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William Faulkner was an American novelist born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. As a child, he was influenced by his mother to become an avid reader and writer. She introduced him to classic novels at an early age and instilled in...

Milan Kundera is a Czech author naturalized French, born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czechia). After secondary school, he attended Charles University to study literature and later transferred to the Academy of Performing...

Michael Wigglesworth was a Puritan minister who embodied all the negative connotations of the Puritans. He bore an exagerated inferiority complex and later on married his cousin as he felt that he would be unable to find another woman. He was also...

Terrible Things: An Allegory of the Holocaust is a children’s book published in 1980 by the Irish writer named Eve Bunting. The book was intended to be a children’s book and contains numerous illustrations realized by the graphician Stephen...

Three Tall Women is a two-act play by Edward Albee. It was first performed at the English Theater in Vienna, Austria under the direction of Albee himself and starring American actress Myra Carter, who won several awards for the performance.

In...

Venus in Furs is a novella that was written by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch that was published in 1870. This work is Sacher-Masoch’s best known novella. He had at first intended for this work to be part of a series that he envisioned to be called...

Tar Baby is a novel written by Toni Morrison and published in 1981. Morrison was a professor at various universities all over the United States, but she moved to NYC to become a part time writer in the mornings before she went to work as an editor...

Theaetetus is one of Plato’s dialogues, written circa 369 BC. It is a dialogue between Socrates and the mathematician Theaetetus, in which they attempt to define “knowledge.” Living between 428/7 to 348/7 BCE, Plato was one of Socrates’ students,...

Wise Children is a novel published in 1991 by the English author Angela Carter. The novel was the author’s last one as she started writing it after she was diagnosed with cancer. Angela Carter died just a year later at the age of 51. Angela Carter...

Women and Writing is a nonfiction book published in 1979 by the British author Virginia Woolf. While she is most commonly known for her novels and for her works of fiction, Virginia Woolf was also the author of many nonfiction books and...

James Mercer Langston Hughes, was an American poet and social activist, born and raised in Joplin, Mississippi. Langston Hughes was a prominent leader in the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic movement in the 1920s that consisted of new...

GE Moore is an English philosopher born on November 4, 1873 in Upper Norwood, London. Moore grew up in a family of academics - some were poets, other were professors, and all were dedicated to the arts and humanities. He received his primary...

The Political Writings of John Locke is a collection of a few of Locke’s most important works that was edited by David Wootton, a professor of history and expert on English speaking countries, and others, such as France and Italy. The Political...

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is a collection of sequential short stories that was published first in 1912. They were written by Stephen Leacock, a Canadian political scientist and writer, who was one of the most famous humorists in the world...

The Return of the Soldier is a novel written by Rebecca West in 1918. The novel revolves around the story of Chris Baldry, an upper class gentleman who has returned from the war to his wife Kitty Baldry. Kitty Baldry is a perfect representation of...

Mark Twain asserted that his literary hybrid Roughing It was nothing more than a simple personal narrative, absent any intent to present that account as history or philosophy. Well, Mark Twain said a lot of things, some of them not to be trusted....

The only work written by the ancient Roman historian Livy was a multi-volume history of Rome that modern scholars consider to be long as literary value, but rather wanting in historical fact. At one time the full history written by Livy spanned...

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is a novel written by Yukio Mishima, published in Japanese in 1963.

Yukio Mishima is a representative of the Japanese literature, an absolute world classic and writer, descending into the abyss of hell...

Some historians are destined to be read while others are destined to become omnipresent through throughout the literature of others as footnotes and references. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War considered the ultimate source for that...

T’was a plague that gave birth to William Shakespeare’s long narrative poem “The Rape of Lucrece.” Between June 1592 and May 1594, acting companies were banished from London and the theater essentially became non-existent. The reason for this was...

First published in 1757, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was a treatise on aesthetics that had a tangible impact on the Romantic and Gothic movements. Burke, through this work, was...

Having played the part of the Shakespeare's caring magician or cruel tyrant, depending on how you view Prospero, in four stage productions in his career, John Gielgud's self-professed life ambition was to create a film adaptation of what we...

The Selected Tales of Henry James represent a concerted effort to provide a cross section of the wealth of talent that was the short fiction of Henry James. Speaking of size, there is a good reason why the narratives in this collection are termed...

George Lippard wrote The Quaker City with the express purpose of creating a controversial and infamous exposé of criminal underworld of Philadelphia that would be embraced by a scandalized public and perhaps lead to wholesale reform. At least,...