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The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 film noir based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett. It was directed by John Huston and was his directorial debut. The film follows the story of a San Francisco private detective named Sam Spade (played...

"Sweat" is a short story by Zora Neale Hurston, published in 1926. Hurston was "a product of the Harlem Renaissance," an African-American political and artistic movement that took place in Harlem, New York in the 1920s, "as well as one of its most...

The Shack is a work of Christian fiction published by William Paul Young in 2007. The novel tells the story of Mack, a man whose daughter has been abducted by a serial killer, meeting God face to face and spending a weekend in a shack in the woods...

Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film The Great Gatsby is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel of the same name. The novel is a classic, taught almost universally in high school English classes and touted as one of the most important works of American...

A classic of 20th-century literature, The Once and Future King is based loosely on the epic Middle French poem Le Mort d'Arthur, written by Sir Thomas Malory in the 15th century. Malory's text chronicles the early life, career, and death of the...

All Creatures Great and Small is a novel written by James Herriot, the pen name for James Alfred ‘Alf’ Wight. It is the first book in a series, followed by the novels: All Things Bright and Beautiful (1972), All Things Wise and Wonderful (1977), ...

The Iceman Cometh is often deemed Eugene O’Neill’s magnum opus. It is a towering, profound, and lengthy work that manages to conjure up the universal and existential amidst the conversations of bums, derelicts, and dreamers at a rundown bar in...

Alien (1979) is a highly regarded and influential film in the Thriller/Science Fiction/Horror genres. The film was directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O'Bannon. Ridley Scott also had been the director of the well-received film The...

The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge is Michel Foucault’s landmark 1978 study, originally published in French, of the historical and political circumstances under which sexuality, as we know it, was formed. The book largely...

The Haunting of Hill House is considered Shirley Jackson’s best work and perhaps the quintessential haunted house novel. A delicate but insidious mediation on the feminine, the supernatural, psychological trauma, and the oppression of family and...

Dr. Strangelove was written and produced at the height of the Cold War, amidst such escalations as the Berlin Crisis (the closing of the border between Soviet East Berlin and democratic West Berlin) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (the establishment...

In retrospect, the most daring film released in 1968 was not Rosemary’s Baby or Night of the Living Dead or even 2001: A Space Odyssey. The major theatrical release that most bucked the conventions of the year 1968 almost certainly has to be...

Though an author of myriad books and plays, William Goldman is perhaps best known for his tale-within-a-tale of love and loss, capture and rescue, action and adventure. The 1973 fantasy romance novel The Princess Bride was a smashing success when...

Hiroshima is a non-fiction book written by John Hersey and published by The New Yorker on August 31 in 1946, a year after the atomic bomb was dropped by the American Army in Hiroshima, Japan during World War II.

Hersey visited Japan from 1945-1946...

Originally, Ellen Raskin, the author of The Westing Game, entered college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with the intention of majoring in journalism; however, after visiting the Chicago Art Institute and viewing an exhibition of...

The Silver Sword is a children's novel published in 1956 by British author Ian Serraillier. It is widely considered to be a classic of children’s literature.

Serraillier began the work in 1949, five years after World War II's end, and took five...

Weber’s text was first written in 1904 as a series of essays. It evolved into a more cohesive work over time, as Weber incorporated responses to criticism and reworked some of his ideas. The text centers itself on a discussion of the 16th century...

The Conversation is one of Francis Ford Coppola's lesser known films, but it is also considered one of his best. Released in 1974, during the middle of the Watergate scandal, its artful depiction of paranoia and fear in the face of improved...

"Desiree's Baby" is the most famous of Kate Chopin's many short stories. It is set before the American Civil War on two plantations in Louisiana: that of the Valmondés and of the Aubignys. The story is about a baby and racial tension between a...

Pretty Woman is considered one of the most iconic American romantic comedies. It is interpreted by many as a modern American retelling of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, in which a rich and successful benefactor plucks a naive girl from the wrong...

The Outsiders was filmed in 1983 and was helmed by the acclaimed film director Francis Ford Coppola. Despite a cast made up of up-and-coming young screen stars such as Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, and others, and the direction of...

Milos Forman is a Czech film director born on February 18, 1932 in Caslav, Czechoslovakia. As a child, both of his parents died in concentration camps and he lived with distant relatives for the duration of World War II. After graduating from King...

Originally published in Harper’s Bazaar in July 1926, the first of what would become a seemingly endless series of republications in anthologies and textbooks commenced the very next year when D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” appeared in...

Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera almost certainly qualifies as a candidate for the title of the least-read novel whose story is best-known. Thanks to a never-ending supply of adaptations into other media, it would be almost impossible to...