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The Storyteller is one of the best-known short stories written by Saki, the pen name of author H. H. Munro. It was first published in 1897; as was customary at the time, it was published in newspapers before its publication in a collection of...

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is one of the most famous, beloved, and lauded works of American letters; it is also the first autobiography to achieve widespread popularity and is a classic of the genre. It sheds light on the life of one...

Written, directed, and produced by Stanley Kubrick, The Shining was released by Warner Brothers in 1980 and based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. It was the twelfth feature film by Kubrick and was met with colossal critical success....

Stephen Leacock enjoyed the privilege of studying economics under the tutelage of the most prescient and greatest economist America has yet—and likely will ever—produce: Thornstein Veblen. Vebelen’s writings are notorious dense and aesthetic; he...

My Brother Jack is George Johnston's classic 1964 novel that tells the story of two brothers and how the cope with grief, death, and loss in their own separate ways. The novel is semi autobiographical and takes place during the tumultuous times of...

Jodi Picoult is an American author who writes novels targeted at both adolescents and adults, choosing themes and language that will allow a wide audience to connect with the story. The Pact, Picoult's fifth book, does exactly this. The plot...

Paul Fisher, the protagonist of Tangerine, has bad eyes, but this doesn’t mean he’s blind. In fact Paul sees through most things in his upper middle class community—a sterile housing development in Tangerine County, Florida, called Lake Windsor...

The Sign of the Four is a novel starring the characters Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it in 1889 after Joseph M Stoddart, the managing editor of Lippincott’s Monthly, commissioned the story. Lippincott’s was an...

"The Monkey's Paw" is a chilling and suspenseful short story by W.W Jacobs, first included in Harper’s Magazine and then published in England in 1902 in his collection "The Lady of the Barge." The story has been included in dozens of collections,...

The Assault is a historical novel written by Dutch author Harry Mulisch. The novel was translated and published in English in 1985 by Random House. The story is partially based on a true event that happened during World War II. The Assault tells...

Jennifer L. Morgan's Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery is an academic work that was published in 2004. Morgan received her B.A. from Oberlin College in 1986, and completed her PhD in 1995 at Duke University. Morgan now...

Synge's one-act play Riders to the Sea (1904) deals with the lives and manners of a cross-section of humanity. While the play is concerned with local matters, Synge represents these matters with a universal interest. In other words, Synge, like...

Bret Harte’s short story “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” is one of the most anthologized examples of the subgenre of American literature known as Regionalism. The identifying characteristics of Regionalism include an emphasis on replicating dialect...

The Lesser Blessed (1996) is a coming-of-age novel by Richard Van Camp that tells the story of Larry Sole, a Native growing up in the forests of Canada. Larry befriends Johnny Beck, who is new to the area. Johnny, however, is in a relationship...

"Christmas Bells" is both an occasional poem written during the Civil War, and a general message about having hope during times of despair. Longfellow wrote it on December 25th, 1863; it was published in a juvenile magazine in 1865 and included in...

Based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go is a dystopian movie released by Fox Searchlight Pictures and directed by Mark Romanek. The movie was released on 03 September 2010 at the Telluride Film Festival; in terms of genre, the film...

Longfellow wrote "The Day is Done" in 1844 and included it as the proem to his anthology The Waif, a selection of sentimental poems mostly about nature that came out at the end of 1844. Some of the poets included were Percy Shelley, Robert...

The poem was written in 1859 and first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1860. It was later included in the collection Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863). Longfellow wrote the poem a few years after resigning from his professorship at Harvard to...

"A Psalm of Life" was first published in The Knickerbocker, attributed only to "L." It was then included in Voices of the Night, published in 1838 not long after Longfellow took on the position of Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard...

“Paul Revere’s Ride” is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s most famous poem and certainly one of the most famous poems in American literature. Revered in its time and loved by schoolchildren today, it has suffered from critical dismissal and...

Evangeline is one of Longfellow’s most famous works, and with The Song of Hiawatha, one of his longest. Critics designate this poem as the one that secured his literary preeminence.

The provenance of the poem is an interesting one. On April 5th,...

The Infinite Sea is the second book in a published trilogy by Rick Yancey. The first book, The 5th Wave was turned into a movie, starring Chloe Grace Moretz, but it was not well-received. The following sequel is called The Lost Star. The Infinite...

The Story of America: Essays on Origins is a book written by Jill Lepore and published quite recently in 2012. Lepore is an American writer and historian who focuses on American history, politics, and literature, and writes for The New Yorker. She...

The Little School is an autobiographical novel by Alicia Portnoy. Portnoy, perceived to be a political dissident, was "disappeared" during the Dirty War period in Argentina, principally from 1976 to 1979. Although it was commonplace throughout...