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"The Waste Land" caused a sensation when it was published in 1922. It is today the most widely translated and studied English-language poem of the twentieth century. This is perhaps surprising given the poem's length and its difficulty, but...

John Steinbeck published his highly controversial novel East of Eden, the work that he referred to as "the big one", in 1952. A symbolic recreation of the biblical story of Cain and Abel set in California's Salinas Valley, Steinbeck wrote the...

The Kite Runner is Khaled Hosseini's first novel. He was a practicing physician until shortly after the book's release and has now devoted himself to being an author and activist. The story of The Kite Runner is fictional, but it is rooted in real...

The Aeneid is Virgil's masterpiece, the product of eleven years of intensive work. Legend has it that Virgil wrote this epic out of order, separating it into twelve books and working on each one whenever he pleased. Still unfinished at the time of...

Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is a short but dense literary work that becomes considerably more approachable when given some context. In the words of critic Anne B. Simpson, it is a text that offers "ambiguous and mutually incompatible...

Light In August was the first book Faulkner published after gaining some public success with Sanctuary, the book he wrote for commercial gain only. He published Light In August in 1931, thus beginning the period of the publication of much of his...

Ellison gained valuable writing experience while working for the Federal Writers' Project between 1938 and 1942. Through his work, he came into close contact with a variety of people and thus became better adept at producing realistic characters...

In late October, 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered a lecture on "Women and Fiction" at Newnham and Girton, the two women's college at Cambridge, England. Woolf had written the lecture in May; in 1929, she expanded it into what is now "A Room of One's...

Love in the Time of Cholera, published in 1985, was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first book after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Although it has often been compared negatively with Marquez's greatest achievement, One Hundred Years of...

After World War I, Italy was in a state of turmoil. Political groups such as communists and anarchists were vying for attention and sway, and King Victor Emmanuel III was losing control over his country. Angry, bitter soldiers had returned to a...

Jack Kerouac's On the Road can be considered among the most important novels of the twentieth century. It holds a great deal of historical significance, showing an underbelly of American culture full of sex, drugs, and lost youth, a culture that...

No Exit was first performed in Paris in May 1944, only three months before the city's liberation from the Nazi occupation. The theater in which it was performed was called the Vieux-Colombier. Startlingly simple in design, the play's power stems...

Astrophel and Stella (now called Astrophil and Stella), which includes 108 sonnets and 11 songs, is the first in a long line of Elizabethan sonnet cycles. "Sonnet cycles" were so named because they incorporated linked sonnets that generally...

The English Patient, published in 1992, is Ondaatje's most famous and critically acclaimed work. The novel won Ondaatje the prestigious Booker McConnell Prize in 1992, making him the only Sri Lankan writer ever to receive the honor. In 1996, Saul...

A work considered a combination of Menippean satire and apocalyptic dialogue, the Consolation of Philosophy is a philosophical work similar in structure to a classical Greek dialogue (such as the Dialogues of Plato) but with a more personal,...

Herzog is often called autobiographical, a claim not wanting in evidence. Bellow wrote the book in multiple locations, namely Puerto Rico, New York, and Chicago, while in the throes of a marital crisis. The crisis was rooted, to Bellow's shock, in...

The Scarlet Pimpernel was initially rejected by publishers, when Orczy completed it in 1903. Undeterred, she reinvented the book as a play, which went on to be successful, leading to the publication of the book in 1905. The book was an immediate...

The Guest, or L'Hote, is considered one of Camus's most important works of fiction. It was published in 1957 as part of the collection titled, Exile and the Kingdom. The Guest touches on many of Camus's major moral and philosophical ideas. It is...

The Bonfire of the Vanities, published in 1987, was the eleventh book and first novel by the famous journalist, author, and American Studies scholar Tom Wolfe. Previously, Wolfe had written non-fiction journalism and essays on American life such...

The Awakening was published in 1899, and it immediately created a controversy. Kate Chopin's contemporaries were shocked by her depiction of a woman with active sexual desires, who dares to leave her husband and have an affair. Instead of...

With the publishing of the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain introduced the two immortal characters of Tom and Huckleberry to the "Hall of Fame" of American literature, as well as re-invented the traditional frontier tale. Written around 1870,...

Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse Five is a novel written in troubled times about troubled times. As the novel was being finished in 1968, America saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In the South, Blacks and their...

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was written between 1938 and 1939 and published in 1941. At the time of its writing Nabokov was living in Paris. According to legend, the book was written while seated on a toilet with a plank over the bidet...