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MacArthur fellowship winner Paule Marshall was an internationally acclaimed American writer. She was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1929. Paule's father was a migrant of the Caribbean island of Barbados. Marshall was still a kid when her father...

The Political Writings is a book written by Alfarabi and was published in 2001 by Cornell University Press. This volume consists of four of Alfarabi's most significant texts that focus on classicists, medievalists, and scholars of religion and...

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman stems from both Arthur Miller's personal experiences and the theatrical traditions in which the playwright was schooled. The play recalls the traditions of Yiddish theater that focus on family as the crucial...

First Confession is a fiction novel by American author Montserrat Fontes. It was first published in 1991 by Norton and tells the coming-of-age story of a nine year old girl with both Mexican and American blood, Andrea. In the novel, Fontes...

Mother Courage and Her Children is set during the Thirty Years' War, but it was written either shortly before or during the early years of the Second World War. Hitler's warmongering intentions had become clear to many Germans by the mid-1930s,...

During the incredibly successful run of The Glass Menagerie, theater workmen taught Williams how to play poker. Williams was already beginning to work on a new story, about two Southern belles in a small apartment with a rough crowd of blue-collar...

In 1905, the young James Joyce, then only twenty-three years old, sent a manuscript of twelve short stories to an English publisher. Delays in publishing gave Joyce ample time to add three accomplished stories over the next two years: "Two...

The Piano Lesson is the fourth play in August Wilson's Pittsburgh cycle, and one of the most renowned. If the entire ten play cycle can be seen as a living history lesson, then The Piano Lesson is the pop quiz, smashing together the legacies of...

Rip Van Winkle and other stories first appeared in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., published serially in the United States from 1819-1820, and in book form in England in 1820. The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon was extremely...

The history of Yonnondio is as interesting as the book itself. It is an unfinished novel. Tillie Olsen wrote the majority of it when she was nineteen years old. Indeed, she estimates that she began the novel in March 1932, the same month she...

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was published as part of Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, which came out in 1820. It is probably the most famous story from the collection, and it is considered one of Irving’s most important...

The Things They Carried, published in 1990, was a runaway hit and is included in many high school and university curricula. O’Brien has called the form of the work “meta-fiction,” indicating that it is neither non-fiction nor quite fiction. The...

"Barn Burning" was originally published in the June, 1939 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It is a prequel to the "Snopes" trilogy, made up of the novels The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). In 1980, "Barn Burning" was made into...

We now know of Cormac McCarthy as an author who produces high-quality work and sells an incredible number of books, and as a Pulitzer-prize winning author. Prior to The Crossing, though, McCarthy was a virtually unknown author whose work went...

“From 1975 to 1979 - through execution, starvation, disease and forced labour - the Khmer Rouge systematically killed an estimated two million Cambodians, almost a fourth of the country’s population.” From Author’s Note in First They Killed My...

Shantaram is the action-filled story of Lin, a character based very closely on the author, Gregory David Roberts. The novel chronicles approximately seven years in Roberts' amazing life, from his arrival in Bombay in 1982 until his departure from...

Fatal Attraction is a gripping and intense psychological thriller movie in 1987. It was an adaptation by James Dearden and Nicholas Meyer of a 1980 made-for-television short film also written by Dearden for the British market.

The film is directed...

The Oedipus myth goes back as far as Homer and beyond, with sources varying about plot details. The play that Sophocles presents is merely the end of a dramatically long story, and some plot background must be provided to make the story...

Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the St. James's Theatre in London on February 14, 1895, only a month after Wilde's previous success, An Ideal Husband. The packed-in audience rollicked with laughter at the on-stage...

Rabbit, Run was, to put it bluntly, the book that made John Updike - a mere twenty-eight years old at the time - a star. When it was published in 1960, Rabbit, Run heralded a distinctly new voice in American literature. The blending of precision...

Grimms Fairy Tales refers to a collection of stories released by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early to mid 1800’s. The first volume of the first edition was released in 1812. It contained 86 stories. An additional volume with 70 more stories...

Eclipse is the third installment of the Twilight Saga, written by Stephanie Meyer. The book was released originally in hardcover on August 7, 2007 by Little, Brown Publishing Company.

The narrative begins immediately following the events of New...

New Moonis the second installment of the Twilight Saga, written by Stephanie Meyer. The book was released originally in hardcover on September 6th, 2006 by Little, Brown Publishing Company.

New Moonreceived favorable critical reception, quickly...

“A comedy – three f., six m., four acts, rural scenery (a view over a lake); much talk of literature, little action, five bushels of love.”

One month before Chekhov finished writing The Seagull, this is the synopsis he offered to Suvorin, a rich...