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Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty in 1877. It was to be her first and only book. Sewell, who grew up in Quaker family of north England, was an invalid for most of her life. Since she could not stand for long periods of time, she learned how to ride...

Big Fish is a 2003 movie directed by Tim Burton. It tells the story of a Paris-based journalist named Will Bloom who comes home to Ashton, Alabama, when he hears that his father, Edward, is terminally ill with cancer and has been taken off...

Bicycle Thieves (often listed under the title The Bicycle Thief) is a landmark 1948 Italian neorealist film directed by Vittorio De Sica. The film was adapted from Luigi Bartolini’s novel of the same name by Cesare Zavattini, who was one of De...

First published in 1946, All the King's Men was directly influenced by Robert Penn Warren's firsthand experiences with fascism in Benito Mussolini's Italy and radical populism in governor Huey P. Long's Louisiana.

In 1934, in the middle of the...

The Bhagavad Gita is one of the fundamental texts of Hinduism, and documents the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna as Arjuna prepares to go into battle against the Kauravas for battle of the kingdom of Hastinapura.

The Gita is written in...

Published in 2016 by award-winning American author, Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad is a gripping account of a runaway slave, Cora, as she makes her way through a fictionalized American landscape. Throughout her journey to freedom, Cora...

The Trojan Women, also known as the Troades, was composed by the Greek playwright Euripides in 415 B.C.E. in response to the Athenian massacre on the island of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. Melos had been attempting to maintain its...

Looking for Richard is a 1996 film directed by Oscar-winning Hollywood actor Al Pacino. It is an exploration of Pacino's love for Shakespeare, particularly Shakespeare's Richard III, and it playfully intersperses documentary-style interviews with...

Amiri Baraka is known for his drama, poetry, and founding of the Black Arts Movement. His works Dutchman and The Slave are considered companion pieces in Black America’s “consciousness epic.” At the time of their staging and publication, Baraka...

Diary of A Wimpy Kid was in the works since 1998, when Jeff Kinney first came up with the idea for the character Greg. Kinney spent several years writing jokes revolving around Greg and workshopping the character, but it wouldn't be until 2004...

"Digging" appears in Seamus Heaney's first major volume of poetry, called Death of a Naturalist (1966). The poems in this book deal mainly with Heaney's rural upbringing, his family, and how his identity formed in that environment. The book was...

A Wrinkle in Time is Madeleine L'Engle's first and most popular book for young adults. It was written in the late 1950s and early 1960s, though the book was rejected numerous times by publishers before finally being published in 1962, just before...

A White Heron and Other Stories was published in 1886. Jewett had begun her writing career in 1868 when her story, “Mr. Bruce,” was published in Atlantic Monthly. Jewett had a supportive relationship with Thomas Fields, the editor of the magazine,...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" in 1955, and gave it the subtitle of A Tale For Children. "Very Old Man" is perhaps the clearest and most famous example of a genre that Garcia Marquez helped to create: magical...

Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was written after Hosseini traveled back to his native Afghanistan to examine for himself the nation’s situation in the aftermath of decades of turmoil. In early 2007, Hosseini told Time...

A Lesson Before Dying is Ernest J. Gaines's eighth book, and is in some ways his most autobiographical. Many aspects of the novel are drawn from Gaines's personal experiences growing up in Oscar, Louisiana. For example, the plantation school where...

A Confederacy of Dunces is one of two novels written by John Kennedy Toole, the other being The Neon Bible, which he wrote at age 16. Neither book was published during Toole's lifetime. Following Toole's suicide, his mother sought out author...

Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is based on Anthony Burgess' 1962 novel of the same name. The title comes from the Cockney expression "as queer as a clockwork orange", which means "very queer indeed (the meaning can be, but isn't necessarily,...

The title, A Burnt-Out Case, refers to a condition identified by Doctor Colin in the novel: some lepers develop severe psychological numbness as a result of their disease. Even after they are cured and cease to feel the pain of their condition,...

This selection of stories includes John Updike's most popular and critically debated short works. "Ace in the Hole," "A & P," and "Pigeon Feathers" are all characteristic of Updike's early style; indeed, 1953's "Ace" was the 21-year-old...

First published in 1922, Babbitt is set during the 1920s (the Jazz Age), the period in America following World War I that is considered especially materialistic and spiritually depraved. Politically, the country was charged with fear due to the...

Sir William Golding composed Lord of the Flies shortly after the end of WWII. At the time of the novel's composition, Golding, who had published an anthology of poetry nearly two decades earlier, had been working for a number of years as a teacher...

“The Whitsun Weddings,” the titular poem of a book by the same name, is perhaps the most-discussed poem by Philip Larkin, known as England’s ‘poet laureate of disappointment.’ With eight stanzas of ten lines each, rhyming like Keatsian odes but...

Three Sisters is a play written by Anton Chekhov in 1900. It follows the lives of the Prozorov sisters as their fortune is in decline and they must seek out a happy life against the odds. The play traces various human disappointments, specifically...