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Victorian poet Christina Rossetti was well-known for her ability to craft poetry that remains at once deeply philosophical, yet fully accessible to many readers. Oftentimes, her religious themes and fascination with the ephemerality of experience...

"Wind," published in Ted Hughes' first collection The Hawk and The Rain (1957), operates on two levels of poetic meaning. On the surface, the poem narrates a destructive storm. However, the poem's final stanzas suggest that Hughes uses the storm's...

The Wizard of Oz remains, to this day, one of the most iconic American films of all time. Production was complicated and huge in scale, with a revolving door of directors coming in to work on the film, an ambitious undertaking unprecedented in...

Raging Bull is a 1980 drama directed by one of the most respected American directors, Martin Scorsese. A complex and subtle film about the tragic and violent life of a prizefighter, it was based on boxer Jake LaMotta's autobiography. Actor Robert...

Mean Girls is a high school teen comedy released in 2004 by Paramount Pictures, starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams. Mark Waters directed the script written by Tina Fey, adapted from the self-help book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind...

Sergei Eisenstein was commissioned by the Soviet government in 1925 to direct a film commemorating the 20th anniversary of the unsuccessful revolution of 1905. Eisenstein originally envisioned this project as an eight-part episodic film which...

Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” was originally published in 1978 in her third volume of poetry, And Still I Rise. The poem was also featured that same year in Cosmopolitan magazine. At the time of its publication, Angelou was already well known...

First published in The Liberator in 1921, "America" is Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay's powerful reflection on both the attraction and the antagonism he felt toward the nation in which he spent much of his adult life. Written while McKay was...

Graham Greene published Brighton Rock as one of his "entertainments," geared towards a popular audience, in 1938. He is reported to have started writing the novel as a simple detective story, but the depth and complexity of spiritual torment felt...

Written and directed by Federico Fellini, 8 1/2 is an Italian avant-garde film released in 1963. Its title derives from its position as the eighth and a half film that Fellini directed (if one considers his two short films and a collaboration each...

Even if you have never heard of Rashomon, you are still likely familiar with the plot of this 1950 Japanese film directed by the master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Television shows as diverse as All in the Family, The X-Files and King of the Hill...

Our Mutual Friend is the last novel Charles Dickens completed during his lifetime; The Mystery of Edwin Drood was left incomplete when the author died in 1870. The novel was published in 20 parts spread over 19 months (the final installment was a...

First published in 1920, Claude McKay's "The Lynching" stands as a powerful condemnation of one of the most horrific chapters of American history. A form of unlawful killing carried out by mobs, lynchings increased in the years after...

"If We Must Die" is writer Claude McKay's most famous poem, showing his deft use of the form most associated with his work, the sonnet. McKay composed the poem in response to the outburst of racial violence in the summer of 1919, dubbed "The Red...

Her is a 2013 American romantic science-fiction film directed, produced, and written by Spike Jonze. The film follows Theodore, a lonely man in the final stages of a divorce. His career is writing "beautiful handwritten letters" on behalf of other...

Perhaps O'Hara's most celebrated poem, "Having A Coke With You" describes an afternoon spent in the park with a lover.

After returning from a trip to Spain in 1960, O'Hara wrote "Having A Coke With You" following an afternoon he spent with dancer...

Released in 2016, J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was a near-instant success, receiving widespread acclaim for its sobering depiction of white, working-class Americans experiencing a collective identity crisis. It remains a controversial book, with...

After the explosive release of Awakenings in 1973, Oliver Sacks waited over a decade to publish a second book. His next two books were released within a year of one another: A Leg to Stand On in 1984, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in...

Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing is a children's book published in 1972, and is to date one of author Judy Blume's most famous works. It is the first book in the Fudge Series, which follows the experiences of a 9-year-old fourth grader named Peter...

Although “In an Artist’s Studio” was published posthumously in 1896, the poem’s composition occurred on December 24, 1856, a date which has proved useful for scholarly interpretation. Since its publication, scholars have assumed that Rossetti’s...

The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals was written in 1785, four years after Kant had written his magnum opus, The Critique of Pure Reason. In the Groundwork, Kant aims to extend the insights of the Critique. Where the Critique inquired into...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist joins the list of what has already proven a rather fertile genre that should prove to become only more and more fertile as time moves on and sensitivities become less delicate. The central event of the story is the...

My Brilliant Friend is the first novel in a four part series known as the "Neapolitan Quartet." The series includes My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost...

The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas’s first novel, debuted as number one on The New York Times bestseller list when it was published in February 2017. Thomas developed the novel from a short story she wrote for her senior project in Belhaven University’...