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Charlie Chaplin took two years to produce The Gold Rush. During that time he got an underage girl pregnant and was forced into a marriage he didn’t want. That pregnancy incurred a change in leading ladies and by the time film was into full swing...

Born in the town of Rugby in 1887, the fun-loving, spirited, and handsome young poet Rupert Brooke would tragically be cut down in the very prime of life, and would become the patriotic hero for a generation of dead Britons. Brooke was sailing for...

Philip Freneau (1752–1832) was the premier American poet in aftermath of the American Revolution. One of his most well-known poems “The British Prison Ship” resulted from his capture and imprisonment aboard the title vessel. Freneau gained his...

The Vegetarian is a novella in three parts written by Korean author Han Kang. First time published in Korea in 2007, it received an uneasy reception and was thought to be both bizarre and extreme. The novella is based on a short story Han had...

Adelbert von Chamisso is a German writer born on January 30, 1781 in Ante, Champagne. As a child, his family was forced to migrate to Berlin as a consequence of the French Revolution. In his new home, Chamisso found a passion for the sciences,...

Leslie Marmon Silko is a writer and novelist born on March 5, 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is of Laguna ancestry, a Native American tribe based in New Mexico, and thus her literary works are heavily inspired by her culture. As a child, her...

William T. Vollmann is an American author and journalist born on July 28, 1959 in Los Angeles, California. As a child, he was raised in an academia-focused household considering his father was a professor of business at Indiana University....

1923. Germany. In the aftermath of the humiliating defeat in the War to End All Wars (later to be known as World War I) and the even more humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the German economy inspires a new definition for the term...

The Witch of Edmonton is a 1621 drama co-written by Thomas Dekker, William Rowley and John Ford. The inspiration for the drama was a popular pamphlet detailing the particulars of a witch hunt investigation conducted against Elizabeth Sawyer. The...

In the Pond is the first novel written by Chinese-American author Ha Jin. It tells the story of one man's struggle against the Chinese system of oppression; an episodic novel centering on one central character, Shao Bin, the novel expresses many...

All overly constrained eras have subversion, but there are few who outright rebels against the suffocating societal norms. Swinburne was one of the very few who did not let overly prudish and moralist ideals of Victorian era constrain and contain...

Stendhal was already 40-years-old when he published his first novel in 1830. Routinely included among any lists of the greatest novels in world literature today, The Red and the Black was almost immediately ignored or dismissed by readers and...

Aristophanes utilized his prodigious talent as a satirical dramatist in The Clouds to formulate his critique toward the growing influent of the Sophists that he deemed to be akin to a pernicious infestation of thought. In its original form, The...

John Dos Passos was an American writer born on January 14, 1896 in Chicago, Illinois. As a child, he grew up in a rather privileged household considering he had personal tutors and attended boarding school. His family encouraged a worldly...

The film was shocking in the sense that this was one of the first mainstream productions to be filmed on location in Africa. However, to film it was very demanding due to the hot and humid climate, the presence of wild beasts, and most importantly...

In 1939, Victor Fleming added two more credits to his already impressive list of directorial efforts. He would go on to win the Oscar for directing Gone with the Wind. He would also receive final credit for helming The Wizard of Oz despite the...

Lawrence of Arabia is an epic dramatic movie released in 1962, and directed by revered British director Sir David Lean (of course, he wasn't a "Sir" at the time of filming - that honor was not bestowed upon him until decades later after he had...

Eyes Wide Shut is a movie that first premiered in 1999. The movie was written by Stanley Kubrick and was nominated for one Golden Globe award. The film was based on the Austrian novel entitles Traumnovelle written by Arthur Schnitzler.

The story...

Barry Lyndon, released in 1975, is Stanley Kubrick’s follow-up to his highly controversial film adaptation of the novel A Clockwork Orange released three years previously. That film was, in turn, his follow-up to the mammoth event that was 2001: A...

Wim Wenders is a German director born on August 14, 1945 in the Rhine Province. Despite his clear love for art and literature as a child, after graduating from high school, he studied medicine at university. However, he dropped out midway to...

The Great Transformation is a nonfictional book by Karl Polanyi about the social and economic history. It was first published in the United States in 1944 by Farrar & Rinehart, and it is divided into three parts. It was later published in...

The Division of Labor in Society, published in 1893, is the English translation of Sociologist Émile Durkheim's doctoral thesis, De la Division du Travail Social.

In The Division of Labor in Society, Durkheim views society through the lens of the...

Emile Durkheim was a French sociologist born on April 15, 1858 in Lorraine, France. As a child, he grew up in a traditional Jewish household, but did not lead a spiritual lifestyle. He grew interested in how mental processes, rather than divine...

Erving Goffman was a sociologist and novelist born on June 11, 1922 in Alberta, Canada. As a child, he never had an interest in science, but rather wanted to pursue a career in the arts. After graduating from St. John’s Technical High School, he...