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Prior to the publication of The World According to Garp in 1979, John Irving was an almost unknown but relatively highly regarded purveyor of serious fiction with a darkly comic bent and a much greater than average propensity for at least one of...

Michael Wigglesworth was a Puritan minister who embodied all the negative connotations of the Puritans. He bore an exagerated inferiority complex and later on married his cousin as he felt that he would be unable to find another woman. He was also...

William Faulkner was an American novelist born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. As a child, he was influenced by his mother to become an avid reader and writer. She introduced him to classic novels at an early age and instilled in...

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher born on June 21, 1905 in Paris, France. During Sartre's childhood, his father was a great influence on him, as he was an avid reader of classic literature. When Sartre read an essay by philosopher Henri...

Director Ernst Lubitsch regularly referred to this 1932 pre-Code sex comedy Trouble in Paradise as his favorite of all the movies he directed. Lubitsch is regarded as one of the masters of light comedy, especially romantic comedies to the point...

Milan Kundera is a Czech author naturalized French, born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czechia). After secondary school, he attended Charles University to study literature and later transferred to the Academy of Performing...

Venus in Furs is a novella that was written by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch that was published in 1870. This work is Sacher-Masoch’s best known novella. He had at first intended for this work to be part of a series that he envisioned to be called...

The Waves is the seventh novel published by Virginia Woolf. By 1931 when the book hit stores, it had undergone a rather significant change from its manuscript form. Woolf started writing this novel with the intention of the title being “The Moths....

Terrible Things: An Allegory of the Holocaust is a children’s book published in 1980 by the Irish writer named Eve Bunting. The book was intended to be a children’s book and contains numerous illustrations realized by the graphician Stephen...

Wit is the name given to a theater play written by the American Playwright Margaret Edson and which premiered in 1995 in the South Coast Repertory Costa Mesa, in California. The play was then sent to different theaters and was played in theaters...

Zuleika Dobson, the only novel by the renowned essayist, parodist, and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, is a sharp and witty satire on undergraduate life at Oxford University. Published in 1911 by Heinemann Publishing, the novel quickly gained...

Three Tall Women is a two-act play by Edward Albee. It was first performed at the English Theater in Vienna, Austria under the direction of Albee himself and starring American actress Myra Carter, who won several awards for the performance.

In...

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada draws on two sources of influence. One being the real-life killing of an American teenager, Esequiel Hernandez Jr, during a military operation at the Texas/Mexico border. The other source is that of William...

The York Mystery Plays are a collection of 48 mystery plays and pageants that cover history from a religious standpoint, starting from the creation and ending with the Last judgment. These plays are typically presented on the feast day of Corpus...

Tristan is a novella that was written by Thomas Mann and published in 1903. Tristan is one of the six works in the collection Tristan: Sechs Novellen. The work alludes to the myth of Tristan and Iseult quite often. In this myth, Tristan is a...

Benjamin Franklin’s The Way to Wealth began life as prefatory material for his more famous Poor Richard's Almanac in 1758. Franklin then decided to transform some of his more pointed sayings and epigrams about financial affairs, economics,...

Theaetetus is one of Plato’s dialogues, written circa 369 BC. It is a dialogue between Socrates and the mathematician Theaetetus, in which they attempt to define “knowledge.” Living between 428/7 to 348/7 BCE, Plato was one of Socrates’ students,...

Tar Baby is a novel written by Toni Morrison and published in 1981. Morrison was a professor at various universities all over the United States, but she moved to NYC to become a part time writer in the mornings before she went to work as an editor...

Women and Writing is a nonfiction book published in 1979 by the British author Virginia Woolf. While she is most commonly known for her novels and for her works of fiction, Virginia Woolf was also the author of many nonfiction books and...

Wise Children is a novel published in 1991 by the English author Angela Carter. The novel was the author’s last one as she started writing it after she was diagnosed with cancer. Angela Carter died just a year later at the age of 51. Angela Carter...

James Mercer Langston Hughes, was an American poet and social activist, born and raised in Joplin, Mississippi. Langston Hughes was a prominent leader in the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic movement in the 1920s that consisted of new...

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is a collection of sequential short stories that was published first in 1912. They were written by Stephen Leacock, a Canadian political scientist and writer, who was one of the most famous humorists in the world...

GE Moore is an English philosopher born on November 4, 1873 in Upper Norwood, London. Moore grew up in a family of academics - some were poets, other were professors, and all were dedicated to the arts and humanities. He received his primary...

The Political Writings of John Locke is a collection of a few of Locke’s most important works that was edited by David Wootton, a professor of history and expert on English speaking countries, and others, such as France and Italy. The Political...