statement, a comment on both the...
Citizen Kane has widely been praised as the greatest film ever made, particularly for its innovative narrative structure, its cinematography, editing, and Orson Welles' tour de force performance. Pauline Kael called it "the one American talking...
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie's first novel, was published in 2000.
Although Dai is a Chinese national, he wrote the novel in French, his second language. The story follows two 'city youths' who are sent to a mountain village...
John Marsden is a teacher and novelist born on September 27, 1950 in Victoria, Australia. As a teenager, he was often times alienated and bullied by his classmates, which took its toll by the time he reached college. After graduating from high...
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All is a one-act play by Christopher Durang that has proven to be one of the most durable and reliable crowd-pleasers of the latter 20th century. Since its very first production by the Ensemble Studio Theater in...
The House of Blue Leaves is play written by John Guare which premiered February 10, 1971, at the Truck and Warehouse Theater in New York and proceeded to enjoy and initial off-Broadway run of 337 performances. The play was the first in a series of...
James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is one of the most significant works of fiction by an African American author and one of the preeminent works of the Harlem Renaissance (although it was published first in 1912 and...
Flight was written by Sherman Alexie and published in 2007 by Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Press. A magical realist novel, it tells the story of a troubled Native American teen who has reached his breaking point after years of abuse at the hands...
The Good Earth was published in 1931. It was an immediate hit and has remained Buck's most well-known text. The novel has been translated into more than thirty different languages. Buck won the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1932. The Good Earth...
At one point in history, the name Preston Sturges was as well known among lovers of movie comedy as Billy Wilder. Criminally little-known and underappreciated today, Sturges was the master of the snappy, crackling, fast-paced dialogue of the...