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The Heart of the Matter (1948) is one of Graham Greene's most famous novels. Critics consider it to be part of Greene's "Catholic Triology" alongside The Power and the Glory (1940) and The End of the Affair (1951). The Heart of the Matter has...

Chinua Achebe penned "Civil Peace" in 1971, depicting through it the effects of the Nigerian Civil War on a man and his family. The War, which began in 1967 with the secession of several Southeastern provinces from Nigeria, led to an intensive...

Though Vonnegut is now known primarily as a novelist, his short stories were quite popular during the 1950s and 60's, in leading magazines such as Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post.

Vonnegut began writing short fiction while working in...

In 1995, Peter Weir was looking for his next project but found every script that crossed his desk to be "either predictable or derivative" (Weinraub). Then, a special project caught his interest - Andrew Niccol's screenplay for The Truman Show,...

One of Zola’s first full-length novels, Thérèse Raquin remains one of his best-known. When he sat down to write the story of Thérèse, her acquaintances, and her descent into murder and suicide, Zola was only twenty-seven years old. In 1866, he had...

The kernel for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind came from a hypothetical question that Michel Gondry's friend, artist Pierre Bismuth, proposed over dinner: What if you received a card in the mail that stated you had been erased from someone's...

Though not one of Hardy's best-known novels, The Return of the Native remains firmly of his canon, and is a dense summation of the preoccupations that run through all of his work.

The Return of the Native was first printed as serial fiction in ...

There is a legend Gabriel Garcia Marquez likes to tell about the writing of his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. He claims that he wrote the book barricaded in his study in Mexico, after receiving a vision. One day, while he and...

Cloud Atlas was written by British novelist David Mitchell and published in the United Kingdom by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton in 2004. The novel was released the same year in the United States by Random House.

Cloud Atlas consists...

Island of the Blue Dolphins was published in 1960. At the time, author Scott O'Dell had only written books for adults, but this novel became his most famous and enduring. It has won the Newbery Medal, has been adapted into film, has inspired a...

Ntozake Shange's choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf debuted in 1975. It is a combination of drama, music, dance, and poetry meant to be performed by seven actresses. It has since become a cornerstone...

W. H. Auden is considered one of the finest English or American poets and one of the best poets of the 20th century. He is an exemplar of modernism along with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but his later poetry differs vastly from his earlier work;...

While Edith Wharton is primarily known for her novels about turn-of-the-century New York high society, she also wrote dozens of short stories that are just as astute and lyrical. In these brief pieces of fiction, Wharton contemplates the tension...

Juan Rulfo's The Burning Plain and other Short Stories (originally En llano en llamas) was published in 1953. It marked the first of Rulfo's two publications, the other being his highly regarded novel, Pedro Páramo (1955). These two works, though...

Ezra Pound's contribution to poetry is marked by his promotion of Imagism, a movement centered on clarity, economic language, and rhythm. Pound started this movement after studying Japanese forms of poetry like waka verse and haiku. These forms...

Although Kipling is perhaps most famous for his short stories like "The Jungle Book," he was just as famed for his verse as his prose. His work, which is staggering in number, consists of such major poems as "If", "The White Man's Burden", "The...

One of the most famous - and infamous - works in the history of literature, The Sorrows of Young Werther was Goethe's first work of narrative art, published in 1774. The novel was perfectly timed, capturing the European imagination with its...

Number the Stars is a historical fiction novel. It follows the journey of 10-year-old Annemarie Johansen after the Nazi invasion of Denmark in 1943. Annemarie must help her Jewish best friend, Ellen Rosen, escape the country. Lowry got the idea...

The Hound of the Baskervilles was written in 1901, eight years after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had already 'killed off' Sherlock Holmes in his story, "The Final Problem." However, the novel was not a sequel - the events of The Hound of the...

Most of Andrew Marvell’s poetry was not published during his lifetime, due to political controversy and the popular tradition of manuscript circulation. Poets in 17th century England often refused to print and publish their work as sign of social...

Three Men in a Boat is an immensely popular Victorian novel, published in 1889. It remains popular in some circles to this day.

Jerome K. Jerome’s early career as a writer was less than promising. He often had to resort to hack journalism to make...

Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 tour de force epic about the Vietnam War, is a rare film where the infamously perilous shoot rivaled the onscreen drama. At his Cannes press conference, after unveiling the (yet unfinished) cut, Coppola...

Edgar Huntly: or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, published in 1799 by Charles Brockden Brown, is one of the earliest work of American fiction, and the first to depict the tense relationship between Americans and Indians on the frontier. Adopting but...

Edward Albee wrote The Zoo Story in less than three weeks in 1958, and originally titled it Peter and Jerry. Although Albee is now widely considered to be among America's greatest living playwrights, this was his first foray into drama writing. It...