Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
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...
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...
The Oedipus myth goes back as far as Homer and beyond, with sources varying about plot details. The play that Sophocles presents is merely the end of a dramatically long story, and some plot background must be provided to make the story...
Rabbit, Run was, to put it bluntly, the book that made John Updike - a mere twenty-eight years old at the time - a star. When it was published in 1960, Rabbit, Run heralded a distinctly new voice in American literature. The blending of precision...
“A comedy – three f., six m., four acts, rural scenery (a view over a lake); much talk of literature, little action, five bushels of love.”
One month before Chekhov finished writing The Seagull, this is the synopsis he offered to Suvorin, a rich...
In 1762, Rousseau published The Social Contract and another major work, Emile, or On Education. Both works criticized religion, and were consequently banned in France and his native Geneva. As a result, Rousseau was forced to flee his homeland and...
Marlowe, while he was still at the University of Cambridge, translated works by the Classical Roman poets Ovid and Lucan. The scholarly reading and translation of ancient Latin (and sometimes Greek) was required of all students in all disciplines...
Jack London spent a single winter in the Canadian North during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-1898. When he returned, he claimed to have come upon a mythic wolf which inspired the character of Buck in The Call of the Wild. Whether or not London...
The Secret Life of Bees is Sue Monk Kidd's first novel, following several acclaimed works of nonfiction. The novel follows Lily Owens in the summer of 1964 in South Carolina. On a quest to discover her mother's past, Lily travels to a honey farm...
Published in 1973, Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye, Blue Monday! was Kurt Vonnegut's 50th birthday present to himself. It also marked the end of a period of depression that had followed his 1969 publication of Slaughterhouse Five.
The alternate...
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is an exaggerated account of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s personal experiences. In 1887, shortly after the birth of her daughter, Gilman began to suffer from serious depression and fatigue. She was referred to Silas Weir...
A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Williams' most famous play and the one that catapulted him to success, changed the American theater and won Williams his first Pulitzer prize. Following this smash hit, however, the playwright staged a series of...
Seneca’s Phaedra was modeled on Euripides’ Hippolytus, which told roughly the same story. It is not clear whether Phaedra was ever performed on stage in Seneca’s time. It seems likely that it was meant instead purely for recitation, as would befit...
There is a major political context to Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. Within the chronology of Nabokov's works, Pale Fire was published in 1962, years after Lolita and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Pale Fire conjures up the unreal world of Zembla,...
The novel, written in 1864, reflects the changes in Dostoevsky's thought that had occurred as a result of recent events in his life. As a result of his liberal political leanings, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death along with a group of liberals in...
Nine Stories, published in 1953, is a collection of Salinger’s short stories, and is considered one of the finest short-story collections in the English language. Taking his cues from such masters of the medium as Guy de Maupassant and James...
Tropic of Cancer was first published in Paris in 1934. Few other novels of the century have created as much of a stir. Some writers, including Anais Nin, proclaimed it a work of genius, while others were baffled; critics began to bicker about its...
In 1865, Dostoevsky was heavily in debt, having taken on his brother Mikhail's debts after he died and amassing his own through gambling. Desperate, he signed an agreement with bookseller F. T. Stellovsky, promising that if he did not hand...
