Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
“since feeling is first” was published in E. E. Cummings’s 1926 poetry collection is 5. Released at perhaps the height of the poet’s career, is 5 features poems that exemplify Cummings’s iconoclastic, experimental, witty, and often satirical...
"Havisham" appears in Carol Ann Duffy's fourth collection of poems, Mean Time, published in 1993. Havisham is written from the perspective of the character Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. The poems included in Mean...
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is Frank Capra's 1939 political "dramedy" starring a then-unknown James Stewart as Senator Jefferson Smith, a naive but good-hearted Western man with the political idealism to take down corruption in Washington. The...
Written around 1956, “An Arundel Tomb” was published in Larkin’s 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings and is one of his most famous poems. The book was a commercial success by poetry standards. In the poem, the speaker is inspired by seeing a pair...
Life of Galileo, aka Galileo, is a play by Bertolt Brecht, written in 1938 and first performed at the Zurich Schauspielhaus in 1943. At the time of its premiere, Brecht, who typically directed his own plays, handed over directorial duties to...
The Stone Angel is a novel by Margaret Laurence first published in 1964. The heroine of the novel is Hagar Shipley, a 90-year-old woman who is endowed with a sharp mind and a proud, unyielding temper. Hagar is having difficulty coming to terms...
An aubade is a poem traditionally set at dawn or early morning, and typically about parting lovers. This “Aubade” doesn’t involve love, however, despite its fitting setting. In the poem, which uses an ABABCCDEED rhyme scheme, the speaker wakes up...
Call Me by Your Name is a 2017 coming-of-age romance film directed by Luca Guadagnino and based on the book of the same name by André Aciman. It stars Timothée Chalamet as Elio and Armie Hammer as Oliver, two young men who find themselves...
"Cat Person" is a short story published in The New Yorker in December 2017, which quickly went viral, attaining significant praise on the internet, especially within certain feminist circles.
The story is told from the point of view of Margot, a...
Among the Hidden is a young adult novel published in 1998. The book depicts a dystopian society in the not-too-distant future in which it is illegal for families to have more than two children. Illegal third children, like Luke Gardner, must spend...
“i carry your heart with me(i carry it in” by E. E. Cummings first appeared in the June 1952 issue of Poetry, and was published later in the collection Complete Poems: 1904–1962. It is not only a widely read love poem, but also a piece that...
David Almond’s Skellig was published in 1998 and is considered one of the most significant works of children’s literature in the late 20th century.
Almond had already written short stories when what would be Skellig came to him. He told an...
"The House" is a poem by Warsan Shire. It was published in 2011 in Shire's first poetry collection, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. It focuses on womanhood, comparing a woman's body to a house equipped with different rooms that serve...
"The Birth-Mark" is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most revered and gripping short stories. Published in the March 1843 edition of The Pioneer, the story examines human sin, evokes the perils of overweening ambition, and theorizes about gender...
The Big Lebowski is a stoner comedy and crime film from 1998 produced and directed by the Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan). It follows Jeffrey "the Dude" Lebowski, an unemployed bowler and general slacker as he navigates a convoluted instance of...
“All in green went my love riding,” one of E. E. Cummings’s most celebrated poems, was published in 1923 in Tulips and Chimneys, Cummings' first published collection of poems. Written in the early years of Cummings’s career, it is perhaps one of...
"Anne Hathaway" appears in Carol Ann Duffy’s collection of poems The World’s Wife, published in 1999. This collection moved women in well-known stories and myths to the foregrounds of their stories—spaces previously occupied by men. "Anne...
"Warming Her Pearls" appears in Carol Ann Duffy's book Selling Manhattan, a collection that includes dramatic monologues, love poems, and poems concerned with the effect of money on society. This poem, told by an adoring servant about her...
Published in 1958, The Guide is a novel by Indian author R.K. Narayan set in his fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. It follows the life of an Indian man, Raju, as he evolves throughout his life to become one of the most prominent holy men in...
Edward Albee wrote The Sandbox on commission from the Festival of Two Worlds at the Spoleto Festival in Italy in 1959. Its first production took place in New York the following year. The Sandbox is linked to a longer play by Albee titled The...
A House for Mr. Biswas was V. S. Naipaul’s fourth novel, following three earlier efforts that were essentially all comedies of manners set in the author’s homeland of Trinidad. This predominantly comic novel, which made Naipaul a major figure in...
“The Mark on the Wall” is Virginia Woolf’s first short story and an example of her pioneering, modernist style with stream-of-consciousness and introspection. Of the story, she wrote, “I shall never forget the day I wrote 'The Mark on the Wall'—...
M. Butterfly is the most successful play written by playwright David Henry Hwang. It premiered on Broadway in 1988 to critical acclaim, was a finalist for the Pulitzer, and won the Tony Award for Best Play. Its original cast included John Lithgow...
Susan Glaspell’s "A Jury of Her Peers" is the short-story version of her play Trifles, which was staged a year before she published "Jury." Essentially the exact same story in two different literary forms, both tell a fictionalized but accurate...
