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Because of Winn-Dixie is Kate DiCamillo's first novel, and it catapulted her into the top category of children's writers working today. The book has won a number of prestigious awards, including a Newberry Honor Distinction in 2001. The New York...

In early 1818, Percy and Mary Shelley set off for Italy with their two children, along with Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron's mistress, and Allegra, Byron's daughter. By December, Shelley found himself in dire straits. His first wife Harriet had...

On May 29, 1851, Sojourner Truth attended a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio. She approached the speaker’s platform and asked “May I say a few words?” The speech she gave that day was transcribed by Marius Robinson, a reporter in the...

Love Actually is a 2003 British romantic comedy film written and directed by Richard Curtis. The film follows a group of young adults in London, set during the Christmas season. Following ten couples, the film chronicles their romantic and...

“Diving into the Wreck” is the titular poem of Adrienne Rich’s seventh collection of poetry, which won the National Book Award in 1974. Written at the height of the second-wave feminist movement, this collection is considered one of Rich’s most...

The Dunciad is a scathing work of satire and critique written by Alexander Pope in the mock-heroic style. It was published three separate times, the first edition containing three books, and the final two editions containing an added fourth book,...

Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl” is a haunting short story published in the New Yorker in 1980. Ozick later included it with a novella about the main character, Rosa, in a single volume also entitled The Shawl.

Ozick is Jewish but did not experience...

It’s a Wonderful Life is a Christmas fantasy film from 1946, written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Frank Capra, among others. Indeed, many people contributed to the script, including Dorothy Parker, Dalton Trumbo, Marc Connelly, and...

Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" is a short story about four men stranded in a small rowboat in rough seas after their ship capsizes. The men spend over thirty hours in the boat until they wash ashore only to discover that their strongest rower has...

The Devil in The White City, published by Erik Larson in 2003, is a factual account of incidents that occurred in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. Larson weaves the story of the Chicago World’s Fair overseer, Daniel Burnham, and his...

British author J.K. Rowling said that the idea for the Harry Potter series “fell into her head” in 1990 while she was riding a train from Manchester to London without a pen to write it down. While she started to write it that evening, her progress...

12 Angry Men is a film from 1957, directed by Sidney Lumet, with a screenplay by Reginald Rose, adapted from his teleplay. It looks at a jury of 12 men as they decide the fate of an 18-year-old defendant who is on trial for the murder of his...

First published in 1944, Eleanor Estes's classic children's book The Hundred Dresses is about the remorse a young girl experiences after she stands by while her best friend teases an impoverished classmate who claims to own one hundred dresses.

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Coraline is the first children's novella by British fantasy writer Neil Gaiman. The novel takes its name from the story's young, female protagonist. After moving to a new home, Coraline acquaints herself with her eccentric neighbors and explores...

Vertigo is one of Alfred Hitchcock's best-known films, a 1958 psychological thriller based on the 1954 novel by the French writing team Boileau-Narcejac, D'entre les morts. It was shot in San Francisco and employs several different camera...

The winner of second prize in the prestigious O. Henry Awards for the year 1941 was a short story written by a relative newcomer to the world of American fiction, a woman straight out of William Faulkner’s backyard. That woman was Eudora Welty and...

“After great pain…” is one of Emily Dickinson’s most famous and widely read poems, and one that has inspired a good deal of critical commentary and controversy. Because of Dickinson's notoriously private and reclusive nature, the poem’s apparent...

First published in the April 1903 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, O. Henry's “A Retrieved Reformation” is about a notorious safecracker named Jimmy Valentine who gives up his life of crime after he falls in love with a banker's daughter.

O. Henry...

Richard Powers' The Overstory (2018) is an ambitious, profound novel with an urgent environmental message. Spanning multiple time periods and including numerous narrators, it tells the story of a group of activists who are called to protect the...

“Incident” is one of the most famous poems from Countee Cullen’s first and most famous poetry collections: Color (1925). Cullen was a rather traditional poet. His main influence was the nineteenth-century English Romantic poet John Keats. He was...

The Pianist is a 2002 film by Roman Polanski based on the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman's survival during the German occupation of Warsaw in 1942. It was directed by Roman Polanski and written by Ronald Harwood, and it met with widespread...

Hamilton is an acclaimed musical that follows the life and exploits of an oft-overlooked Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton. Using innovative musical and theatrical methods, the musical takes the audience through the biography of the impassioned...

First published in 1938, set amid the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression, "The Lamp at Noon" is a short story about how a young homesteader couple's competing visions of a better life lead to the death of their son.

The desolate, dust-filled...

Written in 1974 during the politically-charged second-wave feminist movement, which began in the 1960s as a movement to increase women’s equality, Adrienne Rich's poem “Power” was clearly a political statement. Rich was heavily involved in the...