Newest Study Guides

In 1865, Dostoevsky was heavily in debt, having taken on his brother Mikhail's debts after he died and amassing his own through gambling. Desperate, he signed an agreement with bookseller F. T. Stellovsky, promising that if he did not hand...

Written in 1944 while Brecht was living in America, The Caucasian Chalk Circle was initially intended for Broadway. It never quite made it there, but was instead premiered by students at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1948. Brecht's...

Medea was first performed in 431 BC. Its companion pieces have been lost, but we know that this set of plays won third prize at the Dionysia, adding another disappointment to Euripides' career. Although we know nothing of the other pieces, the...

When The Fountainhead was released in 1943, Rand's publishers did not expect much from it. To their surprise, the work quickly became a word-of-mouth bestseller. While most people consider Atlas Shrugged her most important work, The Fountainhead...

Persuasion is Jane Austen’s last completed novel. She began work on it in the summer of 1815 and completed it by the summer of 1816. The work was published with Northanger Abbey posthumously in December of 1817, six months after Austen’s death in...

In her preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition of The Color Purple, Walker explains: “This book is the book in which I was able to express a new spiritual awareness, a rebirth into strong feelings of Oneness I realized I had experienced and taken...

Dismissed as a piece of light satirical fluff at the time of its publication, Candide has only recently been elevated to a canonical status and included on the list of the "world's greatest books." Originally presented in January 1759 under the...

Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of Ray Bradbury's most popular works. It tells the story of two friends, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, who are thirteen and yearn to be older. The story thus examines themes of maturity and aging,...

Freud published Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria in 1905, four years after completing his final draft. He held off on publication for fear of damaging the reputation of his patient and her family. His apprehension is noticeably present in...

Pudd'nhead Wilson was written during Mark Twain's "pessimistic period." At the time, Twain was living in Italy, attempting to recover from his recent bankruptcy. To raise some funds, he sold the rights to the novel to Century Magazine for $6,500....

Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn follows a long tradition of Russian critical realists - a school which includes nineteenth-century Russians Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Goncharev. In fact, Solzhenitsyn's style of writing and subject...

After receiving rave reviews for his book The Call of the Wild in 1904, Jack London became very enthusiastic about a new idea for a book that would not be a sequel but a "companion" to The Call of the Wild. "I'm going to reverse the process," he...

Wilson Rawls based Where the Red Ferns Grows largely on his own boyhood in Scraper, Oklahoma. With encouragement from his wife, Sophie, he wrote the book in three weeks. She edited his poor grammar, it was serialized in the "Saturday Evening...

First serialized in Harper's Magazine in 1880, Washington Square is one of Henry James' most famous (and most accessible) novels. In 1881, Washington Square was published in novel formthe same year that Portrait of a Lady was published. Unlike...

The Crucible is a fictional retelling of events in American history surrounding the Salem Witch Trials of the seventeenth century. Yet, is as much a product of the time in which Arthur Miller wrote it - the early 1950s - as it is description of...

Leviathan takes place in a time of historical and philosophical change. Historically, it was written just before England plunged into civil war - the result of a bitter power struggle between the British Parliament and the monarchy. Hobbes'...

Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), written while Ibsen was in Rome and Amalfi, Italy, was conceived at a time of revolution in Europe. Charged with the fever of the 1848 European revolutions, a new modern perspective was emerging in the literary and...

Rhinoceros catapulted Ionesco's career to an international level. Though he had written several plays by Rhinoceros in 1959, the English translation of the play caught both public and critical attention around the world. In 1973, a film...

Roberto Bolano's "By Night in Chile" is considered one of the great contemporary classics from South America. It is the story of Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who, on his deathbed, confesses to his collusion and association with the...

Although All Quiet on the Western Front goes a long way in educating readers about the brutality--and, occasionally, banality--of daily war life, it helps to have an understanding of the political climate that precipitated World War I, known at...

The most popular of Cormier's novels for young adults, and the one with which he is most identified, The Chocolate War is a book that incites extreme opinions in most of its readers. The majority of critics either find the book offensive or...

Bless Me, Ultima is a semi-autobiographical novel based on the New Mexican community of Rudolfo Anaya’s childhood. Anaya used his memory of his town, the Pecos River, Highway 66, the church, the school, and the surrounding villages and ranches as...

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was the book that made journalist Tom Wolfe a literary star, and one of the works that best describes the beginnings of 1960s psychedelia. The book chronicles author Ken Kesey's career as a rising literary star who...

The Book of the Duchess is a 1,334-line poem, the earliest of Chaucer's major poems. It exists in several manuscripts of varying accuracy, and for the last one hundred years (beginning with W. W. Skeat in the 1890s) it has been the task of editors...