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De Claris Mulieribus, or On Famous Women as translated to English was written by Giovanni Boccaccio and first published in 1374, the year before Boccaccio died in 1375. He was 62 years old, having been born in 1313 in Florence, Italy. Boccaccio...

The Ballad of the Sad Café is considered by many critics to be the most mature and profound work in the canon of Southern Gothic master Carson McCullers. In this novella that shares its title with the collection in which it appears alongside...

Edward Albee wrote The Zoo Story in less than three weeks in 1958, and originally titled it Peter and Jerry. Although Albee is now widely considered to be among America's greatest living playwrights, this was his first foray into drama writing. It...

The Night Hazel Came to Town, by John Ibbitson, was published in 1993. It follows the life of Lee, who becomes the newsboy, and he becomes entangled in the chaos of a world he has never before been exposed to. This story takes place in Toronto,...

D.H. Lawrence began writing his fifth novel, Women in Love, in 1913 but it was not completed until Lawrence was living in Cornwall three years later. It was first published in 1920 after several delays and editorial changes, some of which were due...

The Swamp Dwellers is a play that was written by Wole Soyinka and was published in 1958. Wole Soyinka is a writer from Nigeria, and he was the first African to be honored with a Nobel Prize, winning the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature. Soyinka was...

Published in 1997, Memoirs of a Geisha became successful into a short period of time and remained on The New York Times best seller list for two years. The book was the result of 6 years of work and it was rewritten 3 times with changers regarding...

Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage seems to defy the laws of the film universe. The story exists as several different entities all at the same time, thus making it a conversation about it between two or more people a potentially tricky...

Federico Fellini began his directing career firmly entrenched within the neorealist school dominated by fellow Italian Robert Rossellini. In fact, Fellini collaborated with the master on his classic in neorealist cinema Open City before creating...

Imagine Cinderella’s story if she’d never made it to the ball. Or Pretty Woman if Richard Gere had hired the girl standing next to Julia Roberts. In a way, one need not imagine these alternative universes since there is always Federico Fellini’s...

Louise Brooks was an American silent-film actress born on November 14, 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas. She endured a hostile upbringing due to her emotionally-unavailable parents, who failed to provide her with any attention or discipline. In...

A brand new approach to acting started appearing with greater frequency in Hollywood movies and on the Broadway state in the 1940s and 1950s. Personified by such legendary stars as Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean and Shelley Winters....

In 1925, schoolteacher John Scopes was put on trial in the state of Tennessee for teaching evolution in its schools. In the trial that followed in Dayton, Tennessee, the chaotic atmosphere and intense press coverage earned it the label "Monkey...

The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short stories by legendary British writer Angela Carter, whose untimely death in 1992 brought her work extensive critical attention. It was first published in 1979, at which time it won the Cheltenham Festival...

J.M. Synge wrote The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, to be produced at Ireland's Abbey Theatre, which he had helped to form. Though it is today one of the English-language drama's most widely-anthologized works, it was hardly a success at...

Scholars widely acknowledge Christina Rossetti as one of the greatest Victorian poets and the foremost poet of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She excelled in using words to invoke the particular aesthetic of the movement. She based some of her...

The poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is among the greatest of English literature. Many of his poems are mainstays of literature courses, and most have attracted copious critical attention. His poems are renowned for, among other things, their bold...

A River Runs Through It is a collection of three short stories written by the American writer Norman Maclean. The stories were published in 1976 by University of Chicago Press. A few years later, in 1989, an illustrated version was published by...

Rumi was a Persian poet who was alive during the 13th century. During his lifetime, Rumi did much more than just write poetry that has survived over the centuries. He was also a scholar of Islam and a theologian whose work influenced more than...

This history book is about the rise and fall of the Comanche empire. Because of its members' highly mobile nature, their ability to ride long distances and attack unpredictably, and their warlike society, the Comanche Nation was one of the most...

A Year in the South: 1865: The True Story of Four Ordinary People that Live Through the Most Tumultuous Twelve Months in American History, was written by Stephen V. Ash, an educator, historian, and author. Ash is a Civil War scholar, a background...

Tony Harrison, the author of the poems that make up this collection, is an English poet and playwright. Through his poetry, Harrison has brought up many controversies and has presented them in an artistic way that creates new perspectives as well...

Few films can be said to maintain that mysterious quality of being “ahead of their times” several decades after their initial release. 2001: A Space Odyssey is such a movie and its presence within that tiny crowd is all the more impressive...

Strange Pilgrims is a novel published in 1992 and written by Gabriel García Márquez in the 1970s. García Márquez was born in Colombia, but was exiled for a time period himself from the country. García Márquez has also won the Nobel Prize and is a...