Newest Study Guides
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.
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.
Though initially begun for a specific purpose, the letter that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote while incarcerated in Birmingham ultimately addressed universal questions of freedom and inequality. It is because of its ambitious reach that “Letter...
Bastard Out of Carolina came out in 1992. It is Dorothy Allison's first novel and remains her most widely successful work to date. Although Allison was an established author within the gay and lesbian literary community, she gained widespread...
“Monday or Tuesday” is a short story collection that was written by one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf, between 1917-1921. This collection was published by The Hogarth Press, London, and it included eight...
The Garden of Eden was the first big project pursued by Ernest Hemingway after a drought that lasted through the early '40s. It's believed that his personal life frustrated his work. He had a new wife, he had developing health issues surrounding...
The Adventure of the Yellow Face is an 1893 short story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and featuring the characters Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. The story was initially written as a commission for Strand Magazine, with original...
Written by Richard Bradford, Red Sky At Morning is a World War II fiction novel published in 1968. This novel focuses around a older teenage boy named Josh Arnold.
This coming of age novel begins with Arnold’s father leaving to WWII, and leaving...
In Persuasion Nation is a short story collection that is full of 12 stories by George Saunders. The stories included were published in different forms, all that which include The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, and McSweeney's. The stories have...
Founding Brothers, by Joseph J. Ellis, was published in 2000 by Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc. It won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2001.
Through a series of six defining events from U.S. history, the author deftly explores the...
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" was adapted for film in 1992 by Jeri Cain Rossi, starring Joe Coleman. The film, titled "Black Hearts Bleed Red," was not well-received by critics. The story was also adapted as a modern chamber opera by David Volk at...
The Collector was John Fowles's first published novel, released in 1963. Fowles described this book as a commentary on class in England, specifically on class issues such as prosperity, pretension, and the contrasts between the working class and...
Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is often considered one of, if not the best, of her works, as well as a significant piece of Victorian literature. It features a strong female protagonist, a mature love story, and relevant social and political...
D. H. Lawrence worked on “The Prussian Officer” between May and June 1913 under the title “Honor and Arms.” That was his preferred title all the way through a revision process that lasted into October of that year. The story would be published...
D. H. Lawrence wrote “Odour of Chrysanthemums” in 1909 and submitted to the English Review where the magazine’s renowned editor Ford Madox Hueffer (better known to most as renowned writer Ford Madox Ford) judged the story’s worth as one with the...
“Second Best” is a short story written by D. H. Lawrence in August 1911 and initially published in English Review in February the following the year. It reappeared as part of Lawrence’s collection The Prussian Soldier and Other Stories in 1914....
Daughters of the Vicar is a book written by D.H. Lawrence and published in 2004. The book revolves mainly around the story of the two eldest daughters of Mr Lindley, who is a vicar. Mr Lindley and his family are very poor but they are a proud...
"The Nose" (Japanese title: "Hana" was first published in January 1916 in the Tokyo Imperial University student magazine Shinshicho. It was later published in various other magazines and anthologies and was translated into English by multiple...
Until Demi Moore came along, “Self-Pity” was primarily known for being part of poetic infamy. The poem was included in the collection of titled Pansies: Poems which became infamous as the result of its being seized and confiscated by government...
“The Outstation” is a short story published by Somerset Maugham as part of his 1926 collection The Casuarina Tree. “The Outstation” is, like the others, a self-contained narrative that unifies the book by virtue of presenting a narrative of what...
The short story “Footprints in the Jungle” is one of six that comprises Somerset Maugham’s 1933 collection titled Ah King. The unifying theme that connects all six stories is the psychological effect of Britons in living in the far flung distant...
The Temple of My Familiar is a novel written by Alice Walker. It was published in 1989. The novel intertwines multiple narratives that are all intertwined with each other in the struggle to find moral truth. The narrator guides the reader through...
The Universal Baseball Associations, Inc. J. Henry Waugh Prop., written by Robert Coover, was originally published by Random House in 1968. The novel is a dark comedy, in which harrowing themes are portrayed humorously. The main character of the...
When people talk about the long arm of political power and someone treats such a proposition dismissively, it helps to know the story of Robert Coover’s novel The Public Burning. The book is primarily told through the first-person perspective of...
Robert Coover is an American novelist, regarded as one of the most prominent figures in the genre of metafiction. He was born in Iowa in 1932, and later studied at Indiana University, where in 1953 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Slavic...
“The Waitress” is a short story by Robert Coover first published in the May 19, 2014 issue of the New Yorker magazine. It is a very short, breezy fairy tale about a waitress who has grown tired of being ogled by all the men who come into the diner...