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Those who subscribe to such beliefs will confidently assert that one of Nostradamus’ many intricately abstruse quatrains foretells the coming of the Great London Fire of 1666. As far as city-wide conflagrations go, the 1666 blaze that made its way...

The poem "The Hind and the Panther" was written and published in 1687 by Dryden, being an allegory regarding religion. During the time Dryden wrote his poem, he left the Church of England and converted to Catholicism. The poem is the longest poem...

British poet laureate John Dryden lived in a time when religious turmoil and political turmoil were intertwined to the point of confusion. The answer to the question of whether you considered yourself a Catholic or a Protestant had the power to...

In 1681, a grand jury was convened in Middlesex to consider a bill of charges filed against the Earl of Shaftesbury on the grounds of having committed high treason. The Earl of Shaftesbury had already been earlier immortalized through his infamous...

John Dryden was England's first Poet Laureate (1668) and still remains an influential poet in the British literary canon. He has written some of the most valuable work that has emerged from Restoration England to the extent that the period was...

The Tao Te Ching is a classical Chinese text. Though the author and date of composition are still not confirmed, the work was most likely written by Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu, also spelled Laozi, is the father of Taoism. He was a philosopher, a writer, and...

On the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural...

Patricia C. McKissack (1944-2017) is an accomplished children's author. Prolific thanks to the support of her husband, Fredrick, she's written over 100 books for young kids. She served as a board member for the National Children's Book and...

The Go-Between is a novel written by English author, L.P Hartley in 1953. After discovering an old diary, the aging Leo Colston reflects upon the summer he spent as a child at Brandham Hall in Norfolk, the home of his wealthy school friend,...

El Buscón is a novel by Francisco de Quevedo that was first published in Spain in 1626 under the title "Historia de la vida del Buscón, llamado Don Pablos, ejemplo de vagamundos y espejo de tacaños" which literally translates to "History of the...

This text is essentially a heretic Spanish novella which was released anonymously. It falls under the picaresque genre and was published in 1554. Lazarillo de Tormes has much significance due to its founding of the picaresque which together a...

We Need to Talk About Kevin, a fictional novel written in 2003 written by Lionel Shriver, is about a teen psychopathic killer named Kevin who commits a fictional school massacre. The story is delivered from the perspective of Kevin's mother, Eva,...

The House At Pooh Corner is the second volume of stories about a bear called Winnie-The-Pooh and was written by English author A.A. Milne in 1928. Milne was a gifted and mercurial writer who studied at Cambridge University on a mathematics...

“Slough” was first published in Betjeman’s 1937 collection Continual Dew. Between the World Wars the Berkshire city of Slough (rhymes with cow) in southeastern England became highly industrialized. When the winds of a second war with Germany...

End Zone is the second novel published by Don DeLillo and sets the stage for much of what would come to be viewed as standard conventions of the novel’s work. In other words, very much like Underworld and somewhat less like Libra, End Zone is a...

“Sonrisas” is a poem appropriately included in Pat Mora’s collection titled Borders, published in 1986. As a Mexican-American woman born in El Paso, Mora has created verse that has always been charged with thematic associations of what it is like...

Published recently in 2011, Silver Sparrow is a novel written by Tayari Jones, a novelist and professor who won the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction in 2003 with her work, Leaving Atlanta. The plot of Silver Sparrow involves a father’...

Aleph is novel written by Paulo Coelho in 2011. It was published in Portuguese and distributed by HarperCollins publishing company. A main focus of the novel is based on the theme spirituality and it taken on a more personal, autobiographical...

The Winner Stands Alone is the name given to the thirteen novel published by the Portuguese author, Paulo Coelho in the year 2008. Paulo Coelho is best known for his novel The Alchemist, the novel that made him famous and the novel that made him...

Thousand Cranes is a novel that was published in 1952 which was written by Yasunari Kawabata, a Japanese author. Kawabata wrote novels and short stories, and those prose works gained him international fame, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature...

Black Like Me has impacted millions of readers in the United States, around the world, and over the decades with its profound exploration of humanity and identity under the pressure of racial prejudice. The sincere and scathing narrative...

"The Devil and Daniel Webster" is American myth; it remains the foundational contribution by an American artist to the Faust myth. Stephen Vincent Benet originally published the short story in the Saturday Evening Post in 1936. The next year it...

"By the Waters of Babylon" is a short story written by Stephen Vincent Benet in 1937. The story is narrated by a man called John who is the son of a priest, and the story is set in the future, after the destruction of industrial civilization. The...

Published in 1975, The Message in The Bottle is a collection of essays on semiotics written by Walker Percy. Throughout this novel, Percy describes what he sees as the end of the modern age and attempts to create a middle-ground between the two...