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The Big Sea is a novel written by Langston Hughes in 1993 and is an autobiography of the author. The story revolves around the life of the author, Langston Hughes, who grows up in America and faces the same challenges as those brought upon other...

If when reading Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country one is overtaken by a strange sense of déjà vu, rest assured nothing supernatural is going on. All that strangely familiar feeling of having read a novel you know for sure you...

"Clarissa, or The history of a young lady" is a novel written by Samuel Richardson in 4 parts in 1748. It was created in the genre of a family character-studying novel in the era of the Enlightenment Mature. This genre was at that time very common...

It is entirely within the realm of possibility that without Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the world would never have gotten to read Gayl Jones’ novel Corregidora. At least, not exactly in the same form that it takes as a result of a world in which...

Continental Drift is the fourth novel from Russell Banks and marks the turning point of his career. The novel earned Banks the John Dos Passos Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer...

Birthday Letters is Ted Hughes' final collection of poetry. It was published in 1998, months prior to Hughes' death. It contains eighty eight poems and is viewed as the poet's most successful and revered work. It is 208 pages long.

Birthday...

Published in 1901, Buddenbrooks was 26-year-old Thomas Mann’s first novel and the work that set his career on a relentlessly inevitable path toward winning the Nobel Prize twenty-eight years later. The story covers four generations of the titular...

Cloud 9 is a two-act play written in 1979 by Caryl Churchill, who is widely accepted as one of England's foremost modern playwrights. It is a controversial play that deals with sexual politics and has some female characters played by men to...

The publication of Lorrie Moore’s third collection of short stories catapulted her to the front ranks of major writers of short fiction. What her previous collection Like Life promised, the arrival in 1998 of Birds of America confirmed. Though she...

Playwright Eugene Ionesco once provided a definition of his favorite mode of literary examination that positively overflows with existential weight: “The Absurd is that which is devoid of purpose.” Some would suggest that every time Ionesco put...

Margery Kempe is a historic figure who lived in England between 1373 and 1438 and remained in history because of her writings and her religious beliefs. While Kempe was never formally made a saint by the Catholic Church she is named a Christian...

John Gower’s Confession Amantis exists in at least three separate and distinct versions. The very first edition published in 1390 is generally regarded as the definitive edition for scholarly and academic attention. That edition comprises more...

Call it Sleep is a fictitious novel written by Henry Roth and follows the life of a young Jewish boy who lives in the Lower East Side of New York. The book was published in 1934 by Robert O. Ballou's publishing company.

The story follows David...

In the 1890s, a family immigrated into America from Poland. Anzia Yezierska recalls the stress and strife of living her with relatives among other Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side in Bread Givers. Published in 1925, the book...

Crow, a book of poetry by Ted Hughes, was published in 1970 by the esteemed British publisher Faber and Faber. It is widely considered one of Hughes' most important works. Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow marks the second phase of Hughes'...

Rarely performed for modern audiences, Richard Steele’s 1722 comedy The Conscious Lovers nevertheless is an essential component in a major turning in the history of the British stage. The play’s debut took place on the night of November 7, 1722 on...

Daphnis and Chloe is one of the few surviving examples of one of the most unusual genres of ancient literature: the Greek romance. The author is known only as Longus and is believed to have lived on the isle of Lesbos between the 2nd and 3rd...

The occupants of a British manor house usually become the focus of a novel due to whatever particular machinations are at work to drive the narrative. Those machinations usually range from throwing suspicion of a murder onto one another in order...

Big Sur was written by Jack Kerouac in 1962. The book was published five years after his novel On the Road put him and the Beat Generation in the national spotlight.

The “Beat” in Beat Generation was defined by Kerouac himself as having several...

Blues for Mister Charlie was written by James Baldwin for an express purpose. That purpose was education: the education of white America on the subject of the black experience in America. The epicenter of that black experience was Emmitt Till, a...

The version of the Christian Holy Bible commonly referred to as the King James Version goes by the more technically correct name of the “Authorized Version.” The creation of the Authorized Version of the Holy Bible can be directly traced back to...

Bury Fair is a 1689 play by Thomas Shadwell. In keeping with his standard application already established with twelve productions produced over the proceeding twenty years, Bury Fair (sometimes spelled Bury-Fair) was an adaptation of an already...

Amerika is the first novel written by Franz Kafka, but remained incomplete until Kafka's death and was only published posthumously. The German book was released three years after Kafka's death in 1927 although the first English translation was not...

Anticlaudianus was written by French theologian and poet Alain de Lille. This lengthy, symbolic poem is about creation as well as the edification of the human soul by God, nature, theology, and philosophy. Alain is also well-known for another poem...