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The Crucible is a fictional retelling of events in American history surrounding the Salem Witch Trials of the seventeenth century. Yet, is as much a product of the time in which Arthur Miller wrote it - the early 1950s - as it is description of...

Leviathan takes place in a time of historical and philosophical change. Historically, it was written just before England plunged into civil war - the result of a bitter power struggle between the British Parliament and the monarchy. Hobbes'...

Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), written while Ibsen was in Rome and Amalfi, Italy, was conceived at a time of revolution in Europe. Charged with the fever of the 1848 European revolutions, a new modern perspective was emerging in the literary and...

Rhinoceros catapulted Ionesco's career to an international level. Though he had written several plays by Rhinoceros in 1959, the English translation of the play caught both public and critical attention around the world. In 1973, a film...

Roberto Bolano's "By Night in Chile" is considered one of the great contemporary classics from South America. It is the story of Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix, a Chilean priest who, on his deathbed, confesses to his collusion and association with the...

Although All Quiet on the Western Front goes a long way in educating readers about the brutality--and, occasionally, banality--of daily war life, it helps to have an understanding of the political climate that precipitated World War I, known at...

The most popular of Cormier's novels for young adults, and the one with which he is most identified, The Chocolate War is a book that incites extreme opinions in most of its readers. The majority of critics either find the book offensive or...

Bless Me, Ultima is a semi-autobiographical novel based on the New Mexican community of Rudolfo Anaya’s childhood. Anaya used his memory of his town, the Pecos River, Highway 66, the church, the school, and the surrounding villages and ranches as...

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was the book that made journalist Tom Wolfe a literary star, and one of the works that best describes the beginnings of 1960s psychedelia. The book chronicles author Ken Kesey's career as a rising literary star who...

The Book of the Duchess is a 1,334-line poem, the earliest of Chaucer's major poems. It exists in several manuscripts of varying accuracy, and for the last one hundred years (beginning with W. W. Skeat in the 1890s) it has been the task of editors...

Scholars disagree on the date of composition of Plato's Phaedrus. This Note consults the version edited and translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, who note that the second speech of Socrates "seems to allude to many of the ideas Plato...

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver's most heralded novel, is the story of the Price family and their journey into the African Congo as Baptist missionaries in the late 1950's. The novel is told from the perspective of the four Price children...

In 1511, Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat, respected and secure in his position. He was an agent of Piero Soderini, often sent abroad to represent Florence, and highly esteemed as both a scholar and a political mind. Then came 1512, and the...

The Tower, written by W.B. Yeats in 1928, contains some of the poet’s best-known works, including “Leda and the Swan” and “Sailing to Byzantium.” The Tower was written during a pivotal time in Yeats’ artistic development. As a young writer, he had...

The God of Small Things is Arundhati Roy's first and only novel to date. It is semi-autobiographical in that it incorporates, embellishes, and greatly supplements events from her family's history. When asked why she chose Ayemenem as the setting...

Spring Awakening was Frank Wedekind's first play. He had it published at his own expense in 1891, but it was not performed until Wedekind started his own repertory company in 1906. The first production in the United States took place in 1912, but...

Before 1992, Cormac McCarthy had not sold more than 5,000 copies of any one of his books. By the end of 1993, All the Pretty Horses had sold 180,000 hardcover copies and more than 800,000 copies in paperback. What prompted such a dramatic reversal...

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is Maxine Hong Kingston’s first and most famous book. It was published in 1976 to great critical acclaim, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. In addition to being a...

Dostoevsky lived in Russia in the mid-19th century, a particularly tumultuous time in the country’s long and chaotic history. The agitation, despair, and pride of the time worked their way into much of Dostoevsky’s prose. Thus, understanding...

Song of Solomon, a rich and empowering novel published in 1977 that focuses on black life across America, follows the path of Milkman Dead, a young black male in search for his identity. Toni Morrison's gift of storytelling clearly shines through...

Breakfast at Tiffany's is Truman Capote's best-loved work of fiction and arguably one of the finest American novellas. Set in Manhattan's Upper East Side, during the final years of World War II, it documents the story of a young writer's...

"The Waste Land" caused a sensation when it was published in 1922. It is today the most widely translated and studied English-language poem of the twentieth century. This is perhaps surprising given the poem's length and its difficulty, but...

John Steinbeck published his highly controversial novel East of Eden, the work that he referred to as "the big one", in 1952. A symbolic recreation of the biblical story of Cain and Abel set in California's Salinas Valley, Steinbeck wrote the...