Newest Study Guides
Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
Philip K. Dick was an American novelist born on December 16, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. Dick’s parents divorced when he was five, so he was raised by his mother in Washington D.C. Although he did not receive stellar grades, his elementary and...
Ragtime is a novel written by Edgar Lawrence Doctorow that was published in 1975. Ragtime is a historical fiction novel that is set in New York City. Doctorow is a New York City native, and after going to school at Kenyon College and Columbia...
My Mortal Enemy is a novel written by Willa Cather in 1926. The novel revolves around Myra and her husband Oswald who return to their home in Illinois, USA to visit their relatives. Oswald soon receives silver-buttons for his shirt from an old...
Born in Christmas Eve of 1818 in the South-wark section of London, Eliza Cook found early success as a poet. She published her first collection while still a teenager in 1835. The verse featured in Lays of a Wild Harp found a receptive audience...
Parallax is defined as the illusion that a given object in the distance appears to change position viewed from a different position. You can demonstrate this effect by focusing on an object off the distance as you are reading this and looking at...
Stanley Kubrick. Sidney Lumet. George Roy Hill. According to film critic Daniel O’Brien, these Hollywood luminaries were among a dirty dozen or so who all turned down the opportunity to direct a film adaptation of Richard Hooker’s comic novel...
Annie Hall: The most perfectly imperfect love story ever
Woody Allen, a legendary director, screenwriter and comedian is famous for his bittersweet slapstick comedies and unique Jewish humor. Allen's heartfelt tribute to his muse and actress Diane...
The highly dubious “auteur theory” that distinguishes the director as the “author” of a film in the same way that a writer is the author of a novel simply does not hold when applied to Network. The film that reveals a shocking ability to produce...
The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca is a Moroccan folklore written by Tahir Shah and was released on October 26 2006 by Bantam Dell publishers.
The story follows the life of Tahir Shah, an Anglo-Afhan immigrant, who travels with his family to...
The Upanishads (also commonly known as the Vedanta) are a collection of ancient Sanskrit texts of religious and philosophical subjects. There are many concepts that are central to Hinduism and related to Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. They are...
Having finished “The Legend of Saint Julien," Flaubert, as he said, was too excited to take on much work. In March 1876, he began his second novel “A Simple Heart”, completed in September of the same year.
He had already somewhat developed the...
Lucky Jim is a novel written by Kingsley Amins in 1954. The novel mainly revolves around the story of Jim Dixon, who is a history lecturer at a university in England. He is a middle-class man who is grammar school-educated who has just started out...
When talking about A Man for All Seasons,one has to consider two aspects: the period in which the play was written and the historical backround on which it is based.
Robert Bolt was a playwright born in Lancashire on the 15th of August 1924. He...
During the first two years of her new marriage, Carson McCullers worked on a manuscript titled The Mute which she then showed to her writing teacher, Sylvia Bates. Bates was impressed enough to strongly urge McCullers to apply for a Houghton...
Written in 1893, The Odd Women explores the role of British women in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, especially that of the redundant woman. What do women do when marraige isn't an option? What is natural for women? If woman's practical...
Hunger is a novel written by Knut Hamsun in 1890. The book mainly revolves around an unnamed vagrant who is very intellectual leanings and wanders around the streets of Norway's capital, Oslo, in pursuit of nourishment. The unnamed character also...
The novel The Natural was published in 1952 by the American writer Bernard Malamud; it marks the writer’s debut in the literary field and the start of his literary career. While Bernard Malamud published short stories before the novel, The Natural...
In the late 1870's, Friedrich Nietzsche was planning the publishing of his latest philosophical works, a three-part book called Human, All Too Human. The books would be published in three parts, and then in a two-volume release several years...
On December 17, 1996, rebels stormed the Japanese embassy in Peru, taking hundreds hostage in an act of protest against the policies of Peruvian leader Alberto Fujimori. Within days all but 72 of the hostages had been released. Of these 72 people,...
ZZ Packer is an American short fiction writer. She is of African ethnic origin and her most known collection of stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003) is closely connected with the issue of race affiliation. Still it is not the central issue of...
A Thousand Acres is a novel that was published in 1991 that was written by Jane Smiley. The novel is highly acclaimed, having won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. In addition,...
The context within which Raymond Chandler unleashed The Big Sleep upon an unsuspecting world of murder mystery devotees may be surprising to some. Although Chandler had established his hard-boiled variety of murder mystery within the world of...
The Dew Breaker is a 2004 novel by Edwidge Danticat which is structured in the form of nine connected stories. Each story is set either in Haiti at the height of the dictatorship of François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, and his son, Jean-Claude...
Gottfried Leibniz should make the short list for any discussion of true genius. His insights into mathematics helped shape our understanding of Calculus and Physics, and he also wrote extensively about probability, biology, medicine, psychology,...