Newest Study Guides

Published in 1989, Maestro is the first novel by Australian writer Peter Goldsworthy. A bildungsroman, it focuses on a teenage boy named Paul Crabbe and his relationship with his piano teacher, Herr Eduard Keller. The book draws on many...

In the preface to his new edition, Joseph Heller recalls when he originally submitted Catch-22 to various magazines, including The Atlantic and The New Yorker. He describes how the novel was dismissed, not even making the New York Times bestseller...

Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection of stories, published in 1999, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway/PEN Award in 2000, and several of the stories appeared in The New Yorker. The title is taken from one of the stories in the...

Julia Alvarez published her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, in 1991 at the age of 41. Built from interrelated stories she had been publishing in magazines and literary reviews throughout the 1980s, it was the first major...

The House of the Spirits (La Casa de los Espíritus) marked Isabel Allende's novelistic debut and the advent of her status as an internationally best-selling author. After spending many years as a journalist, television, and theater writer in Chile...

The Last of the Mohicans takes place in the midst of the French-Indian war. Specifically, it focuses on one battle in a war that lasted for many years. This was the last and most important conflict over French and British possessions in North...

The Second Treatise of Government was published amidst the turmoil and upheaval of late-17th century English politics. In 1690 when it anonymously entered the canon of great works of political theory, the absolute monarch King James II had been...

Charlotte Temple was Susanna Rowson's second novel, and her first to receive financial success. The novel is a didactic melodrama, intended to teach young women how to behave honorably and avoid falling in with unsavory people, whether they be men...

Bertolt Brecht wrote Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (translated literally as “The Good Person of Setzuan”) with Margarete Steffin and Ruth Berlau between the years of 1938 and 1943. Steffin was a German actress, writer, and translator, and Brecht's...

Like Water for Chocolate, published in 1989, is Laura Esquivel’s first novel. Part cookbook, part fiction, this best-selling work retells the story of the De la Garza family with a specific focus on Tita de la Garza. Every chapter begins with a...

The Epic of Gilgamesh is an ancient epic poem from Mesopotamia dating back to roughly 2000 BCE. It is believed to be one of the earliest works of literature in human history. Scholars believe that its origins were in ancient Sumerian poems that...

Federico García Lorca maintained a lifelong interest in the music and culture of rural Spain, a fascination that heavily influenced one of his most acclaimed tragedies, Blood Wedding. More directly, the play was inspired by a sensational crime...

H. Rider Haggard came to literary prominence with the publication of King Solomon’s Mines in 1885. Haggard self-consciously modeled the book on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which Haggard had read. He bet his brother that he could...

Civilization and Its Discontents, which Freud wrote in the summer of 1929, compares "civilized" and "savage" human lives in order to reflect upon the meaning of civilization in general. Like many of his later works, the essay generalizes the...

In 1798, Coleridge and longtime friend William Wordsworth anonymously published Lyrical Ballads, a work which officially began the Romantic movement in English poetry. Though not the first of Colerdige's published works, Lyrical Ballads...

Tayeb Salih published Season of Migration to the North in 1966, ten years after Sudan received its independence from the British empire on January 1, 1956. The novel is heavily influenced by the tumultuous politics of the period. The 1950s and...

Jeannette Walls’ 2005 memoir The Glass Castle details the joys and struggles of her childhood. It offers a look into her life and that of her highly charismatic yet frequently dysfunctional family. Walls’ first memoir and second non-fiction work,...

The Bean Trees draws from many of the experiences of its author, Barbara Kingsolver, whose personal life and academic training provide some of the background for the novel. The novel is not autobiographical, but there are numerous parallels...

Art Spiegelman's Maus is the most unlikely of creations: a comic book about the Holocaust. Yet when the first volume of Maus was published in 1987, it met with enormous critical and commercial success, and to this day it is widely considered to be...

Lorraine Hansberry, in an August 1959 Village Voice article, wrote:

In an almost paradoxical fashion, it disturbs the soul of man to truly understand what he invariably senses: that nobody really finds oppression and/or poverty tolerable. If we...

"Atonement" is the eleventh book written by Ian McEwan. It was published in 2001 and won the W.H. Smith Literary Award in 2002, the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award in 2003, the L.A. Times Prize for Fiction in 2003, and the Santiago...

The Professor’s House was published in 1925, but had been in the works since Cather’s 1915 trip to Mesa Verde National Park in Montezuma County, Colorado. The park is widely recognized as the home of some of the world's best-preserved cliff...

The Marrow of Tradition is considered to be one of the most important works of African American realist fiction. It is a novel based upon a historical account of the Wilmington, North Carolina race riots of 1898. The riots were, actually, a coup d...

Tuesdays with Morrie is based on the real-life relationship with author Mitch Albom and his college professor Morrie Schwartz. Morrie had been one of Mitch's favorite professors in college, and on graduation day, Mitch presented Morrie with a...