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In 1942, Albert Camus published “The Myth of Sisyphus”, an essay about absurdism, which revolutionized the absurdist movement and inspired the theater of the absurd. Some of the early plays included “The Maids” by Jean Genet, “The Bald Soprano” by...

My Bondage and My Freedom, published in 1855, is an example of a genre of literature known as the slave narrative. This genre flourished from around 1760 and though the first few decades after the abolition of slavery. One of the most famous...

The Complete Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse is collection of fairy tales written by Hermann Karl Hesse, a German poet and novelist as well as a Nobel-Prize winning laureate, and was published in 1995 by Bantam Books. The stories have mainly been...

Karl Marx gets all the press, but it is important to realize that much of the writing which established the communist ideology was either co-written by Friedrich Engels or based on concepts and research established and conducted by Engels. Then...

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is a book written in 1883 by Howard Pyle. The story revolves around an archer who is extremely skilled and goes by the name of Robin Hood. He and his companions, called the Merry Men, live in Sherwood forest and...

The story goes that it was Robert Redford—who already was committed to bringing the book to the screen—who suggested to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that they abandon the idea of writing All the President’s Men from...

Published in London in 1767, The Man of Feeling made its author famous and became his most well-known work. The author of this story was a true man of his time and fell under the influence of sentimentalism. However, the idea of sentimentalism had...

Ivanhoe is most immediately notable within the expansive canon of Sir Walter Scott by virtue of its being his very first attempt at writing a tale exclusively devoted to a British subject. In fact, one is hard-pressed to get much more intensely...

He Knew He Was Right was written by the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, and was first published in Strahan and Co in 1869. The novel found great success among literary circles of that time and is one of Trollope's most famous works, alongside...

Published in 2002 and written by William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault is a novel telling the story of a girl named Lucy. The book is split up into three sections that make up her life: her childhood, her maturing into adulthood, and her older...

Jean Rhys was an English author born on August 20, 1890 in Dominica, British West Indies. At age 16, she moved to England to attend the Perse School for Girls, but was intensely mocked for her foreign accent. She also enrolled at the Royal Academy...

Tim O’Brien is an American novelist born on October 1, 1946 in Austin, Minnesota. After high school, he attended Macalester College to study political science and was subsequently drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. He served from 1969 to 1970...

Published in 1997, School Days is novel that tells of the colonial world that the author Patrick Chamoiseau, one of the greatest writers in French and Caribbean literature, experienced in Fort-de-France, Martinique.

As the Colonial Period was...

Three Lives is a novel that was written by Gertrude Stein and published in 1909. This book was Stein’s first published book, and it depicts three lower-class women in the fictional town of Bridgepoint, which is based on the city of Baltimore. The...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the most outstanding representative of the radical wing of the French Enlightenment, and was one of the founders of European sentimentality. His ideological differences with the leading figures of the era often took the...

Giovanni Boccaccio would be a more than appropriate figure to assume the honorary status of Patron Saint of the First Amendment. If, that is, he had not lived well before America, the Constitution or the very idea of freedom of speech ever...

The novel Fathers and Sons is a social novel published in 1862 by Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. The novel focuses on the conflict between the ’fathers’, the old aristocrat society having a traditional way of thinking, and the ’sons’, the new...

Joel Chandler Harris was already an experienced Atlanta newspaper editor with a growing reputation when he was tapped for a temporary position filling in for the paper’s writer of highly popular dialect stories. Recalling stories he’d heard...

In Daniel S. Burt’s book the ranks that 100 greatest novels of all time, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier comes in at number 62, sandwiched between The Age of Innocence and The Awakening. Reverse the placement of those two novels the this...

Richard Wilbur was a poet whose works were elegant yet witty and paradoxical. He was the second poet laureate of the United States, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection Things of This World: Poems in 1957, and then won another Pulitzer...

Mountains Beyond Mountains, written by Tracy Kidder, was published in 2003. It is a non-fiction and biographical book which follows the life of Paul Farmer, an anthropologist, who is trying to fight tuberculosis in Haiti, Peru, and Russia. The...

Milkweed, written by Jerry Spinelli, is a young adult fiction novel published in 2003. It takes place in Warsaw, Poland, and the main character is mainly called Misha Pilsudski. Spinelli describes this Misha's life during the Holocaust, where he...

Funny In Farsi is a humorous autobiography written by Firoozeh Dumas. It chronicles the experiences of Firoozeh and her family when they moved to Southern California form Iran in 1972, when Firoozeh was seven years old. When they arrived only...

Tom Wolfe is a dandy. Fashion-wise, Wolfe belongs to era of men’s style and concern with their appearance that is as out of joint with the Space Age as the street urchins of Dicken or the ladies with sense and sensibility desperately seeking a...