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Earle Birney was a twentieth century (1904-1995) Canadian poet and legendary teacher. He was nick named “a chronicler of Canada" and is considered one of Canada's finest poets. Based upon his life, Birney has written poems that can be placed into...

Joy Kogawa is a Japanese-Canadian novelist born on June 6, 1935 in Vancouver, British Columbia. During World War II, she and her family were forced to move from their home to an internment camp in Slocan, British Columbia and eventually Coaldale,...

The Fall is a fictional, philosophical novel written by Albert Camus and was published in 1956 by Vintage Books publishing company. It has been translated and released in both English and French copies.

The novel is made up of numerous dramatic...

William S. Burroughs is an American author born on February 5, 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri. As a child, he led a very privileged lifestyle considering his family was wealthy and emphasized the importance of education. Thus, Burroughs was an avid...

Jeannette Walls’ 2005 memoir The Glass Castle details the joys and struggles of her childhood. It offers a look into her life and that of her highly charismatic yet frequently dysfunctional family. Walls’ first memoir and second non-fiction work,...

Restoration is a novel that was written by Rose Tremain and published in 1989. It was pretty popular, being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989 and being the Sunday Express Book of the Year. In addition, Restoration was made into a film in...

One of the few guarantees you will ever find in life is that Ken Kesey will forever be best known for writing One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. With that in mind, many people may be surprised or even shocked to learn Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes...

Witness is an autobiographical novel written by the American Jay Vivian Chambers. The novel was published in 1952, nine years before the author’s death. The novel was a best-seller for more than a year and it focuses on the life of the author.

The...

Women and Other Animals is a collection of short stories written by the American author Bonnie Jo Campbell and published in the year 1999 by the University of Massachusetts Press. The author was awarded the Associated Writing Programs Award for...

To fully appreciate the context and background of Glengarry Glen Ross it helps to know who Thorstein Veblen was, to be familiar with postmodern literary techniques and—perhaps most importantly—not assume that just because you saw the movie you...

Published in 1958, The Question (French title: La Question) was a largely autobiographical work that described methods of torture used by the French military during the Algerian War of Independence. The text recounts the author's arrest by French...

The Life of Omar Ibn Said is an autobiography written by Senegalese scholar, Omar ibn Said, who documented his life living under slavery in this book. The book was written in 1831 and written in Arabic. It was sold to the Library of Congress in...

It is perhaps not straying too terribly far from the certainty known as absolute truth that without the release of the so-called “Kinsey Report” in 1948 and the subsequent release of two highly regarded semi-autobiographical novels dealing openly...

Michael Cunningham is an American author born on November 6, 1952 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He showed great potential to be a writer as a teenager, leading to him studying English literature at Stanford University and later the University of Iowa for...

The Bean Trees draws from many of the experiences of its author, Barbara Kingsolver, whose personal life and academic training provide some of the background for the novel. The novel is not autobiographical, but there are numerous parallels...

Art Spiegelman's Maus is the most unlikely of creations: a comic book about the Holocaust. Yet when the first volume of Maus was published in 1987, it met with enormous critical and commercial success, and to this day it is widely considered to be...

The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning German author Heinrich Böll. It was first published in 1974 in the Federal Republic of Germany (better known as West Germany). The...

Herman Hesse published his novel Steppenwolf in 1927, but its mixture of psychological and philosophy about a rebellious non-conformist dropping out of a society he cannot abide would not find a truly appreciative audience for more than three...

Lorraine Hansberry, in an August 1959 Village Voice article, wrote:

In an almost paradoxical fashion, it disturbs the soul of man to truly understand what he invariably senses: that nobody really finds oppression and/or poverty tolerable. If we...

The Nietzsche Reader, by Friedrich Nietzsche himself, is a collection of many of his analyses and stories. Nietzsche was influenced by many famous scientists and artists, such as Goethe, Darwin, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. His was born in 1844, but...

"Atonement" is the eleventh book written by Ian McEwan. It was published in 2001 and won the W.H. Smith Literary Award in 2002, the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award in 2003, the L.A. Times Prize for Fiction in 2003, and the Santiago...

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy to acknowledge and celebrate the yin and yang of life. This book was originally published during 1871 and was later published during 2003 by Penguin Classics. Specifically, Nietzsche was aiming to...

Soren Kierkegaard is a Danish philosopher and Christian theologian whose contributions were critical in the development of existential philosophy. In fact, he is regarded by some as the first true existential philosopher. He wrote Philosophical...

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel composed an original work, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, in 1820. This book holds Hegel’s “legal, moral, social and political philosophy” within its pages. He goes into a deeper expansion of the topics he...