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Christopher Okigbo was a Nigerian-born poet of the twentieth century. He was born during 1932 and died during 1967. He possessed a diverse taste in literature and culture, which largely influenced his poetic talent. For example, he drew...

A.E. Housman may well cast a longer shadow over the history of poetry than any other writer who published just thin collections during his lifetime. Those two collections link the 19th century to 20th century. The 1896 release of A Shropshire Lad...

Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan and has recently completed a stint as Poet Laureate, beginning in 2009. She was the first openly LGBTQ poet (Duffy is bisexual) to hold this...

With Meditations on First Philosophy (published in 1647), Descartes revolutionised Western philosophy, having a profound impact on society from the sciences to the arts. As such, Meditations is said to be a seminal - and arguably the first - text...

Born in Coventry, England in 1922, Philip Larkin belongs to the particular group of poets who maintained a steady job bringing in a reliable income while devoting his creative energy to his literary pursuits. Larkin’s 9-to-5 job for most of his...

Gerard Manley Hopkins lived from 1844 to 1889, and in 1858 he officially became a member of the Jesuit Order. The decision may have turned out well for him, but the world lost an unknowable surplus of great poetry as Hopkins made the fateful...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is one of the most well known and respected Victorian writers. She began writing poetry at the age of six and entered the literary tradition in 1830s. Her works have been considered formative entries in the expansion of...

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was to the manor born among the Bostonian elites in 1821. He would eventually establish long-term correspondences with such literary elites of New England as Hawthorne and Longfellow. While attending Harvard, his tutor...

Elizabeth Bishop was born to become a poet. Like so many of the greatest names in American poetry, Bishop is a New Englander who came into the world in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. Almost immediately commenced a series of events of that would...

Nella Larsen; Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories was published in 2001. Nella Larsen wrote a couple short stories, and Quicksand and Passing, two books. However, as she could not find a publisher for her third book, she stopped writing and began...

Due to his chronological placement at the end of the line in the extensive use of the heroic couplet behind John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson, George Crabbe is often referred to as the last of the Augustan poets. His specialty was...

Comfort Woman is Nora Okja Keller's debut into full-length literature. Following her award winning short story "Mother-Tongue," Comfort Woman stays true to Keller's mission to speak the unspeakable concerning the plight of Japanese women...

Translated into English, the title of this epic Germanic poem means “Song of the Nibelungs.” A fact that is utterly meaningless, of course, unless you know that the Nibelungs were an ancient dynasty whose conquering by the hero is the subject of...

The Secret Scripture is a novel published recently in 2008 and written by Sebastian Barry. For this novel, Barry was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008, one of the two times that he has received the honor. In addition, The Secret...

The poems of Gwendolyn Brooks can effectively be separated into two distinct and starkly divided epochs. The line which bifurcates these two radically different periods in the life and work of Brooks slices through the year 1967 with the point of...

Published in 2009, The Year of the Flood is the second novel in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. In this speculative fiction trilogy, Atwood vividly describes a possible future created by ruthless corporations, disregard for the environment,...

The Woman in the Dunes is a novel crafted by Japanese writer and playwright Koko Abe and published in 1962. It is the story of a teacher interested in insects who went in search of a rare instance of the Spanish fly. Stumbling on a remote village,...

Isaac Rosenberg almost seemed destined to die a cruelly ironic death as if being mocked by the gods from the day he was born in 1890. He was Jewish, economically deprived, wracked by poor health and of such an impressive physical stature that when...

John McCrae was a Canadian poet, artist and author. He was also a soldier in World War I, which greatly influenced his poetry. His poems are drawn from his first hand experiences on the front line and his times treating the wounded soldiers.

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The Revolt of “Mother” and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by Mary Wilkins Freeman that was originally published in 1974. There are eight stories in this collection, and they are called “The Revolt of Mother,” “A New England...

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a semi-autobiographical novel by Jeannette Winterson, first published in 1985. It draws on Winterson’s own experience growing up in the Elim Pentecostal Church in Accrington, Lancashire. The protagonist and...

A young adult novel by the American writer Robert Cormier, I Am the Cheese (1977) falls under the category of crime fiction and chronicles around the protagonist, Adam Farmer (Paul Delmonte).

This novel opens up to a scene in which Farmer is...

Travel Team is a novel for young adults written by renowned sports journalist Mike Lupica. Drawing from his own experiences as a short guy who was constantly under-estimated because of his lack of height, Lupica tells the story of highly gifted...

A Long Way from Chicago was written by Richard Peck, a writer, playwright, and speaker, in 1998 and won a Newbury Honor in 1999. Its sequel, A Year Down Yonder, was published in 2000 and won the Newbery Medal in 2001.

The book tells the story of...