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Astrophel and Stella (now called Astrophil and Stella), which includes 108 sonnets and 11 songs, is the first in a long line of Elizabethan sonnet cycles. "Sonnet cycles" were so named because they incorporated linked sonnets that generally...

The English Patient, published in 1992, is Ondaatje's most famous and critically acclaimed work. The novel won Ondaatje the prestigious Booker McConnell Prize in 1992, making him the only Sri Lankan writer ever to receive the honor. In 1996, Saul...

A work considered a combination of Menippean satire and apocalyptic dialogue, the Consolation of Philosophy is a philosophical work similar in structure to a classical Greek dialogue (such as the Dialogues of Plato) but with a more personal,...

Herzog is often called autobiographical, a claim not wanting in evidence. Bellow wrote the book in multiple locations, namely Puerto Rico, New York, and Chicago, while in the throes of a marital crisis. The crisis was rooted, to Bellow's shock, in...

The Scarlet Pimpernel was initially rejected by publishers, when Orczy completed it in 1903. Undeterred, she reinvented the book as a play, which went on to be successful, leading to the publication of the book in 1905. The book was an immediate...

The Guest, or L'Hote, is considered one of Camus's most important works of fiction. It was published in 1957 as part of the collection titled, Exile and the Kingdom. The Guest touches on many of Camus's major moral and philosophical ideas. It is...

The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987, was the eleventh book and first novel by the famous journalist, author, and American Studies scholar Tom Wolfe. Previously, Wolfe had written non-fiction journalism and essays on American life such...

The Awakening was published in 1899, and it immediately created a controversy. Kate Chopin's contemporaries were shocked by her depiction of a woman with active sexual desires, who dares to leave her husband and have an affair. Instead of...

With the publishing of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain introduced the two immortal characters of Tom and Huckleberry to the "Hall of Fame" of American literature, as well as re-invented the traditional frontier tale. Written around 1870,...

Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse Five is a novel written in troubled times about troubled times. As the novel was being finished in 1968, America saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In the South, Blacks and their...

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was written between 1938 and 1939 and published in 1941. At the time of its writing Nabokov was living in Paris. According to legend, the book was written while seated on a toilet with a plank over the bidet...

Manhattan Transfer is a seminal American novel, and yet it is not widely read. John Dos Passos is perenially overlooked in the literary canon in favor of his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Dos Passos was friends with...

Ernest Hemingway wrote In Our Time in 1925, and its critical acclaim established him as a literary force. Critics currently argue over whether it should be considered a novel or merely a compilation of short stories and vignettes. In fact it has...

In the summer of 1893, Oscar Wilde began writing An Ideal Husband, and he completed it later that winter. At this point in his career he was accustomed to success, and in writing An Ideal Husband he wanted to ensure himself public fame. His work...

When the young playwright Arthur Miller began writing All My Sons, he was embarking on a project that would be either the beginning or the end of his career. His first and only play to be produced on Broadway, The Man Who Had All the Luck, was an...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, is a hybrid of literary genres, at once a journalistic account of a historical murder that took place in Sucre, Columbia, a psychological detective story, and a work of allegorical...

Our Town is one of the most performed and best-known plays in American theater; it is a truism in the theater business that every night, somewhere in America, a theater audience is watching Our Town. The play is especially popular in amateur...

The Rose is a collection of twenty-two poems that W.B. Yeats published in 1893. It was only his second lyrical collection, but contains many of his famous mythological poems. At this point in his life, Yeats was steeped deeply into the world of...

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at Bournemouth in 1885, while convalescing from an illness. The original idea occurred to him in a nightmare from which his wife awakened him. In fact, Stevenson was disappointed that she had...

Sardonic, farcical, dark and tragicomic, Troilus and Cressida is a play that seems more comfortable on today's stage than it ever was in Shakespeare's day. Indeed, Troilus went unstaged for three hundred years; following its first performance in...

American Beauty is a DreamWorks production that was shot in 1999 and released in the United States in 2000. It was the big-screen debut for director Sam Mendes, as well as for writer Alan Ball. The film was produced by Alan Ball, Bruce Cohen, Dan...

Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) is Walter Mosley's first novel as well as the first book of the Easy Rawlins mystery series. Mosley has said that although he has long been enamored of detective fiction, he did not set out to write a mystery series....

Plato's Republic has long defied classification: it is a philosophical masterpiece; it is acute political theory; it is great literature. Although certain inconsistencies have been subsequently discovered, philosophical and otherwise, there can be...

First published in 1918, My Antonia is a modernist novel. Modernism was a literary movement that began at the very end of the nineteenth century and continued until the end of the 1930s. It reached its peak during the 1920s, and it was...