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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was the last of Twain's novels written during the apex of his career. As a work it shows his more mature writing, hinting at some of the cynical and dark themes that he would obsess over in his final...

In 1846 Karl Marx was exiled from Paris on account of his radical politics. He moved to Belgium where he attempted to assemble a ragtag group of exiled German artisans into an unified political organization, the German Working Men's Association....

Recently named among the top 25 non-fiction works of the century, Richard Wright's Black Boy has made a strong impact on American literature with its strong commentary on the cultural, political, racial, religious, and social issues of 20th...

Melville finished his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, when he was all of thirty-two years old. Still a young writer, he had crafted one of the most incredibly dense and imaginative works in all of literature, a book now praised by many as the greatest...

The Bacchae was presented posthumously along with Iphigenia in Aulis and the lost Alcmaeon in Corinth in 406-405 BCE. The three plays were brought back to Athens by Euripides' son, Euripides the Younger. They were probably written around 407 BCE,...

Aristotle's Politics is one of the most influential and enduring texts of political philosophy in all of history. The Aristotelian tradition, following from the philosophy of Plato and continuing in the writings of Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas and...

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics was written around 340 BC. It is probably named after either his father or son, who were both named Nicomachus. Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle's most mature work on ethics. That the argument as presented in the book...

Anna Karenina was published in serial form from 1873-1877. It created a great stir in society?reports from the time claim that everyone in Russian Society was discussing the book and waiting eagerly for the next installment to appear. The critical...

The Ambassadors is divided into twelve sections called "books." In 1903, these sections were published, in serial form, in a journal called The North American Review. Later that year, the novel was published as a whole, though there were...

Agamemnon is only the first play of the great tragic trilogy, the Oresteia. Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia around 458 B.C.E.. It is his sole trilogy to survive intact. The two other plays, Choephori and Eumenides, and a lost satyr play called...

Absalom, Absalom! was published in 1936, after Faulkner's three seminal novels The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and A Light in August (1932). One of the strange things about this chronology is that two of the narrators of...