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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...

For the mythological background on Prometheus, refer to the Short Summary section of this ClassicNote. The information in the Context section focuses on the historical background of Aeschylus' times and crucial information on his art form.

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Sense and Sensibility was Austen's first published novel; its first edition came out in three volumes in 1811, and the novel was reasonably well-liked and successful. This was much to the relief of Austen, who financed the printing of the book...

The adventures of Crusoe on his island, the main part of Defoe's novel, are based largely on the central incident in the life of an undisciplined Scotsman, Alexander Selkirk. Although it is possible, even likely that Defoe met Selkirk before he...

Published in 1859, On Liberty was perhaps John Stuart Mill's finest and most controversial work. Released shortly after his beloved wife, Harriet's death, On Liberty is Mill at his finest arguing for the principles he had espoused over his fifty...

Native Son's publication history is one of its most revelatory aspects. After several novel-projects had failed, Wright sold Native Son to Harper Publishers, netting a $400 advance. Published in 1940, Native Son became a selection of the...

Moll Flanders, published in 1722, was one of the earliest English novels (the earliest is probably Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, published in 1688). Like many early novels, it is told in the first person as a narrative, and is presented as a truthful...

Middlemarch was first published in 1871 and 1872, as a serial novel in eight parts, which came out every two months. This was Eliot's most comprehensive and sweeping novel to date, and was intended as a study of provincial British life. Eliot...

In June of 1883, Thomas Hardy and his wife Emma settled into their new home in Dorchester. The Hardys had spent the last few years traveling about England, although they wanted to settle down and perhaps begin a family. Finally, Hardy and Emma...

The Two Towers is the second 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...

The Libation Bearers is the second part of Aeschylus' great trilogy, the Oresteia. It has been said that Athens left the world two masterpieces of surpassing beauty: the Parthenon and the Oresteia. Aeschylus was the great father of drama in the...

Jazz was first published in 1992, a year before Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Chronologically, Jazz is Morrison's sixth novel of seven, followed by Paradise and preceded by The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby...

Kafka wrote the short story "A Hunger Artist" in 1922. He combined it with three other stories for the collection A Hunger Artist, which was published soon after his death in 1924.

All four stories in some way detail the negotiations of artists...

Hard Times was originally published in serial form, in a magazine called Household Words beginning on April 1, 1854. The last time that Dickens had published a work in serial form was in 1841 and when publication of Hard Times had begun, Dickens...

Franny and Zooey is a major piece of J.D. Salinger's Glass family saga. After his 1951 classic, The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger devoted his time to writing about this family of mystical prodigies in several stories from Nine Stories (1953) and...

The Eumenides is the third part of Aeschylus' great trilogy, the Oresteia. It has been said that Athens left the world two masterpieces of surpassing beauty: the Parthenon and the Oresteia. Aeschylus was the great father of drama in the West, and...