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Leaves of Grass has been considered by many critics to be the first and best example of American poetry, and Whitman to have been the first major American poet. Yet other critics have found the work obscene. Its greatness has been the topic of...

And Then There Were None was first published in 1939 in Great Britain and was published a few months later in the United States in January of 1940. It is Agatha Christie's bestselling novel. Over 100 million copies have been printed and it remains...

In Jacob's Room, the novel preceding Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf works with many of the same themes she later expands upon in Mrs. Dalloway. To Mrs. Dalloway, she added the theme of insanity. As Woolf stated, "I adumbrate here a study of...

Premiering in 1905 and published in 1907, Major Barbara is a three-part play written by George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright, and critic. The plot revolves around a young woman named Barbara who is in the Salvation Army, and her efforts to...

In 1942, Albert Camus published “The Myth of Sisyphus”, an essay about absurdism, which revolutionized the absurdist movement and inspired the theater of the absurd. Some of the early plays included “The Maids” by Jean Genet, “The Bald Soprano” by...

My Bondage and My Freedom, published in 1855, is an example of a genre of literature known as the slave narrative. This genre flourished from around 1760 and though the first few decades after the abolition of slavery. One of the most famous...

The Complete Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse is collection of fairy tales written by Hermann Karl Hesse, a German poet and novelist as well as a Nobel-Prize winning laureate, and was published in 1995 by Bantam Books. The stories have mainly been...

Karl Marx gets all the press, but it is important to realize that much of the writing which established the communist ideology was either co-written by Friedrich Engels or based on concepts and research established and conducted by Engels. Then...

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is a book written in 1883 by Howard Pyle. The story revolves around an archer who is extremely skilled and goes by the name of Robin Hood. He and his companions, called the Merry Men, live in Sherwood forest and...

The story goes that it was Robert Redford—who already was committed to bringing the book to the screen—who suggested to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that they abandon the idea of writing All the President’s Men from...

Published in London in 1767, The Man of Feeling made its author famous and became his most well-known work. The author of this story was a true man of his time and fell under the influence of sentimentalism. However, the idea of sentimentalism had...

Ivanhoe is most immediately notable within the expansive canon of Sir Walter Scott by virtue of its being his very first attempt at writing a tale exclusively devoted to a British subject. In fact, one is hard-pressed to get much more intensely...

He Knew He Was Right was written by the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, and was first published in Strahan and Co in 1869. The novel found great success among literary circles of that time and is one of Trollope's most famous works, alongside...

After the death of his father, John, James Bradley was inspired to research the lives of the six men (including his father) in the famous photograph of the raising of the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. His idea was turned down...

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008. The book took Junot Díaz eleven years to write, and was his first novel. The story is set both in the United States and in the Dominican Republic. The narrative...

Published in 2002 and written by William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault is a novel telling the story of a girl named Lucy. The book is split up into three sections that make up her life: her childhood, her maturing into adulthood, and her older...

Jean Rhys was an English author born on August 20, 1890 in Dominica, British West Indies. At age 16, she moved to England to attend the Perse School for Girls, but was intensely mocked for her foreign accent. She also enrolled at the Royal Academy...

Tim O’Brien is an American novelist born on October 1, 1946 in Austin, Minnesota. After high school, he attended Macalester College to study political science and was subsequently drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. He served from 1969 to 1970...

Published in 1997, School Days is novel that tells of the colonial world that the author Patrick Chamoiseau, one of the greatest writers in French and Caribbean literature, experienced in Fort-de-France, Martinique.

As the Colonial Period was...

Three Lives is a novel that was written by Gertrude Stein and published in 1909. This book was Stein’s first published book, and it depicts three lower-class women in the fictional town of Bridgepoint, which is based on the city of Baltimore. The...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the most outstanding representative of the radical wing of the French Enlightenment, and was one of the founders of European sentimentality. His ideological differences with the leading figures of the era often took the...

Giovanni Boccaccio would be a more than appropriate figure to assume the honorary status of Patron Saint of the First Amendment. If, that is, he had not lived well before America, the Constitution or the very idea of freedom of speech ever...

The novel Fathers and Sons is a social novel published in 1862 by Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. The novel focuses on the conflict between the ’fathers’, the old aristocrat society having a traditional way of thinking, and the ’sons’, the new...

Joel Chandler Harris was already an experienced Atlanta newspaper editor with a growing reputation when he was tapped for a temporary position filling in for the paper’s writer of highly popular dialect stories. Recalling stories he’d heard...