Newest Study Guides

The poem "A Valediction: Of Weeping" was published two years after the poet’s death, and it was believed to be written as a dedication to his wife Anne. Some argue that the poem’s ambiguity and metaphysical contemplation speak against the claim...

Extinction was published in 1986 and was the last novel published by Thomas Bernhard before his death in 1989.

Bernhard was born out of wedlock in the Netherlands in 1931. He was left to live with his grandparents for six years until his mother,...

A comedic 1991 play by Paul Rudnick, I Hate Hamlet tells the tale of an actor who wrestles with taking on the role of Hamlet, while attempting to deal with life's problems as well. It premiered on Broadway later in 1991, and enjoyed moderate...

Douglas Dunn was born in Scotland in 1942. Graduating with an English degree from Hull University in 1969. Dunn has since received three honorary doctorates, two Literature doctorates from the University of Hull and the University of St Andrews,...

The Collected Stories of Frank O'Connor is, from its name, a collection of short stories written by the Irish author Frank O'Connor. It was first published on 1981. Today, O'Connor is best known for his memoirs and short stories.

This book is a...

"The Use of Force" is a story first published in 1938 as part of a compilation of work by William Carlos Williams. It tells the story of a doctor who is summoned to make a house-call to a family whom he has never met before, and who finds the...

In the 1940s and 50s, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, known collectively as "The Archers," wrote, directed, and produced a litany of films that are now considered classics. Contrary to the typical Hollywood studio arrangement at the time,...

Studying Callihroe is less of a literary enterprise and more of an archaeological one; scholars need to rely on complex techniques in order to find out more about the time in which this novel was written, and also to learn more about the...

Iginio Ugo Tarchetti was an Italian poet, author, and journalist of the 19th century. He was born in San Salvatore Monferrato and started his career in the military, a tall, blue-eyed, handsome man. But he later ceased to continue his service...

Wu Ch’eng-en, a Confucian scholar and well-respected literary poet, wrote Monkey during the Ming dynasty. This makes it all the more surprising that Monkey was written in the vernacular -- plain, simple language -- during a time period that...

The Glass Menagerie was written in 1944, based on reworked material from one of Williams' short stories, "Portrait of a Girl in Glass," and his screenplay, The Gentleman Caller. In the weeks leading up to opening night (December 26, 1944 in...

Paul Celan is a survivor of the Holocaust and his experiences at the hands of the Nazis inform all of his poetry. His poems belong in a group of poems that are great, informative, and absolutely terrifying all at the same time, and he is mentioned...

Alice Oswald is an English poet born in 1966. Throughout high school, she never considered anything but writing as a future career. Thus, she continued her studies at New College, Oxford where she majored in classics. She has since won numerous...

Poor Sir Walter Raleigh. A gifted poet, masterful networker, adventurer, sailor and empire builder, he is most famous for gallantly spreading his cloak over a puddle on the ground for Queen Elizabeth to walk across, thereby saving her from wet...

"Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasion" is a short autobiographical memoir by Edith Maude Eaton, who published work under the name Sui Sin Far. To call herself "Eurasian" is really to simplify Far's racial heritage; she was a...

Toronto, Mississippi is a play written by the Canadian author and playwright Joan MacLeod. Written in 1987, the play follows the story of a young woman, Jhana, who tries to form stronger relations with her family but feels that she cannot do this...

Winnie-the-Pooh is one of the most famous works of the English author, A. A. Milne. A classic in children’s literature, Winnie-the-Pooh was published in 1926 and had such an extensive success that it overshadowed all of Milne’s previous novels,...

Sputnik Sweetheart is a 1999 book written by globally acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Originally published in Japanese, it was translated into English by Philip Gabriel in 2001.

The plot of Sputnik Sweetheart revolves around Sumire, a...

War Trash is a novel written by Chinese author Xufei Jin, who writes under the pen name Ha Jin. Ha has lived in America for decades, and writes in English, so his novels are not "lost in translation", even though some of the Chinese history and...

Born in British Columbia, Canada in 1948, Jeannette Armstrong is a prolific poet, academic and campaigner for the rights of Indigenous peoples. Her works of poetry include 'Breath tracks', and she contributed to the collection 'Voices: Being...

Alice Walker is an African-American writer and active political advocate, known for her good-great works in fiction, non-fiction and poetry itself. She was born in 1944 in a small rural town in central Georgia, where her parents used to farmed the...

Gwendolyn Bennett was an American artist of paintings and literature. Although she wrote several novels and worked for a publishing company for some time, Bennett also wrote poems in her spare time. Some of her most famous poems are those included...

Peter Kropotkin was one of the most famous revolutionaries in Russia and his "Memoirs", first written in Russian, dealt with the way in which his life had progressed and how his experiences had laid the groundwork for his anarchist philosophies.

...

The Long Loneliness is the autobiography of noted social activist and radical figure in Catholicism in America, Dorothy Day (1897-1980). Published in 1952, the autobiography covers much of the first half of the 20th century and traces Day’s...