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.
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...
The Threepenny Opera, written and staged in 1928, soon became Brecht's first and greatest commercial success. Produced only two years after Brecht's famous work Man equals Man, the play represents a new style for Brecht. Whereas Man equals Man has...
The Sun Also Rises will maintain a place in history not only for its literary merit, but also for its documentation of what writer Gertrude Stein called the "Lost Generation." After WWI, many young Americans left their native country, bitter over...
On June 26, 1963, John F. Kennedy traveled to West Berlin and uttered the now-famous statement, "Ich bin ein Berliner." Nearly two years earlier, on the night of August 13, 1961, the Communist East German government had erected the Berlin Wall....
Sherwood Anderson began writing the short stories, relatively in order, during the late fall of 1915. The majority were finished by the middle of 1916. The story "Godliness" was not originally written as part of the collection but was salvaged by...
In 1909, ten years after the publication of Heart of Darkness, except for the revision of his first story, "The Black Mate," Joseph Conrad had not written a short work since the spring of 1907. Without warning, he received a visit from Captain C....
Sister Carrie, published in 1900, stands at the gateway of the new century. Theodore Dreiser based his first novel on the life of his sister Emma. In 1883 she ran away to Toronto, Canada with a married man who had stolen money from his employer....
A Room with a View was published in 1908. It was one of Forster's earliest novels, and it has become one of his most famous and popular. E.M. Forster was twenty-nine at the time of publication; two earlier novels, Where Angels Fear to Tread and...
