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Published in 1944 when Somerset Maugham was 70 years old, The Razor’s Edge would come to be considered the last of his major works of fiction. The philosophical awareness that any man naturally arrives at by the advanced age at which Maugham...

Published in 1857, Barchester Towers is Anthony Trollope’s sequel to The Warden and almost certainly the most well-known of the author’s Barsetshire series. Ostensibly a portrait of life the clerics in a “cathedral town” the renowned social...

Eleanor H. Ayer is an American novelist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her book Parallel Journeys. She was born and raised in Vermont, and was inspired to write at an early age by her mother's career as a teacher. After graduating...

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy was published the very same year as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Both novels present a portrait of what it meant to be an American in the early part of the 20th century, but in reading one can be...

Under the Jaguar Sun is a novel written by Italo Calvino and published in 1986. Calvino is an Italian author and journalist. This novel was first written and published in Italian, but it was soon translated into English in 1988. In fact, Calvino...

Published in 1894, The Story of a Modern Woman was written by Ella Dixon. The novel was actually first printed in a series in The Lady’s Pictorial. The book was written in the late Victorian age in England, and is one of the works in the New Woman...

Tracks is a novel that was written by Louise Erdrich and was published in 1988. It is the third book in a series of four books that tell the story of four Anishinaabe families that are all somehow connected to each other. All of them live on an...

Some novelists knock it out of the park on their first try and spend an entire career trying to live up to the great promise. Other writers must take time to mature and grow before it all comes together toward the end of their life. Very few...

The infinitely rebellious writer known as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) would have been one of those real life people who show up as disguised as fictional characters in works by others if she hadn’t been a a writer herself. In an age...

The novel Cold Mountain was published in the year 1997 by the American author Charles Frazier and is generally regarded as a historical romance, with the action being set during the American Civil War.

The main character of the novel is an...

"Metamorphoses" means transformations, and transformation is the governming theme of the text. But, Metamorphoses is also a compilation of myths, some complimentary and some almost contradictory, that were well-known in Ovid's society. Indeed, one...

Published in 1999, A Star Called Henry is a novel written by Roddy Doyle, an Irish author. A Star Called Henry is the second book in “The Last Roundup” series. The protagonist of the novel is named Henry Smart. Smart, as a child, lived in the...

Set against the stark background of World War II, City of Thieves is a historical fiction novel by David Benioff published in 2008. Centering around two young boys in Soviet Russia and their daring quest, the story qualifies for the Bildungsroman...

The story of O Pioneers! begins in the dedication and poem which precede the work. Cather dedicates O Pioneers! "To the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, in whose beautiful and delicate work there is perfection that endures." Cather met Jewett in 1908,...

Ulysses, a Modernist reconstruction of Homer's epic The Odyssey, was James Joyce's first epic-length novel. The Irish writer had already published a collection of short stories entitled Dubliners, as well as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young...

Allen Ginsberg's work can be considered a culmination of modernist poetry while, at the same time, it is also a prime example of the deconstruction of the modernist form. Ginsberg sought to move away from the formal styles of poetry that...

Although Mann is considered to be a deeply German writer, at the time that he began writing, Germany itself was fairly new to the world. When Death in Venice was published in 1912, a unified Germany had existed for a mere 41 years. Although Mann...

Hurston wrote Their Eyes in 1937 in only seven weeks while doing anthropological research in Haiti. When Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published in 1937, it did not receive the accolades and recognition that it...

Vladimir Nabokov started writing Lolita while teaching at Cornell University in 1949. He continued writing the novel while traveling with his wife around the country on summer butterfly hunting trips (Nabokov was an esteemed lepidopterist, or...

Theodor Fontane had enjoyed a long career as a travel writer, almost been executed as a spy and enjoyed a twenty-year long gig as a theater critic before he found the ideal medium for his literary expression. Fontane did not publish his first...

Although the origin of this novel was published under anonymous, it is assumed that the author was Madame de Lafayette, born Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne. In the year 1650, she was the maid-of-honour to the Queen and began to learn how to...

A Moveable Feast, written by Ernest Hemingway, was published in 1964. This volume was published by his wife, the fourth one, after his death; the book is a memoir about his life in Paris and other places, and Hemingway's relationships between...

White Teeth is Zadie Smith's acclaimed debut novel, first published when she had barely finished college. The novel began as a short story, and a single chapter gained Smith a contract with a prominent literary agency. The novel was released in...

Philippe Bourgois (born 1956) is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. His most recognizable work, In Search of...