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Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 tour de force epic about the Vietnam War, is a rare film where the infamously perilous shoot rivaled the onscreen drama. At his Cannes press conference, after unveiling the (yet unfinished) cut, Coppola...

Edgar Huntly: or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, published in 1799 by Charles Brockden Brown, is one of the earliest work of American fiction, and the first to depict the tense relationship between Americans and Indians on the frontier. Adopting but...

Edward Albee wrote The Zoo Story in less than three weeks in 1958, and originally titled it Peter and Jerry. Although Albee is now widely considered to be among America's greatest living playwrights, this was his first foray into drama writing. It...

D.H. Lawrence began writing his fifth novel, Women in Love, in 1913 but it was not completed until Lawrence was living in Cornwall three years later. It was first published in 1920 after several delays and editorial changes, some of which were due...

In 1925, schoolteacher John Scopes was put on trial in the state of Tennessee for teaching evolution in its schools. In the trial that followed in Dayton, Tennessee, the chaotic atmosphere and intense press coverage earned it the label "Monkey...

The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short stories by legendary British writer Angela Carter, whose untimely death in 1992 brought her work extensive critical attention. It was first published in 1979, at which time it won the Cheltenham Festival...

J.M. Synge wrote The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, to be produced at Ireland's Abbey Theatre, which he had helped to form. Though it is today one of the English-language drama's most widely-anthologized works, it was hardly a success at...

Scholars widely acknowledge Christina Rossetti as one of the greatest Victorian poets and the foremost poet of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She excelled in using words to invoke the particular aesthetic of the movement. She based some of her...

The poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is among the greatest of English literature. Many of his poems are mainstays of literature courses, and most have attracted copious critical attention. His poems are renowned for, among other things, their bold...

Camus was influenced by a diverse collection of foreign authors and philosophies in the 1930s. The mood of nihilism was high. Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky had remained significant in thought since the turn of the century. German phenomenology was...

"The Fall of the House of Usher" was one of Edgar Allan Poe's first contributions to Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, of which he was an associate editor. The story was printed in 1839, a little over a year after "Ligeia," which Poe always...

The Vicar of Wakefield, published between 1761 and 1762, is Oliver Goldsmith's most famous work and one of the most beloved and widely-read 18th century English novels. It is also considered a model example of the sentimental novel, one of the...

In 1935, T.S. Eliot, famed poet of modernist despair and convert to the Anglican Church, was commissioned to write a play for Kent's annual Canterbury Festival. There were few explicit restrictions on subject matter.

That Eliot chose to dramatize...

Midaq Alley (Zuqaq al-Midaq) was published in Egypt, in Arabic, in 1947. The novel takes place in the Gamaliya neighborhood of Cairo, which is where Naguib Mahfouz and his family lived for the early years of his life. It has remained one of...

Nervous Conditions is a partially autobiographical novel by Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga that takes place in Rhodesia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It focuses on the themes of race, class, and gender through the eyes of Tambu, the...

Mario Puzo's The Godfather was published in 1969. Robert Evans, the head of production at Paramount Pictures, had expressed interest in optioning the book before Puzo had even finished writing it (although Peter Bart, then Evans' vice president in...

First published in 1992, Daniel Quinn's Ishmael has remained in print since its publication and has been translated into over 25 languages. Mostly a Socratic dialogue exploring the the world's impending disaster and the human responsibility...

Blade Runner is the 1981 film adaptation of Philip K. Dick's science fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, directed by Ridley Scott and produced by Michael Deeley. Hampton Fancher and David Peoples wrote the screenplay. The film stars...

Tell Me a Riddle is a collection of four short stories written by Tillie Olsen, and first published in 1961. The four short stories, "I Stand Here Ironing," "Hey Sailor, What Ship?," "O Yes," and "Tell Me a Riddle," touch on issues of...

Chinua Achebe's college work sharpened his interest in indigenous Nigerian cultures. He had grown up in Ogidi, a large village in Nigeria. His father taught at the missionary school, and Achebe witnessed firsthand the complex mix of benefit and...

Sigmund Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis were first published in 1933, and intended as a supplement to his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, delivered between 1915 and 1917 at the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic. In 1932, the...

Top Girls is one of Caryl Churchill’s most well known plays. It premiered at the Royal Court Theater in London on August 28, 1982, and won the Obie Award for Best Play of the Year. In its first run at the Royal Court, the cast included Gwen Taylor...

Though The Beggar's Opera has earned a reputation for its ironically rambunctious exploration of amoral characters, crime syndicates, and overt sexuality, John Gay originally intended it primarily as a political statement, a comment on both the...

Citizen Kane has widely been praised as the greatest film ever made, particularly for its innovative narrative structure, its cinematography, editing, and Orson Welles' tour de force performance. Pauline Kael called it "the one American talking...