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The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver's most heralded novel, is the story of the Price family and their journey into the African Congo as Baptist missionaries in the late 1950's. The novel is told from the perspective of the four Price children...

In 1511, Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat, respected and secure in his position. He was an agent of Piero Soderini, often sent abroad to represent Florence, and highly esteemed as both a scholar and a political mind. Then came 1512, and the...

The Tower, written by W.B. Yeats in 1928, contains some of the poet’s best-known works, including “Leda and the Swan” and “Sailing to Byzantium.” The Tower was written during a pivotal time in Yeats’ artistic development. As a young writer, he had...

The God of Small Things is Arundhati Roy's first and only novel to date. It is semi-autobiographical in that it incorporates, embellishes, and greatly supplements events from her family's history. When asked why she chose Ayemenem as the setting...

Spring Awakening was Frank Wedekind's first play. He had it published at his own expense in 1891, but it was not performed until Wedekind started his own repertory company in 1906. The first production in the United States took place in 1912, but...

Before 1992, Cormac McCarthy had not sold more than 5,000 copies of any one of his books. By the end of 1993, All the Pretty Horses had sold 180,000 hardcover copies and more than 800,000 copies in paperback. What prompted such a dramatic reversal...

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is Maxine Hong Kingston’s first and most famous book. It was published in 1976 to great critical acclaim, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. In addition to being a...

Dostoevsky lived in Russia in the mid-19th century, a particularly tumultuous time in the country’s long and chaotic history. The agitation, despair, and pride of the time worked their way into much of Dostoevsky’s prose. Thus, understanding...

Song of Solomon, a rich and empowering novel published in 1977 that focuses on black life across America, follows the path of Milkman Dead, a young black male in search for his identity. Toni Morrison's gift of storytelling clearly shines through...

Breakfast at Tiffany's is Truman Capote's best-loved work of fiction and arguably one of the finest American novellas. Set in Manhattan's Upper East Side, during the final years of World War II, it documents the story of a young writer's...

"The Waste Land" caused a sensation when it was published in 1922. It is today the most widely translated and studied English-language poem of the twentieth century. This is perhaps surprising given the poem's length and its difficulty, but...

John Steinbeck published his highly controversial novel East of Eden, the work that he referred to as "the big one", in 1952. A symbolic recreation of the biblical story of Cain and Abel set in California's Salinas Valley, Steinbeck wrote the...

The Kite Runner is Khaled Hosseini's first novel. He was a practicing physician until shortly after the book's release and has now devoted himself to being an author and activist. The story of The Kite Runner is fictional, but it is rooted in real...

The Aeneid is Virgil's masterpiece, the product of eleven years of intensive work. Legend has it that Virgil wrote this epic out of order, separating it into twelve books and working on each one whenever he pleased. Still unfinished at the time of...

Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) is a short but dense literary work that becomes considerably more approachable when given some context. In the words of critic Anne B. Simpson, it is a text that offers "ambiguous and mutually incompatible...

Light In August was the first book Faulkner published after gaining some public success with Sanctuary, the book he wrote for commercial gain only. He published Light In August in 1931, thus beginning the period of the publication of much of his...

Ellison gained valuable writing experience while working for the Federal Writers' Project between 1938 and 1942. Through his work, he came into close contact with a variety of people and thus became better adept at producing realistic characters...

In late October, 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered a lecture on "Women and Fiction" at Newnham and Girton, the two women's college at Cambridge, England. Woolf had written the lecture in May; in 1929, she expanded it into what is now "A Room of One's...

Love in the Time of Cholera, published in 1985, was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first book after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Although it has often been compared negatively with Marquez's greatest achievement, One Hundred Years of...

After World War I, Italy was in a state of turmoil. Political groups such as communists and anarchists were vying for attention and sway, and King Victor Emmanuel III was losing control over his country. Angry, bitter soldiers had returned to a...

Jack Kerouac's On the Road can be considered among the most important novels of the twentieth century. It holds a great deal of historical significance, showing an underbelly of American culture full of sex, drugs, and lost youth, a culture that...

No Exit was first performed in Paris in May 1944, only three months before the city's liberation from the Nazi occupation. The theater in which it was performed was called the Vieux-Colombier. Startlingly simple in design, the play's power stems...

Astrophel and Stella (now called Astrophil and Stella), which includes 108 sonnets and 11 songs, is the first in a long line of Elizabethan sonnet cycles. "Sonnet cycles" were so named because they incorporated linked sonnets that generally...