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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...

Look Back in Anger is considered one of the most important plays in the modern British theater. It was the first well-known example of "Kitchen Sink drama," a style of theater that explored the emotion and drama beneath the surface of ordinary...

The Jungle was published in 1906, three years after Upton Sinclair’s failed first novel, and it became an immediate success. Sinclair based the novel on the American meatpacking industry, an industry that had received scrutiny in the decade before...

The Lottery and Other Stories is a collection of twenty-five of Shirley Jackson's short stories, plus an epilogue. This collection was first named The Lottery--Adventures of the Daemon Lover by Jackson. The collection was first published in 1949...

During Henry James's youth, James came into contact with many of the literary greats of the time due to his family's prominence. When he was a young boy, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited often and he once was introduced to William Thackeray. As he grew...

"The Open Boat" and Other Stories is a collection of four stories by Stephen Crane, listed in chronological order as follows: “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” (1893), “The Open Boat” (1897), “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898), and “The Blue...

A Modest Proposal and Other Satires is a collection of satirical works of political, social, and religious commentary by Jonathan Swift. The most famous of his essays—perhaps the most famous essay of satire in the English language—is “A Modest...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust is one of the greatest works of German literature in the modern age and one of the greatest epic poems in Western literature. Faust consumed much of Goethe's thought and work throughout his entire life. He...

"Metamorphoses" means transformations, and transformation is the governming theme of the text. But, Metamorphoses is also a compilation of myths, some complimentary and some almost contradictory, that were well-known in Ovid's society. Indeed, one...

The story of O Pioneers! begins in the dedication and poem which precede the work. Cather dedicates O Pioneers! "To the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, in whose beautiful and delicate work there is perfection that endures." Cather met Jewett in 1908,...

Ulysses, a Modernist reconstruction of Homer's epic The Odyssey, was James Joyce's first epic-length novel. The Irish writer had already published a collection of short stories entitled Dubliners, as well as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young...

Allen Ginsberg's work can be considered a culmination of modernist poetry while, at the same time, it is also a prime example of the deconstruction of the modernist form. Ginsberg sought to move away from the formal styles of poetry that...

Although Mann is considered to be a deeply German writer, at the time that he began writing, Germany itself was fairly new to the world. When Death in Venice was published in 1912, a unified Germany had existed for a mere 41 years. Although Mann...

Hurston wrote Their Eyes in 1937 in only seven weeks while doing anthropological research in Haiti. When Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published in 1937, it did not receive the accolades and recognition that it...

Vladimir Nabokov started writing Lolita while teaching at Cornell University in 1949. He continued writing the novel while traveling with his wife around the country on summer butterfly hunting trips (Nabokov was an esteemed lepidopterist, or...

White Teeth is Zadie Smith's acclaimed debut novel, first published when she had barely finished college. The novel began as a short story, and a single chapter gained Smith a contract with a prominent literary agency. The novel was released in...

To the Lighthouse (1927) is widely considered one of the most important works of the twentieth century. With this ambitious novel, Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of modernism. The novel develops innovative literary...

After her early upbringing as a child of Irish and French Creole descent in the upper class of St. Louis in the decades surrounding the Civil War, Kate Chopin married Oscar Chopin, a Creole businessman, and moved with him to New Orleans. In New...

The 51 chapters of the novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985) are unorthodox in that, while they are of varying lengths, most of them are very short. Some of these small divisions are under two pages long. This unusual arrangement creates...

"We cannot go forward and build up this new world order, and this is our war aim, unless we begin to think differently: one must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation. Take the change...

Although J.D. Salinger has written many short stories, The Catcher in the Rye is Salinger's only novel and his most notable work, earning him great fame and admiration as a writer and sparking many high school students' interest in great...

For Whom the Bell Tolls was inspired by Hemingway's experiences as a foreign correspondent, first in Paris and then in Spain itself, during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway visited Spain in 1931, just after the monarchy of Alfonso XIII had been...

In Disgrace (1999), J.M. Coetzee enters intimately into the mind of a twice-divorced academic, David Lurie, as he wrestles with the impediments that societal standards place on the fulfillment of his sexual desire. Fired from his position in Cape...

Melville finished his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, when he was all of thirty-two years old. Still a young writer, he had crafted one of the most incredibly dense and imaginative works in all of literature, a book now praised by many as the greatest...