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.
The Sound and the Fury was published in 1929, although it was one of the first novels Faulkner wrote. Many critics and even Faulkner himself think that it is the best novel that he wrote. Its subject is the downfall of the Compson family, the...
Madame Bovary, written by Gustave Flaubert, was published in 1857 in French. Flaubert wrote the novel in Croisset, France, between 1851 and 1857 and set the action in the same period of time, the mid-1800s, in the French towns of Tostes, Yonville,...
Friedrich Duerrenmatt's The Visit premiered in Zurich in 1956. Duerrenmatt was 35 at the time, and the play's performance immediately won him international acclaim, cementing his reputation as a dramatist.
Duerrenmatt describes "The Visit" as a...
Snow Falling on Cedars is a novel strongly committed to engaging with the ideals of justice, law, love, and morality. Structured around the trial of an American citizen of Japanese ancestry and set in an island community in the Puget Sound, the...
Lord Jim, published in 1900, initially began as a short story based on a real incident involving a steamship called Jeddah, which carried Muslim pilgrims from Singapore to Mecca. Conrad had spent much of the time between 1883 and 1888 in the area...
As I Lay Dying was published in 1930, immediately following the work that many consider to be Faulkner's masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury. The Sound and the Fury is widely considered to be among the greatest of the modernist novels, and is...
Robert Louis Stevenson began writing Kidnapped in March of 1885. In February, he had finished writing The Black Arrow and was working on The Great North Road when he read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A month later, he put aside...
Contemporary politics deeply influenced Dante's literary and emotional life, and had a major influence on the writing of the Inferno. Renaissance Florence was a thriving, but not a peaceful city: different opposing factions continually struggled...
Waiting for Godot qualifies as one of Samuel Beckett's most famous works. Originally written in French in 1948, Beckett personally translated the play into English. The world premiere was held on January 5, 1953, in the Left Bank Theater of...
T.S. Eliot started writing "Prufrock Among the Women" in 1909 as a graduate student at Harvard. He revised it over the next couple of years, changing the title to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" along the way. First published in the Chicago...
The Chosen comes out of experiences both relevant to twentieth century world history and the particular life of its author, Chaim Potok. Potok includes autobiographical details in The Chosen with regard to each of the two main characters. Like...
A Lost Lady is primarily a transcendent of realism, arriving shortly before The Great Gatsby which shares many of its characteristics. A characteristic of this type of novel is that the society is in transition from an old culture to a new, a...
The Return of the King is the third novel of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Tolkien began this trilogy well after the "world" of Middle Earth had been created. Several of the characters presented in this novel were first presented in The Hobbit....
The Fellowship of the Ring is the first novel of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. Tolkien began this trilogy well after the "world" of Middle Earth had been created. Several of the characters presented in this novel were first presented in The...
Long Day's Journey into Night was never performed during O'Neill's lifetime. On his twelfth wedding anniversary with his wife Carlotta, O'Neill gave her the script of the play with this note:
For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary
Dearest:...
Bertolt Brecht wrote Jungle of Cities (Im Dickicht der Staedte) when he was only twenty-three years old. The play emerged as a brilliant and poetic tribute to his most despairing and nihilistic phase from 1921-1923. Set in Chicago, it portrays the...
The House on Mango Street is Sandra Cisneros' first major work. Even though she periodically wrote poems and stories throughout her childhood and adolescence, it was not until she attended the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop in the late...
The House of Mirth was published in 1905 when Edith Wharton was forty-three. She had done very little fiction writing up to that point but had some practice with volumes of short stories and an historical "romantic chronicle" called The Valley of...
In terms of Tolkien's literary context, we should look to his twin focuses: philology (the study of languages) and philosophy (moral, rather than political ethics). The Hobbit is a literary exposition of Tolkien's personal grappling with the "big...
During his stay at Walden Pond (later to become the subject of his published journal Walden, or Life in the Woods), Thoreau spent one night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax meant to support America's war with Mexico. He composed a letter...
After working as an actor for several years in New York City's avant-garde, left-wing Group Theatre repertory company, Clifford Odets produced his first play, "Waiting for Lefty," in 1935. To call it a smash hit would be an understatement. Its...
Harriet Beecher Stowe is considered by many to have written the most influencial American novel in history. When she met President Lincoln in 1862, he reportedly called her "the little lady who started this big war." Indeed, Uncle Tom's Cabin was...
"The Time Machine" is primarily a social critique of H.G. Wells's Victorian England projected into the distant future. Wells was a Socialist for most of his life with Communist leanings, and he argued in both his novels and non-fiction works that...
