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.
No Longer at Ease is Chinua Achebe's second book and part of what is commonly referred to as the African Trilogy; this includes Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. The title comes from T.S. Eliot's Journey of the Magi. Some critics discern...
Many critics during Mikhail Lermontov's time felt that he created Pechorin, the main character of A Hero of Our Time, in his own likeness. Besides similarities in age and occupation, characters in Pechorin's life resemble individuals in...
Charles de Secondat was a French nobleman: the Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu. Historians and literary students simply refer to him as "Montesquieu".
Born in the southern part of France, Charles de Secondat lived from 1689 to 1755....
What We All Long For is a novel written by the Canadian writer Dionne Brad. While she is generally known for her lyrical work, her novel quickly became popular not only in Canada but also internationally. What we long for is the author’s first...
Touching Spirit Bear, published in 2001, is an account of a young boy's experience with violence, forgiveness, and nature as he is banished to a remote Alaskan island as punishment for a violent crime. During this time, he is confronted by a rare...
Friday Night Lights is a novel by famed sports writer and journalist H.G. “ Buzz” Bissinger. The novel was published in 1990 and surrounds the Permian Panther’s 1988 high school football season. His landmark novel has sold roughly 2 million copies...
Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman is perhaps the Nobel-Prize-winning playwright's greatest and most enduring work. Published in 1975, the work is often studied and performed in colleges and universities, as well as staged worldwide.
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The Real Inspector Hound is a one-act play modeled after the parlor mystery genre that was extremely popular at the time. Written between 1961-62, it is considered one of Tom Stoppard’s early works. The play is actually a play-within-a-play: the...
George Etherege’s Man of Mode is one of the most renowned plays of Restoration England. Critic Gamini Salgado wrote, “Its chief merit consists in the uncompromising realism with which it investigates the implications of Restoration libertinism.”
...Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy’s Life, was born on June 19, 1945 in Alabama. He grew up in a very academic-focused household as his father was an aerospace engineer. As a teenager, he ran the local newspaper route and served as a Boy Scout for...
Published in 1981, "In the Counselor's Waiting Room" is a representative example of the poetry of Bettie Sellers. Her verse often paints quick narrative snapshots of the people of Appalachia, their history, culture and the influence of religion on...
Marie Lu spent most of her youth writing, although Legend is her first published novel. In writing Legend, Lu was inspired by the stage version of Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. Hugo's work and its subsequent adaptations follow Jean Valjean,...
The famous book "Argonauts of the Western Pacific" was written by anthropologist Bronisaw Malinowski. This book contains the experiences and observations that Malinowski made while conducting fieldwork in the southwest Pacific Ocean's Trobriand...
Nietzsche regarded Thus Spoke Zarathustra to be one of his most important works. Ultimately, it is a work about overcoming the self. It combines inverted allusions to the Bible with Greek mythology and ancient Persian religion.
Nietzsche composed...
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Downis the poignant story of a young Hmong girl suffering from epilepsy who is caught in the cultural chasm between her family and her rationalist American doctors. The story shows the tragic consequences of a...
Pushkin, already an established poet, began writing Eugene Onegin in 1823 while exiled from the capital to southern Russia. He published parts of each chapter in serialization as he wrote them before printing each complete chapter in booklet form....
Burmese Daysis George Orwell's first novel, and a searing critique of British imperialism. It is notable for deriving its plot and themes from the events of Orwell's own life.
In 1922 Orwell traveled to Burma to become an English police officer....
"The Devil and Tom Walker" first appeared in author Washington Irving's 1824 collection of short stories,Tales of a Traveller, in the "Money-Diggers" section. Though it is still widely known, it is not quite as famous as some of his other works,...
The Garden Party and Other Storiesby Katherine Mansfield was first published in 1922 by Constable and Co., a notable publishing house in London. The work was dedicated to her husband, John Middleton Murry. The collection of short stories was the...
This collection of short stories includes some of Ray Bradbury's most famous and cherished works. Many are from his 1950 short story collection, The Martian Chronicles, which chronicles the colonization of Mars by men from Earth. Although The...
Chinese Cinderella is the story of Adeline Yen Mah's youth as the unwanted daughter of a rising businessman in the midst of a great transformation within Chinese society. Adeline’s affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother...
Silencewas published in 1966 and is often regarded as Endo's finest achievement. It won the Tanizaki prize in Japan the year it was published.Silencetells the story of a young Portuguese priest, sent to Japan in the 1600s when Christians in Japan...
Equus,written in 1973, is one of Peter Shaffer's most celebrated plays. It tells the story of a boy who has a strange, religious fascination with horses. He is treated by a psychiatrist who, in turn, realizes some things about himself during these...
