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In Disgrace (1999), J.M. Coetzee enters intimately into the mind of a twice-divorced academic, David Lurie, as he wrestles with the impediments that societal standards place on the fulfillment of his sexual desire. Fired from his position in Cape...

Melville finished his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, when he was all of thirty-two years old. Still a young writer, he had crafted one of the most incredibly dense and imaginative works in all of literature, a book now praised by many as the greatest...

In the Time of the Butterflies was published in 1994. It was selected as a Notable Book for 1994 by the American Library Association, and it was also a 1994 Book of the Month Club choice. In 1995, it was a finalist for the National Book Critics...

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone tells the story of an eleven-year-old orphan who suddenly discovers that he is a wizard. J.K. Rowling began writing the book in 1990, prompted by a delayed train ride from Manchester to London during which she...

Ethan Frome was published in 1911, when Wharton was already an established and successful writer. She lived primarily in Paris between 1905 and the outbreak of World War II, and these years were productive. She was growing more self-assured in her...

The Road (2006), Cormac McCarthy's most recent novel, describes the bleak journey of a father and son across a post-apocalyptic American landscape. He was visiting El Paso, Texas, with one of his sons, John Francis McCarthy, in 2003 when the...

Woyzeck is based on a true account of a poor man who was executed for stabbing his wife, Marie, to death. Buchner became fascinated with the case, so much so that he used it as inspiration for the play that would culminate his short literary...

Stephenie Meyer began to write Twilight on the first day after a vivid dream she had about a young woman and a very handsome vampire in a field discussing their love for each other and the problem of the vampire’s hunger for her scent and her...

Shakespeare's sonnets comprise 154 poems in sonnet form that were published in 1609 but likely written over the course of several years. Evidence for their existence long preceding publication comes from a reference in Francis Mere's 1598 Palladis...

Susan Glaspell wrote Trifles in 1916, basing this brief, one-act play on the murder of the sixty-year-old John Hossack, which she had covered extensively during her stint as a journalist with the Des Moines Daily News after her graduation from...

As with many extant Greek tragedies, we have no exact date for the the writing of Electra, though scholars have argued that some of its stylistic features suggest it was written towards the end of Sophocles' life.

The story of Orestes' revenge is a...

In this 1998 book by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, an unnamed city is beset by an epidemic of the "white sickness," a disease that instantly turns everyone blind. Everyone, that is, except for one woman. The novel follows the story of seven...

Barbara Ehrenreich was already a highly respected figure in the world of journalism before she penned Nickel and Dimed. As she relates in her introduction to the book, the idea of trying out low-wage work in the interest of investigative reportage...

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman stems from both Arthur Miller's personal experiences and the theatrical traditions in which the playwright was schooled. The play recalls the traditions of Yiddish theater that focus on family as the crucial...

Mother Courage and Her Children is set during the Thirty Years' War, but it was written either shortly before or during the early years of the Second World War. Hitler's warmongering intentions had become clear to many Germans by the mid-1930s,...

During the incredibly successful run of The Glass Menagerie, theater workmen taught Williams how to play poker. Williams was already beginning to work on a new story, about two Southern belles in a small apartment with a rough crowd of blue-collar...

In 1905, the young James Joyce, then only twenty-three years old, sent a manuscript of twelve short stories to an English publisher. Delays in publishing gave Joyce ample time to add three accomplished stories over the next two years: "Two...

The Piano Lesson is the fourth play in August Wilson's Pittsburgh cycle, and one of the most renowned. If the entire ten play cycle can be seen as a living history lesson, then The Piano Lesson is the pop quiz, smashing together the legacies of...

Rip Van Winkle and other stories first appeared in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., published serially in the United States from 1819-1820, and in book form in England in 1820. The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon was extremely...

The history of Yonnondio is as interesting as the book itself. It is an unfinished novel. Tillie Olsen wrote the majority of it when she was nineteen years old. Indeed, she estimates that she began the novel in March 1932, the same month she...

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was published as part of Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, which came out in 1820. It is probably the most famous story from the collection, and it is considered one of Irving’s most important...

The Things They Carried, published in 1990, was a runaway hit and is included in many high school and university curricula. O’Brien has called the form of the work “meta-fiction,” indicating that it is neither non-fiction nor quite fiction. The...

"Barn Burning" was originally published in the June, 1939 issue of Harper’s Magazine. It is a prequel to the "Snopes" trilogy, made up of the novels The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). In 1980, "Barn Burning" was made into...

Shantaram is the action-filled story of Lin, a character based very closely on the author, Gregory David Roberts. The novel chronicles approximately seven years in Roberts' amazing life, from his arrival in Bombay in 1982 until his departure from...