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Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V., was published in 1963. The novel won him many awards. America began to view Pynchon as a premier Postwar writer, an able representative of the paranoid generation coming out of the McCarthy era and facing the...

Fielding began writing Tom Jones in 1746. It was a wildly ambitious book which, in attempting to portray the nuances of real life, angered many but ultimately delighted generations of readers through both its influence and sprawling narrative.

The...

Enduring Love, published in 1997, is Ian McEwan's sixth novel and one of his most successful, shortlisted for several prizes. It was adapted into a film in 2004. It tells the story of Joe Rose, who struggles to maintain his comfortable life and...

Christopher Paolini began reading fantasy novels at 10 and started to work on Eragon when he was only 14years old. He quickly stopped, realizing that he had no idea how to write a full-length novel, let alone a series. Paolini read all the books...

In Cold Blood, which was published serially in The New Yorker in 1965 before appearing in book form in 1966, is the work that launched Truman Capote to literary stardom, and remains his best-known piece. It details the events of a real-life murder...

C.S. Lewis was a British novelist born on November 29, 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. Lewis was raised in a devout Christian family, but he identified as an atheist in his teens. However, as an adult, he once again found comfort and solace in religion,...

Speak is Laurie Halse Anderson's first young adult novel. It was published in 1999 by Penguin Group and re-released in 2006 as a "platinum edition" containing an interview with the author. The novel tells the story of Melinda Sordino, a Syracuse...

While she was researching her nonfiction history book Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, Esther Forbes became interested in the lives of ordinary people in colonial Boston. This interest resulted in Johnny Tremain, a coming-of-age story for...

History of the Collection

There have been several collections of poetry since the sixteenth century that have included works attributed to Sir Thomas Wyatt. There remains confusion, however, as to the exact number of poems written by Wyatt; there...

The Wave was Todd Strasser's third novel, written while he spent days working as the owner of a fortune cookie manufacturer. It is based on a real-life experiment performed by high-school teacher Ron Jones in 1967 (for more information, see "The...

Alan Paton wrote Cry, the Beloved Country during his tenure as the principal at the Diepkloof Reformatory for delinquent African boys. He started writing the novel in Trondheim, Norway in September of 1946 and finished it in San Francisco on...

Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes was first performed in 467 BCE, as the third play of the trilogy satyr-drama "Sphinx." Unfortunately, we only possess this play from the trilogy, and we do not possess more than one play from any of Aeschylus' other...

According to New York Times book reviewer William Boyd, "The great benefit of Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone, is that it may help us arrive at an understanding of this situation. Beah's autobiography is almost unique, as far as I can...

After twenty-five previous novels over the span of three decades, Joyce Carol Oates accomplished something with We were the Mulvaneys in 1996 that she’d never done before: she hit the number-one spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Although...

Writer and essayist Jonathan Franzen came to fame with his third novel The Corrections, published in 2001. The Corrections has been heralded as a timely and astute prediction of the frantic, cynical and anxious mood that would dominate American...

East, West (1994) is an anthologized work, one of the most distinctive works to have been written by Salman Rushdie. The anthology consists of a myriad of short stories and is divided into three sections - “east”, “west”, and “east, west”. The...

The nature of Dylan Thomas lies in the tragic characteristics of the drama extending to his life. It is plagued by tales of alcoholism, jealousy, and penury. Yet, despite engaging in excessive self-indulgence, Thomas launched himself into writing...

The Laramie project is a play written by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project and first staged in 2000 at the Ricketson Theatre in Denver Laramie.

The play is set in Laramie and was inspired by the real case of an American...

Ten Little Indians is a 2004 collection of short stories by Sherman Alexie. The collection is composed of nine short stories that tell of the struggles of the Spokane tribe, a Native American tribe that lives in Washington state. Though there are...

Western philosophy in the 18th century was characterized by the emergence of oppositional thought to ancient notions of epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. Immanuel Kant occupies a central role in the generation of several radical new...

Since its publication in 1781, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has established itself as one of the essential volumes in the history of philosophical literature. The complex work stands on its own as the equal of such other foundational...

Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Galapagos, was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and then attended Cornell University. However, he dropped out at the beginning of 1943 and joined the US Army.

Published in 1985, Galapagos is a novel that describes life...

King Leopold’s Ghost was written by Adam Hochschild and was first published in the fall of 1998. After being refused by nine different publishing houses, the tenth house accepted it and the novel became an international bestseller and won the Mark...

The House of the Scorpion was written by Nancy Farmer and published in 2002 by Atheneum Books. It is the first of two books in the series, and is a combination of the science fiction and YA genres. It is set in the future and largely takes place...