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Grendel was published in 1971. Ostensibly a retelling of the Beowulf epic, Grendel is in fact a dark fable concerned with the philosophical underpinnings of society and individuality, as well as the place of art in a world of competing ideologies....

Through the Looking Glass is Carroll's sequel to Alice in Wonderland. A few of the characters who appeared in Wonderland reappear in Through the Looking Glass, including Alice's cat and the Hatter and the Hare. More significantly, however, is the...

Fences was written by August Wilson in 1983 and first performed at the 46th Street Theatre on Broadway in 1987. Fences is the sixth play in Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle." The Cycle is a series of plays set in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania over the ten...

The Lovely Bones, released in 2002, is Alice Sebold’s second published book, and her first published novel. The book sold almost three million copies and was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. The novel was translated into over...

The Rape of the Lock (1714) had its origins in an actual incident that occurred in 1711. Robert, Lord Petre surreptitiously cut a lock of hair from Arabella Fermor, who he had been courting at the time. The Fermors took offense, and a schism...

Published in 1922, Siddhartha is the most famous and influential novel by Nobel prize-winning (1946) German author Hermann Hesse. Though set in India, the concerns of Siddhartha are universal, expressing Hesse's general interest in the conflict...

Many of Hemingway’s short stories appeared in various magazines before being anthologized in his short story collections. The first of these collections, and his first major published work, was Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923); this collection...

The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy, that is, an English theatrical comedy written during the period 1660-1710, when theatrical performances resumed in London following their 18-year spell of illegality under the reign of the Puritan...

Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, The Story of Their Lives, A Girls’ Book was written by Louisa May Alcott and published in two parts. Roberts Brothers published the first part on September 30, 1868. After its success, with the first 2000...

Leaves of Grass has been considered by many critics to be the first and best example of American poetry, and Whitman to have been the first major American poet. Yet other critics have found the work obscene. Its greatness has been the topic of...

And Then There Were None was first published in 1939 in Great Britain and was published a few months later in the United States in January of 1940. It is Agatha Christie's bestselling novel. Over 100 million copies have been printed and it remains...

In Jacob's Room, the novel preceding Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf works with many of the same themes she later expands upon in Mrs. Dalloway. To Mrs. Dalloway, she added the theme of insanity. As Woolf stated, "I adumbrate here a study of...

After the death of his father, John, James Bradley was inspired to research the lives of the six men (including his father) in the famous photograph of the raising of the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. His idea was turned down...

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008. The book took Junot Díaz eleven years to write, and was his first novel. The story is set both in the United States and in the Dominican Republic. The narrative...

Everyman is one of the most famous and best known examples of a medieval morality play (see ‘The Morality Play’). It is, in the words of Arnold Williams, “the morality play best known and most widely performed in modern times”. Modern scholars are...

Mankind is one of the most famous and best known examples of a medieval morality play (see ‘The Morality Play’). It is, like many others of the same type, anonymous, and we know very little about the playwright, though the play itself seems to...

William Blake was a poet who was not very well recognized during his lifetime. It was not until his sixties when his work began to receive credit as leading a new literary movement in England at the time that was really triggered by William...

The Tortilla Curtain was published by Viking Press in 1995 and went on to become T.C. Boyle's most successful novel. It delves into middle class values and their relation to the issues of illegal immigration, xenophobia, poverty, and the American...

Euripides twice treated the Hippolytus myth in dramatic form, which was unusual for a Greek tragedian. This is, in fact, the only known instance of a Greek dramatist composing two tragedies on the same mythic source. It therefore seems likely that...

Henry Fielding published his first full novel in 1742, at a time when he was nearly penniless and expecting the deaths of his young daughter and beloved wife. Joseph Andrews was, then, a response to personal and financial exigencies, but it was...

Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe, published in 1861, is unique among George Eliot's writings for its brevity and its apparent allegorical clarity. The novel is only slightly longer than the short stories that Eliot published in her first work,...

Jane Austen wrote Northhanger Abbey while she was residing in her childhood home in Steventon, England, but the novel is largely set in the resort town of Bath, where Austen visited for a month-long vacation in 1797. Originally entitled Susan, the...

Samuel Richardson may have based his first novel on the story of a real-life affair between Hannah Sturges, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a coachman, and Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Baronet of Northampton, whom she married in 1725. He certainly based...

La Chanson de Roland, or The Song of Roland, is the oldest surviving French poem. It is also the oldest and greatest of the chansons de geste, medieval epic poems written in French. In old French, "geste" means a deed or action, often of heroic...