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War and Peace was published as a serialized novel, completed in 1869. Famous for its girth and sprawling ambition, it merges historical fact with invented characters, and philosophy with fiction. For all these reasons, it initially baffled many...

Young Goodman Brown and Other Short Stories consists of tales that were all published in newspapers and periodicals before they were later compiled and published in short story collections during Hawthorne's lifetime. These works were written...

The Kama Sutra is the seminal text on love in Indian civilization - and perhaps the world - and is considered a masterpiece of Sanskrit literature. As a result of its legendary status, the Kama Sutra has achieved a place in pop mythology as a "sex...

Charles Brockden Brown published Wieland in 1798 when he was 27 years old. After quitting a law apprenticeship in 1793, Brown established himself in New York literary circles. His fame rested partly on a pamphlet concerning women’s rights, Alcuin;...

Pygmalion has become by far Shaw's most famous play, mostly through its film adaptation in 1938. Shaw was intimately involved with the making of the film. He wrote the screenplay and was the first man to win both a Nobel Prize and an Academy...

Kate Millet, author of Sexual Politics, wrote of Villette that it was "too subversive to be popular." Mrs. Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë's friend and her first biographer, said that the story of Villette was not as interesting as that of Jane Eyre....

The Mill on the Floss was George Eliot’s third book, after Scenes of Clerical Life (1858) and Adam Bede (1859). She began writing the novel in 1859 and it was first published in 1860, with a few subsequent revised editions. The novel was eagerly...

Fight Club is a Twentieth Century Fox production shot in 1998 and released in the United States in 1999. The film is based on the book by Chuck Palahniuk of the same name. The rights to the novel were acquired by producer Laura Ziskin for $10,000...

The short story “The Most Dangerous Game” was originally published in Collier’s Weekly on January 19, 1924. The story has also been published as “The Hounds of Zaroff.” The main premise of the tale has been adapted numerous times to film and...

The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is a careful, thorough, and brilliant criticism of the mercantile system that governed economic policy in Great Britain during Smith's life. Smith charts the evolution of mercantile principles from the...

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, is often referred to as the founding text or manifesto of Western feminism. Nineteenth-century American feminists revered its author as their founding mother and read and...

The Book of Daniel was published in 1971 when Doctorow was a Visiting Author at the University of California, Irvine.

Doctorow conceived of the idea for the novel in the late 1960s - an era of intense conflicts over Vietnam, the Civil Rights...

Published in 2005, The Secret River is the first book in a trilogy by Kate Grenville that tackles the morally complex history of the colonization of Australia. The Secret River emerged out Grenville's research into her ancestor, Solomon Wiseman,...

Fitzgerald’s short stories remain the broadest and most comprehensive summary and analysis of the Jazz Age. He was far more successful in his lifetime with his stories than he was with his longer fiction, and yet both have endured the test of time...

A Study in Scarlet was written in 1886 and published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887 by Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was rejected three times by publishers; Ward, Lock, and Company finally accepted it in 1886 with the caveat of it delaying...

Stevenson conceived of the idea of Treasure Island (originally titled, "The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys") from a map of an imaginary, romantic island idly drawn by Stevenson and his stepson on a rainy day in Breamar, Scotland. Stevenson had just...

Vanity Fair was published as a series of installments, beginning in 1847. Even before all installments had been published, the work was an enormous hit. Thackeray was hailed for his realistic satire, and yet at the same time criticized for his...

Palahniuk has stated that the book was inspired by an actual fight he had while on a camping trip. He returned to work with bruises, but his co-workers never asked what had happened. This seeming reluctance to know the details of his private life...

Cathedral was published in September of 1983. It was Carver's third and final major-press publication of all-new stories in his lifetime. Though Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories would follow in 1988, that book was comprised...

C. S. Lewis was already a well-known literary critic and religious writer by the time he embarked on what has become his best-loved project: The Chronicles of Narnia. The first in the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published in...

Zeitoun is a nonfiction account of Abdulrahman Zeitoun's heroism and subsequent arrest in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, LA in 2005. Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant and American citizen, chooses to ride out the storm...

First released in 1936 and banned from the U.S. for nearly thirty years, Tropic of Capricorn, along with its predecessor Tropic of Cancer, set a new standard for explicitness of content. D. H. Lawrence’s novels, T. S. Eliot’s poetry, and other...

George Gordon, Lord Byron, began writing poetry in his youth. He published his first book of verse, Fugitive Pieces, at age 18, and he continued to write and publish poetry until his untimely death at 36. Although a lifelong poet, Byron did not...

By the time Never Let Me Go was published in 2005, author Kazuo Ishiguro was already one of the most renowned and critically acclaimed British writers. He had previously received the Whitbread and the Booker Prize for earlier works, and his The...