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In 1960, French author Albert Camus died at the age of 46 in a car accident. Prior to his death, Camus published a number of great works like The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. He was also working a brand new novel entitled The First Man,...

Nathaniel Hawthorn owes the writing of his last novel, The Marble Faun, to the fact that Franklin Pierce was such an incompetent President that even today, more than 150 years and 30 contenders later, he still consistently ranks among the five...

Released in 1940, The Great Dictator was a satirical political film produced, directed, written , starring, and scored by the famed British actor and comedian, Charlie Chaplin. The film makes fun of the Nazi Regime in Germany, which was at its...

Every short story that Nabokov ever wrote is included in this collection, apart from The Enchanter. The collection was published after Nabokov's death and none had been previously published. As a tribute to his later father, the author's son,...

J.D. Salinger is best known for the coming-of-angst novel The Catcher In The Rye, but he is also revered and respected as one of America's pre-eminent writers of short stories as well. His career as a short story writer began when he was still in...

Sometimes it is necessary to have another income source when one is first thinking about becoming a poet. Such was life for American poet and essayist Dana Gioia, who spent the first fifteen years of his writing career penning feverishly at night...

Included in Tobias Wolff's book Back in the World are ten stories (ranging from "The Missing Person" to "The Rich Brother") which cover rather normal people in abnormal situations. In one story, a kind and gentle priest finds himself in a Las...

“The Wife of His Youth” (1898) was Charles W. Chesnutt’s proclamation of the death of the plantation myth of the black man as defined and constructed by the dialect tales, stories which appealed primarily to white readers. Chesnutt had found...

“The Altar” is a pattern poem, also known as a “hieroglyphic” poem. These are poems shaped like the thing they describe: in this case, an altar. The first known pattern poems were written in Ancient Greek between 325 BCE and 200 CE. While other...

Published in 2003, Private Peaceful is a young-adult novel by English author Michael Morpurgo, notable for his children's book War Horse. The book is written from the perspective of a soldier discussing his life experiences both before and during...

Not to be confused with the Laurel and Hardy movie of the same name that was released six years previously, Leo McCarey's Duck Soup was the last of five Marx Brothers movies to be released by Paramount Studios. It also marked the ending of the...

The Accidental Tourist is a novel written by the American author Anne Tyler in 1985. The novel revolves around a protagonist named Macon Leary, a middle-aged writer of travel guides. Macon and his wife of 20 years, Sarah, struggle to maintain...

The speed of Wendelin Van Draanen's prose is extremely quick, and mirrors the speed around the track of her protagonist, sixteen year old Jessica Carlisle, a high school track star who loses a leg when her track team's bus collides with a car...

"The Darling" is a short story by Anton Chekhov, written in December 1898. First published in The Family magazine, it was ultimately included in the nine volume of Chekhov's work, released by book publisher Adolph Marx. The story draws from...

In 1862, during his Presidency, Abraham Lincoln's beloved son, Willie, passed away, and was interred in the crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery in the Georgetown area of Washington D.C. The President was consumed by grief, and had been known to go into the...

Michael Robartes and the Dancer is a book collection of 15 poems. The book and thus the poems were written between the years 1914 and 1919, before it was published in 1920. Later on, the book has been republished various times, including the...

This Coen Brothers movie, released in 2000, takes its title from a film made six decades earlier. In the 1941 Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan’s Travels, the title journey is undertaken by a popular director of comedy movies who has decided he...

Juno was a groundbreaking film at the time of its release in 2007 for many reasons. Its frank and un-precious depiction of teen pregnancy was witty and crowd-pleasing; the screenplay, by newcomer Diablo Cody was laugh-a-minute while also...

Published in 1972, Gorilla, My Love is Toni Cade Bambara's first book-length work of fiction. However, she had been publishing short fiction in periodicals for some time. "Sweet Home" (which appears in Gorilla, My Love under the title "Sweet...

In 1946, a former tail gunner during World War II was elected to represent Wisconsin in the United States Senate. His methods would become infamous in American history, known today as "McCarthyism." In a strikingly short period of time. Sen....

The novel is set during a tumultuous time in French history, when the country was in the throws of short-lived regimes and a series of revolutions. It is also during the height of the Industrial Revolution, which began in France later than it did...

Although the five books of Gargantua and Pantragruel are often presented chronologically, François Rabelais actually wrote the second book first, which is the story of Pantagruel. Research by Donald M. Frame indicates that Rabelais wrote his story...

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. It is the story of nine-year-old Oskar Schell, an imaginative but troubled boy who lost his father in the attacks of 09/11. The story follows Oskar's attempt to make peace...

Everything is Illuminated is Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel. Foer completed a full manuscript of the book while an undergraduate at Princeton under the mentorship of Joyce Carol Oates. Only the core of the novel is based in fact. When he was...