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Wall Street is a 1987 film, directed and co-written by Oliver Stone. At the time of its release, New York finance was riding high and many were talking about the rise of the "yuppie" generation—young professionals who were profiting off the stock...

A charming but also deeply philosophical novella for children, The Little Prince was first published in the United States in April 1943, and published in France only in 1946, two years after its author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry died. Today a...

Published in 1979, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler appeared near the end of Italo Calvino’s career. This literary work is considered one of his greatest, especially for the nontraditional style and structure that almost spits in the face of...

An irreverent science-fiction adventure novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy constitutes the first installment of a five-book “trilogy” by Douglas Adams. The story is derived largely from a radio show, the scripts of which Adams compiled to...

Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis was published in 1999. Like his main character Bud, Curtis grew up in Flint, Michigan.

Curtis drew many of the book's events from the actual circumstances of the Great Depression and stories of the 1930s...

Tucker: The Man and His Dream is one of the more lauded films of Francis Ford Coppola's from the 1980s. The backstory for the project dates all the way to Coppola's childhood, when his father invested in the Tucker car company, an innovative...

In 1928, Charlie Chaplin's The Circus was released to positive reviews. However, things were starting to change, as silent films were getting replaced with "talkies"—movies with sound. The first talking picture, called The Jazz Singer, was...

Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” appears as the last poem in his career-altering book Life Studies, published in 1959, but as Lowell described to Al Alvarez, a fellow writer and critic, the poem was the first in the book to be completed. The final...

Lost in Yonkers is a play by Neil Simon, a highly acclaimed work that bridged his career into the 1990s and established his reputation as one of America’s major playwrights of the latter 20th century. In the 60s and 70s, Simon's reputation had...

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one of the most famous and beloved works of children’s literature. It was published in 1972, eight years after the original. Elevator continues the story of...

Bonnie and Clyde is an American film directed by Arthur Penn, released in 1967, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. The plot follows the criminal collaboration and love affair between Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in the 1920s in Texas. The...

Django Unchained is the highest-grossing film of Quentin Tarantino's career—an explosive, nearly three-hour Western epic that forces audiences to confront the brutal legacy of American slavery in a way rarely, if ever, glimpsed in Hollywood...

“The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” was published in Robert Lowell’s second collection of poetry, Lord Weary’s Castle. This collection was published in 1946 and won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947.

This poem deals with personal loss and applies it...

Doubt is a 2008 period drama film. The movie, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, is an adaptation of the writer’s award-winning stage play Doubt: A Parable. The film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, and Viola...

Goldfinger is the third James Bond movie released by Eon Productions. It was released in 1964, directed by Guy Hamilton. The film stars Sean Connery as the suave and sophisticated British spy, James Bond, who has been tasked with taking down a...

If you've ever read a book whose plot features action and adventure, it's easy to feel like you're in the story. As the hero battles enemies and defeats monsters, you may feel like you're by his side, wielding a sword, traveling the world with him...

The Happy and Other Tales, a collection of fairy tales that consists of the titular piece, “The Selfish Giant,” “The Devoted Friend,” “The Young King,” “The Nightingale and the Rose,” “The Fisherman and His Soul,” “The Star-Child,” “The Remarkable...

What Maisie Knew is an 1897 novel by American/British author Henry James. The story was first published in The Chap-Book and the New Review, two prominent American literary magazines of the time.

The protagonist of the book is Maisie, a young girl...

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (or the original French Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison) is a 1975 work by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault. The evolution of Foucault's thought is a complicated...

Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason is the 1965 abridged translation of Michel Foucault’s 1961 French text, Folie et Déraison. A more recent, unabridged translation has been released by Routledge under the title ...

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine was written by Michael Lewis and first published in 2010. Lewis wrote the book to trace the many factors that led to the United States housing bubble, which burst catastrophically in 2008. By the time he...

"An Agony. As Now" was published in 1964 as a part of The Dead Lecturer: Poems, Baraka's second collection of poems. Though this was close to the date when Baraka became radicalized and left his family in Greenwich Village to pursue activism in...

As one of the premier writers of the mid-17th century, Aphra Behn’s often lighthearted poetry and drama should be all the more surprising because she was a woman able to make a livable career in the then-new literary marketplace. And this isn’t...

Daughters of the Dust is a film about the descendants of the Gullah people of the islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, directed by Julie Dash. It is the first American film directed by an African American woman to get a general...