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The little fictional town of Manawaka was created by Margaret Laurence at the age of fourteen when she had her first short story published after winning a competition in the Winnipeg Free Press. This began a respected and heralded career that...

Although he has written and published more than one hundred books, Walter Dean Myers is most famous for being the author of Monster, a book in memoir form about a school shooter. His works of fiction are usually directed at a young adult audience,...

“since feeling is first” was published in E. E. Cummings’s 1926 poetry collection is 5. Released at perhaps the height of the poet’s career, is 5 features poems that exemplify Cummings’s iconoclastic, experimental, witty, and often satirical...

"Havisham" appears in Carol Ann Duffy's fourth collection of poems, Mean Time, published in 1993. Havisham is written from the perspective of the character Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. The poems included in Mean...

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is Frank Capra's 1939 political "dramedy" starring a then-unknown James Stewart as Senator Jefferson Smith, a naive but good-hearted Western man with the political idealism to take down corruption in Washington. The...

Sissinghurst Castle in the county of Kent, England is renowned for both its beautiful landscaped gardens and for the speed with which tickets for its annual garden tours are sold out. Both of these factors are due to the landscaping design and...

Born in 1940 in Sussex, England, Angela would be dead from lung cancer by 1992. Today, Carter is notoriously one of the most studied writers of the 20th century, but even as late as the day she died she was, in the words of her most infamous fan...

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is an American play co-authored by American playwrights Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence. Robert Lee is not to be confused with the Confederate general of the same name. The main character of the play is Henry...

Out of the Silent Planet is a science-fiction novel first published in 1938. Written by famous British author C.S. Lewis, the novel details the story of Dr. Ransom, who is on a planet that definitely is not Earth. The novel is a bit like H.G....

The Other Wes Moore is both a New York Times Bestseller and a Wall Street Journal Bestseller that was published in 2011 about two men who are both named Wes Moore. The story follows the author and his life, which is the first Wes Moore. This Wes...

Written by author and activist Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma asks the race a fundamental question: what should we, as the human race, have for dinner? The answer, Michael Pollan says, is ultimately very complicated and goes far back into...

First published in 1961, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie could be considered Muriel Spark's most famous novel. Spark was born and spent her childhood and early adulthood in Scotland, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her sixth novel, is set on home...

Written by famed Australian author Ruth Park, Playing Beatie Bow (originally released in 1980) tells the story of a young woman named Abigal who is incredibly distraught over her parents' separation. After an incident on the playground, Abigal...

A People's History of the United States is the sort of book that you don't see in traditional literature, because it would have been banned, burned, or outright not published. Rather than taking the more "politically correct" approach at political...

Published some time during the first century CE, Medea is a work from Ancient Roman writer Seneca. The piece is about 1000 lines long, and details the events of fictional character Medea. The reason that "Medea" doesn't exactly sound Roman is...

The last years of Yeats' life were defined by two conflicting concepts. At the one hand, he felt distain for the in his eyes failure of the democratic process in Ireland and the destruction of Irish nobility. On the other hand, he underwent a...

One of the most acclaimed modern writers, Mary Jean Chan impresses through her words and through the stories she tells in her poems. The author was born and raised in Hong Kong but eventually moved to London where she currently lives and works as...

Nowadays, in a Britain that tends to frown upon anything more patriotic than an international soccer friendly, poets such as Jessie Pope are considered outdated and jingoistic. Perhaps this is because the past really is what L.P. Hartley claimed...

Today, William Hazlitt is widely regarded as one of the greatest British essayists of all time and possibly the single most gifted writer in that field of prose of the 19th century. What makes this accomplishment all the more impressive is that...

Tea and Sympathy (1956) is based on Robert Anderson's stageplay of the same name. The film was directed by Vincente Minnelli and its screenplay was written by Robert Anderson. The film tells the story of Tom Lee, a 17 year old kid who isn't...

"The first casualty, when war comes, is truth." So said Hiram Johnson, a progressive Republican senator from California; his words referred to World War One, the conflict around which this novel is woven.

This is the crux of the matter in Ben...

Written around 1956, “An Arundel Tomb” was published in Larkin’s 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings and is one of his most famous poems. The book was a commercial success by poetry standards. In the poem, the speaker is inspired by seeing a pair...

Life of Galileo, aka Galileo, is a play by Bertolt Brecht, written in 1938 and first performed at the Zurich Schauspielhaus in 1943. At the time of its premiere, Brecht, who typically directed his own plays, handed over directorial duties to...

The Stone Angel is a novel by Margaret Laurence first published in 1964. The heroine of the novel is Hagar Shipley, a 90-year-old woman who is endowed with a sharp mind and a proud, unyielding temper. Hagar is having difficulty coming to terms...