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"Memory Green" by Archibald MacLeish, though not one of MacLeish's most famous poems, is highly characteristic of his style and prowess. The poem, published in 1930, contains several of his signatures as a poet: the use of natural imagery to...

“Absalom and Achitophel” is a heroic satire written by John Dryden in 1681-1682. John Dryden is an English poet, playwright, translator, essayist, and literary theorist. Along with Shakespeare and Milton, he is considered as one of the most...

Looking for Alaska was published in 2005 by Dutton Children’s Books. It was John Green’s first novel. Inspired by his own education at Indian Springs School in Alabama, the book is set at the fictional Culver Creek Preparatory School, an upscale...

Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World, published anonymously in January of 1778, is the first novel written by Frances Burney. It is often considered her best work, and it is certainly her most popular and widely-read....

Twelve Years a Slave is the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black man who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. Published in 1853, the same year in which he was liberated, it covers his twelve years in servitude.

Northup recounts his life...

Animal House is a comedic film from 1978, written by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney, and Chris Miller, and directed by John Landis. It was produced by Matty Simmons of National Lampoon, a humor magazine that ran from 1970 to 1998, and based on...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “A Musical Instrument” is a poem first published in Browning's volume Poems Before Congress. The collection was published in 1860, just one year before her death. Unlike the love sonnets of Browning’s earlier works,...

“For the Union Dead” is the titular poem of Robert Lowell’s sixth book of poetry. This poem was commissioned by the Boston Arts Festival in 1960 and ended up in some paperback editions of Life Studies. It builds a shaky bridge between the present...

This 2013 film by Bong Joon-ho is based on the Le Transperceneige, a French graphic novel by Jean-Marc Rochette. Snowpiercer was Bong Joon-ho's first English film, after directing numerous critically-acclaimed Korean films. The film stars Chris...

Shutter Island is a thriller written in 2003 by Dennis Lehane. Set in the summer of 1954, with memories of World War Two still fresh, the novel follows U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels as he travels to Shutter Island, the location of Ashecliffe Hospital...

Famed children’s author Linda Sue Park published A Long Walk to Water in 2010. Based on the true story of Salva Dut, a Sudanese “Lost Boy,” it interweaves the tales of Dut with those of a fictional young girl named Nya. Dut’s story takes place in...

Pather Panchali was inspired by filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s desire to create more realistic films with actual locations and natural actors about real Indian issues. While traveling in London, Ray saw Bicycle Thieves, an Italian film directed by...

“Sonnet 24: Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning is part of her collection of poems entitled Sonnets from the Portuguese. The collection of 44 sonnets was published in 1850 and dedicated to her husband,...

Along with Elia Kazan's East of Eden, which was released six months earlier, Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause is best known for forging James Dean's legacy as a screen icon. Dean, Ray, writer Irving Shulman, and a cast of committed young stars...

The Philadelphia Story remains one of the best-loved romantic comedies—more specifically, a “comedy of remarriage”—of the 20th century, and features a stunning cast of Hollywood heavyweights delivering some of the most crystalline dialogue in...

Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 film noir, melodrama, and dark comedy directed by visionary filmmaker Billy Wilder, who also co-wrote the screenplay with one of his longtime collaborators, Charles Brackett. The duo initially conceived the film as a...

The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir written by the American writer Joan Didion. Most known for her literary journalism, Didion began writing The Year of Magical Thinking as a personal account of her grief not long after the death of her...

Tuck Everlasting is a classic tale about a family that does not age and is immune to injury and illness, and one girl who chooses to fiercely protect their secret.

Natalie Babbitt's inspiration for writing this book came from an experience with...

It Happened One Night is a pre-Code romantic comedy beloved for its charm, its picaresque style, and the glowing performances of its two stars, Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. It is considered to be one of the first "screwball comedies," a...

In 1928, MacLeish produced what many consider to be the defining manifesto for modernist poetry, “Ars Poetica,” with the famous concluding line insisting that

“A poem should not mean / But be.”

One of the conventions of modernism was, perhaps...

Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey is a beloved hybrid of bildungsroman, travel writing, political commentary, and diary. It achieved even more prominence when turned into a popular film in 2004, and has...

James M. Cain, the author of the book on which Mildred Pierce is based, is one of several great American crime writers of the 1940s, a group that included Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich. The novel Mildred Pierce was a...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” is part of the volume Sonnets from the Portuguese. The collection of 44 sonnets was published in 1850 and dedicated to her husband, the poet Robert Browning. This...

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of stories relating to the infamous character Sherlock Holmes, a notable detective who investigates various mysteries and crime set in the 1900s. George Newness publishing company first published...