Harold Pinter was working as an actor in England when he stayed briefly at a dilapidated boardinghouse that would serve as his inspiration for both The Birthday Party and The Room. As he has explained in many published works, he wrote more from...

The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan's first novel, published in 1989. Just two years before the book's release, Tan was succeeding as a speech writer and self-proclaimed workaholic. Feeling unfulfilled, she found her calling in fiction writing. Tan...

She Stoops to Conquer was first produced in London in 1773, and was a massive success. It was reputed to have created an applause that was yet unseen in the London theatre, and almost immediately entered the repertory of respectable companies....

Yukio Mishima's The Sound of Waves was published in 1954 in Japanese. It was translated into English by Meredith Weatherby and published in North America in 1956. It is a sweet and simple tale of two lovers on an idyllic, isolated Japanese island...

Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V., was published in 1963. The novel won him many awards. America began to view Pynchon as a premier Postwar writer, an able representative of the paranoid generation coming out of the McCarthy era and facing the...

Enduring Love, published in 1997, is Ian McEwan's sixth novel and one of his most successful, shortlisted for several prizes. It was adapted into a film in 2004. It tells the story of Joe Rose, who struggles to maintain his comfortable life and...

In Cold Blood, which was published serially in The New Yorker in 1965 before appearing in book form in 1966, is the work that launched Truman Capote to literary stardom, and remains his best-known piece. It details the events of a real-life murder...

Speak is Laurie Halse Anderson's first young adult novel. It was published in 1999 by Penguin Group and re-released in 2006 as a "platinum edition" containing an interview with the author. The novel tells the story of Melinda Sordino, a Syracuse...

While she was researching her nonfiction history book Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, Esther Forbes became interested in the lives of ordinary people in colonial Boston. This interest resulted in Johnny Tremain, a coming-of-age story for...

History of the Collection

There have been several collections of poetry since the sixteenth century that have included works attributed to Sir Thomas Wyatt. There remains confusion, however, as to the exact number of poems written by Wyatt; there...

The Wave was Todd Strasser's third novel, written while he spent days working as the owner of a fortune cookie manufacturer. It is based on a real-life experiment performed by high-school teacher Ron Jones in 1967 (for more information, see "The...

Alan Paton wrote Cry, the Beloved Country during his tenure as the principal at the Diepkloof Reformatory for delinquent African boys. He started writing the novel in Trondheim, Norway in September of 1946 and finished it in San Francisco on...

According to New York Times book reviewer William Boyd, "The great benefit of Ishmael Beah’s memoir, A Long Way Gone, is that it may help us arrive at an understanding of this situation. Beah's autobiography is almost unique, as far as I can...

The Kama Sutra is the seminal text on love in Indian civilization - and perhaps the world - and is considered a masterpiece of Sanskrit literature. As a result of its legendary status, the Kama Sutra has achieved a place in pop mythology as a "sex...