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Ihimaera published “The Whale Rider” in 1978 to critical acclaim. He wrote it in the earlier portion of his writing career, having only penned three other novels prior to it. In the introduction to the book, he explains his inspiration: his two...

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is Alison Bechdel's first graphic memoir. Bechdel, who has been working as acartoonist since the 1980s, took seven years to completeFun Home. Itspublication in 2006 brought her wide literary renown.

Bechdel used Adobe...

Roots: The Saga of an American Family was published in 1976 after Alex Haley spent 12 years researching his family's origins. Haley grew up hearing oral traditions passed down through his family, describing the experiences of his maternal...

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is a product of three different eras of black history. The injustices portrayed in the book have their roots in the era of slavery which lasted until the Civil War and which, shamefully, continues to influence racial...

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Stephen Chbosky and published in 1999. It is Chbosky's most famous work, and it has been translated into 31 languages and has remained on the New York Times Bestseller...

Plato began his career as a writer of tragedies, but, influenced by Socrates, left that behind and began writing philosophical dialogues. Other writers also wrote about Socrates and his speeches. Plato’s use of him as a main character may not have...

The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story is based on a non-fiction article by Richard Preston that was published in The New Yorker on October 26, 1992. Titled “Crisis in the Hot Zone,” the article chronicled an outbreak of a mutated strain of the...

The Quiet American is an anti-war novel by Graham Greene that waspublished in 1955 in the United Kingdom and in 1956 in the United States. Greene drew upon his own experiences in Indochina as a war correspondent for The Times and Le Figaroin the...

The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a novel by Mitch Albom that was published in 2003. It follows the life and death of a maintenance man named Eddie.

Albom grew up Jewish and, although he does not subscribe to any specific religion today, feels...

The Revenger’s Tragedy (1607) is a Jacobean play and one of the most prominent examples of the “tragedy of the blood” and “revenge tragedy” genres. Like many other plays from that same theatrical tradition, such as John Webster’s The White Devil,...

Walter Dean Myers's novel Fallen Angels was published in 1988. The novel is based on the author's own experiences as a young American soldier fighting in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War lasted from 1959 to 1973, but the United States had the most...

Everyday Use was first published in 1973 as part of the short story collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. These stories span multi-generational periods and interconnect Black women from the American South, New York City and...

Though published over 100 years ago, The Wind the Willows has survived as a classic children's novel, one which has been in print since initial publication and continues to delight children even today.

Kenneth Grahame created the characters of...

Accidental Death of an Anarchistis a form of political theater,written in responseto the death of Giuseppi (Pino) Pinelli, an anarchist who died while in police custody for questioning about a bombing in which he played no part. Some of Fo's...

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, published in the United Kingdom with the alternate spelling The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, won many international and Irish awards, including two Irish Book Awards and the Bisto Book of the Year. It topped the New...

Remains of the Day, published in 1989 is the third novel by Kazuo Ishiguro after A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World. Remains of the Day has since become a modern classic after it won not only the Man Booker Prize in 1989, but...

On the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural...

Though initially begun for a specific purpose, the letter that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote while incarcerated in Birmingham ultimately addressed universal questions of freedom and inequality. It is because of its ambitious reach that “Letter...

Bastard Out of Carolina came out in 1992. It is Dorothy Allison's first novel and remains her most widely successful work to date. Although Allison was an established author within the gay and lesbian literary community, she gained widespread...

Founding Brothers, by Joseph J. Ellis, was published in 2000 by Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc. It won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2001.

Through a series of six defining events from U.S. history, the author deftly explores the...

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" was adapted for film in 1992 by Jeri Cain Rossi, starring Joe Coleman. The film, titled "Black Hearts Bleed Red," was not well-received by critics. The story was also adapted as a modern chamber opera by David Volk at...

The Collector was John Fowles's first published novel, released in 1963. Fowles described this book as a commentary on class in England, specifically on class issues such as prosperity, pretension, and the contrasts between the working class and...

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is often considered one of, if not the best, of her works, as well as a significant piece of Victorian literature. It features a strong female protagonist, a mature love story, and relevant social and political...

The Arabian Nights, also called One Thousand and One Nights, is a collection of stories and folk tales from West and South Asia that was compiled during the Islamic Golden Age. It took centuries to collect all of these together, and various...