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The Political Writings of John Locke is a collection of a few of Locke’s most important works that was edited by David Wootton, a professor of history and expert on English speaking countries, and others, such as France and Italy. The Political...

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is a collection of sequential short stories that was published first in 1912. They were written by Stephen Leacock, a Canadian political scientist and writer, who was one of the most famous humorists in the world...

Having played the part of the Shakespeare's caring magician or cruel tyrant, depending on how you view Prospero, in four stage productions in his career, John Gielgud's self-professed life ambition was to create a film adaptation of what we...

The only work written by the ancient Roman historian Livy was a multi-volume history of Rome that modern scholars consider to be long as literary value, but rather wanting in historical fact. At one time the full history written by Livy spanned...

The Shadow Line was one of the last pieces of long prose that Joseph Conrad ever produced. At 30,000 words, it is a long piece, but as to whether it is actually a long short story or a short novel is up for debate. The general consensus is that,...

The Subterraneans was published in 1958. It was written by the famous Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The Beat Generation is a group of writers who started publishing their works and gaining popularity after World War II, around the 1950s....

GE Moore is an English philosopher born on November 4, 1873 in Upper Norwood, London. Moore grew up in a family of academics - some were poets, other were professors, and all were dedicated to the arts and humanities. He received his primary...

George Lippard wrote The Quaker City with the express purpose of creating a controversial and infamous exposé of criminal underworld of Philadelphia that would be embraced by a scandalized public and perhaps lead to wholesale reform. At least,...

The Pioneers was published in 1823 and holds a significant place in American letters: it is the novel that launched the famous Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. This is the book that introduced the world to Natty Bumppo, one of the...

The Known World earned Edward P. Jones a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for shedding light on one of the darkest corners of American history: black slave-owners. The novel is set in Virginia before the Civil War and spans several decades in the life Henry...

In 1967, Angela Carter won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her novel The Magic Toyshop. The novel is considered an essential component in the evolutionary process in which Carter became a progenitor of a more avant-garde offshoot of Gothic...

John Berendt comes from a scholarly background, his parents being writers, himself being trained in writing at Harvard University. His career as a journalist bloomed quickly. He was the associate editor of Esquire Magazine, then editor of New York...

Author Brian Moore was born Belfast, had immigrated first to Canada and then the United States, and published several potboiler pulp fiction novels under a pen name before finally staking the claim to serious novelist using his own name for which...

Linden Hills, written by Gloria Naylor, was published in 1985. Though easily understood as a work of social commentary, this novel also references the literary past. The world that Naylor depicts is structured through an extended allegory...

Published by Perugia Press in Massachusetts in 2004, Kettle Bottom is a collection of poems written by Diane Gilliam Fisher, focusing on the 1920 and 1921 West Virginia labor battles.

An author's note at the beginning of the collectionexplains the...

The Koran (Qur'an) is the holy scripture of the religion Islam, written by the prophet Muhammad, probably during the sixth or seventh century AD, and likely written over the course of 20-something years, as it was received through the prophecy of...

Caryl Phillips is a British novelist born on March 13, 1958 in St. Kitts. After graduating from secondary school, he attended Queen’s College at Oxford to study English. His artistic talents were unleashed at university where he directed plays and...

Jonathan Edwards was an American preacher born on October 5, 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut. He was raised in an actively religious household as his father was a minister and his mother was the daughter of a reverend. At only 13-years-old,...

Old Times is categorized as one of the Harold Pinter’ “memory plays” that characterized his evolution and development in the 1970’s through a series of productions that took a step back from the more cerebral experimentation of the playwright’s...

Luigi Pirandello is far better known as a dramatist with a fondness for exploring themes related to masks, disguises and the various personae that people choose to wear or have forced upon them. In fact, the very first major literary work in which...

The Utopian Novel has always meant big time readership for those writers capable of coming up with something unique to say about a perfect society. Of course, even better is the anti-utopian bleakness of Dystopian Novel. Overdone by half in the...

Composed originally in Old French, The Mirror of Simple Souls is a work written in the 14th century by Marguerite Porete about the Christian faith, especially the idea of agape, or divine love. Although it was extremely popular in its time, it was...

Moonlight is a one-act play by Harold Pinter which was first produced in September 1993 at the Almeida Theater in London. The play is divided into seventeen different sections which take place in three “playing areas” of the set: the...

Experimental novelist Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities was published in 1972 as a series of “overhead conversations” between Kublai Kahn, Notorious Mongol Emperor and Marco Polo, noted explorer. Although categorized as a novel, that description...