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In Daniel S. Burt’s book the ranks that 100 greatest novels of all time, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier comes in at number 62, sandwiched between The Age of Innocence and The Awakening. Reverse the placement of those two novels the this...

Richard Wilbur was a poet whose works were elegant yet witty and paradoxical. He was the second poet laureate of the United States, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Things of This World: Poems in 1957, and then won another Pulitzer...

Everyman is one of the most famous and best known examples of a medieval morality play (see ‘The Morality Play’). It is, in the words of Arnold Williams, “the morality play best known and most widely performed in modern times”. Modern scholars are...

Mankind is one of the most famous and best known examples of a medieval morality play (see ‘The Morality Play’). It is, like many others of the same type, anonymous, and we know very little about the playwright, though the play itself seems to...

Mountains Beyond Mountains, written by Tracy Kidder, was published in 2003. It is a non-fiction and biographical book which follows the life of Paul Farmer, an anthropologist, who is trying to fight tuberculosis in Haiti, Peru, and Russia. The...

Milkweed, written by Jerry Spinelli, is a young adult fiction novel published in 2003. It takes place in Warsaw, Poland, and the main character is mainly called Misha Pilsudski. Spinelli describes this Misha's life during the Holocaust, where he...

Funny In Farsi is a humorous autobiography written by Firoozeh Dumas. It chronicles the experiences of Firoozeh and her family when they moved to Southern California form Iran in 1972, when Firoozeh was seven years old. When they arrived only...

Tom Wolfe is a dandy. Fashion-wise, Wolfe belongs to era of men’s style and concern with their appearance that is as out of joint with the Space Age as the street urchins of Dicken or the ladies with sense and sensibility desperately seeking a...

Strength in What Remains was written by Tracy Kidder, who is a Pulitzer Prize winner, and was published in 2009. The book is a nonfiction book, a biography of a man from Burundi named Deogratias, aka Deo. Deo is a Tutsi who survived the Hutu-Tutsi...

Tobias Wolff is an American author born on June 19, 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama. After graduating high school, he attended Hertford College to study English and later enrolled at Stanford University to obtain his M.A. Afterward, Wolff ventured...

Clive Staples Lewis (better known as C.S. Lewis) wrote Till We Have Faces in 1956. This was his last novel and was cowritten by his wife, Joy Davidman. It is the retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche. Lewis developed the idea for this novel...

Robert Zimmerman - whose nom de plume is Robert Alexander - is an American author whose works so far have concentrated on fictionalizing significant moments in the history of Russia. Born and raised in Chicago, Zimmerman has travelled to and...

Published in 2005 by a prominent American historian, David McCoullogh’s 1776 discusses the events of the American Revolution and is considered a companion of his Pulitzer-winning biography of John Adams, which was adapted by HBO into a miniseries....

“The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” is an example of a form of storytelling alternatively known as a “paired story” or a “diptych” in which two separate and distinct works are connected thematically in some manner. As a literary...

William Blake was a poet who was not very well recognized during his lifetime. It was not until his sixties when his work began to receive credit as leading a new literary movement in England at the time that was really triggered by William...

The Tortilla Curtain was published by Viking Press in 1995 and went on to become T.C. Boyle's most successful novel. It delves into middle class values and their relation to the issues of illegal immigration, xenophobia, poverty, and the American...

Euripides twice treated the Hippolytus myth in dramatic form, which was unusual for a Greek tragedian. This is, in fact, the only known instance of a Greek dramatist composing two tragedies on the same mythic source. It therefore seems likely that...

The Martian Chronicles was published in 1950 and became an instant classic, not just within the science fiction genre but in the wider, mainstream literary world. It was not written as a novel, but was a conglomeration of several short stories...

Charles Baudelaire is considered one of the most stimulating poets of the nineteenth century. He was born during 1821 in France and died during 1867. Although he was a poet, he was also a novelist and prose writer. According to the Poetry...

Henry Fielding published his first full novel in 1742, at a time when he was nearly penniless and expecting the deaths of his young daughter and beloved wife. Joseph Andrews was, then, a response to personal and financial exigencies, but it was...

A Bildungsroman (coming of age) story about a black boy growing up in America, The White Boy Shuffle is the debut novel of American author and poet Paul Beatty. Published in 1996, the book is acclaimed for its insight into African-American culture...

Jasper Fforde was born in London, England and spent almost twenty years working in the film industry. He worked on movies which included Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment. His desire to become a novelist and create his own works, drove...

Silas Marner, the Weaver of Raveloe, published in 1861, is unique among George Eliot's writings for its brevity and its apparent allegorical clarity. The novel is only slightly longer than the short stories that Eliot published in her first work,...

Jane Austen wrote Northhanger Abbey while she was residing in her childhood home in Steventon, England, but the novel is largely set in the resort town of Bath, where Austen visited for a month-long vacation in 1797. Originally entitled Susan, the...