Animal Farm was published on the heels of World War II, in England in 1945 and in the United States in 1946. George Orwell wrote the book during the war as a cautionary fable in order to expose the seriousness of the dangers posed by Stalinism and...

John Steinbeck wrote The Pearl during the time in which he was at the height of his fame. He had completed The Grapes of Wrath, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was renowned and reviled as a subversive, unpatriotic man who...

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, is a dystopian novel set six hundred years in the future. The novel envisions a world that, in its quest for social stability and peace, has created a society devoid of emotion, love, beauty, and...

Published in 1967 by Viking Press, The Outsiders was S.E. Hinton's first novel. The rivalry between the "greasers" and the "socs" was based on events in her own high school, the Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hinton began writing the...

Nemesis, published in 2010, chronicles the impact of the 1944 polio epidemic on a middle-class Jewish community in Newark, New Jersey. The protagonist, 23-year-old Bucky Cantor, is ineligible to serve in the war and instead works as the...

Age of Iron was published in 1990 and is the sixth novel written by South African author J. M. Coetzee. It was an international critical success, and although it didn't receive any of the prestigious literary awards that some of his other novels...

By the time Pearl S. Buck published “The Enemy” in 1942, the United States had officially been at war with Japan for nearly a year, she had won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth, and she had become the first (and, for more than a half...

Toni Morrison's short story "Sweetness," published in 2015, is about a light-skinned black mother who gives birth to a dark-skinned daughter who the mother fears and struggles to love. The mother justifies her prejudice by reflecting on how...

Dear Martin, published in 2017, is a novel about 17-year-old Justyce, who, after being racially profiled by a police officer, grapples with questions of police brutality and systemic racism. As he finishes his senior year, Justyce reflects on his...

The Wild Duck (Vildanden in Norwegian) is a play by the Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen. Written in 1884 while he was living abroad in Italy, the process of writing the play initially did not go smoothly for Ibsen, largely due to the political...

Thought to be one of Selma Lagerlöf's earliest works, "The Rat Trap" is a short story that was likely written in the 1880s, before excerpts of Lagerlöf's first novel Gösta Berling's Saga were published in a Swedish weekly publication. The story...