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Released in 1946, Notorious is a rather uncharacteristic Hitchcock film, in that it does not employ many of the horror-filled tropes of his other films, but it is nonetheless considered to be one of his greatest works and touted as one of his...

Stagecoach came out in 1939 to critical acclaim. It marked the first film of many in which director John Ford used Monument Valley as a backdrop for his narrative. It is also the film that made the iconic actor John Wayne a star. The film was shot...

Maya Angelou’s “Africa” was originally published in 1975 in her second volume of poetry, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well. At the time of its publication, Angelou had already established herself as a prolific writer of both prose and verse....

What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a 1993 American drama movie. The film, directed by Lasse Hallström, stars Johnny Depp, Juliette Lewis, Darlene Cates, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Hallström's realistic aesthetic, often dubbed cinéma vérité, allowed the...

In 1992, Samuel Huntington first presented the central argument of what would become The Clash of Civilizations in a lecture. Huntington was the first scholar to argue that cultural identity would be the most important factor in shaping global...

Released in 1954, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront is considered by many to be one of the greatest American films ever made. While Kazan and his legacy have been complicated and in many ways tarnished by the fact that he testified against friends...

Eugene O’Neill’s famed Mourning Becomes Electra is a complex and tragic play in three parts. Set in New England at the close of the Civil War, it was first published and staged in 1931. The play is based off Aeschylus’s Greek tragedy The Oresteia...

Maya Angelou’s “Alone” was originally published in 1975 in her second volume of verse, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well. By the time of the book’s publication, Angelou had already established herself as a prolific writer of both prose and...

Directed with true brilliance and care by Robert Mulligan, To Kill a Mockingbird is a 1962 American film adapted from Harper Lee’s 1960 semi-autobiographical, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel of the same name. The film stands as one of the few screen...

There Will be Blood is often referred to as a film adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, but it's far from a direct adaptation. The names of the characters in the film do not correspond to those in the book, and the events in the novel that...

Markus Zusak began his career as a successful writer of young adult fiction, but for his fifth novel, Zusak set out to relate the experiences of his parents growing up during World War II for an adult audience. Zusak has said that much of the...

Martin Buber’s most influential work, I and Thou, was originally published in German as Ich and Du in 1923 and was translated into English in 1937. It is the foundational text of what has come to be called the philosophy of dialogue. This covers...

The Archaeology of Knowledge is Foucault’s historiographical treatise—his theory of how to study history—and it was first published in French in 1969. It lays out Foucault’s method for doing history, in particular how to assemble and interpret the...

Alice Walker set to work on a new novel shortly after filing for divorce from her husband in 1976. In the three years since the publication of her short story collection In Love and Trouble, Walker had become a contributing editor at Ms. Magazine,...

The Big Sleep is a 1946 film noir directed by Howard Hawks, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Raymond Chandler. The movie stars Humphrey Bogart as Chandler's iconic hero-detective Philip Marlowe and Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge. ...

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was published in 1962 in German. It began as Habermas’s doctoral dissertation. It was a major work, but it was not translated into English in 1989. By that point, Habermas had already systemized...

Frank O'Hara's "The Day Lady Died" is an elegy to the jazz singer Billie Holiday, who passed away on July 17th, 1959 from cirrhosis of the liver. Holiday was known for her contralto voice, and for her ability to improvise a song on the spot. Her...

“The Loaded Dog” was published in 1901 in Henry Lawson’s short story collection titled Joe Wilson and His Mates. Since publication, the story has continued to be one of the most popular of Lawson’s short stories due to the tale’s universally...

Beetlejuice was one of Tim Burton’s first full-length movies, and established him as an unusual, singular, outrageous, and exciting director. The first screenplay for the film was written by Michael McDowell, and was apparently much darker than...

The Dumb Waiter is a one-act play written by English playwright Harold Pinter in 1957. The short play is set in a single basement room. There are only two characters: Gus and Ben, hitmen waiting for a target to arrive.

The play has elements of...

"The Library of Babel" is a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges. The story was originally published in Borges' 1941 collection El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, translated as The Garden of Forking Paths. It was later also included in the...

An early Hitchcock film, Rope is not among the Master of Suspense's best known films, but it is certainly notable, and includes many Hitchcockian innovations of horror and suspense. Rope is perhaps most memorable as a notable experimentation in...

Trainspotting is a British black comedy by Danny Boyle, released in 1996. It starred Ewan McGregor, Johnny Lee Miller, Robert Carlyle, Ewen Bremner, Kevin McKidd, and Kelly Macdonald, in an ensemble cast led by McGregor’s protagonist, Mark Renton....

Hilda Doolittle is known widely by her initials, H.D. “Sea Rose” is one of the poems belonging to Sea Garden (1916), a book of poems in which H.D. examines the themes of gender, sexuality, conformity, and value by using natural scenery as...