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T.S. Eliot wrote “The Hollow Men” in 1923, five years after World War I ended in 1918. At the time, Eliot lived as an American expatriate in London, England. His poetry of the 1920s responded to the aftermath of the war, especially its effect on...

It has been said that the nineteenth century was the century when sexuality, and sexual identity, was first invented, which is also when this collection of short stories, all detailing the sexual predilections of a selection of "queer" characters,...

Perhaps what is most interesting about Hal Ashby's 1971 film Harold and Maude is how long it took to get an audience. Since its release, the film has gained the reputation as a "cult classic" -- or a book or movie that is popular amongst a certain...

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) write a vast number of novels and short stories, often under pen names such as William Irish. He hit his stride in the 1940’s with a series of novels and stories that redefined the concept of the American crime story....

There is a saying that goes, "Wherever you go, there you are" - meaning that people do not change just because their geographical location has. The essay demonstrates the truth in this saying only too well and shows that escaping from gangs,...

Nominated for two Academy Awards, Into the Wild is a film based on the true story of student athlete Christopher McCandless, who gives up all his possessions, donates his life savings of almost twenty five thousand dollars to charity, and...

The Night Circus is a novel by writer and multimedia artist Erin Morgenstern. Published in 2011, it was the author's debut novel. She has acknowledged debts to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Christopher Priest’s The Prestige...

Some writers purposely look for anonymity. J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon are the poster boys for this type of avoidance of the limelight and the trappings of fame. Other writers toil in obscurity until they are “discovered” late in their...

The Shape of Water—released in 2017—is rare in Guillermo Del Toro's oeuvre as a film that's relatively optimistic. It's also the first film of Del Toro's to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, which it did in 2018. The film also snagged awards...

The story of fireman Guy Montag first appeared in "The Fireman", a short story by Ray Bradbury published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951. Montag's story was expanded two years later, in 1953, and was published as Fahrenheit 451. While the novel...

“Affliction I” is one of 17th-century English poet George Herbert’s most memorable and loved poems. Herbert was a Welsh poet and priest. His single collection of poems, known as The Temple, was published in 1633 after his early death at the age of...

Written in 1942 by Italian author Dino Buzzati, The Seven Messengers is a collection of short stories. In the book, there are nineteen short stories, beginning with the first, "The Seven Messengers. Other stories include "The Assault on the Great...

Although The Comet is set in a futuristic New York City after the release of toxic gases by an unknown enemy, the story is really a study in relationships, specifically, those that take place between people of different ethnicities. It tells the...

"The Flowers" is a short story written by Alice Walker, published in 1973 as part of the collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women. It is only two pages long—565 words total. "The Flowers" describes the carefree life of Myop, a...

James Albert Michener was an American author born on February 3, 1907 in Doylestown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Doylestown High School, he attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania to study Arts degree in English and...

The little fictional town of Manawaka was created by Margaret Laurence at the age of fourteen when she had her first short story published after winning a competition in the Winnipeg Free Press. This began a respected and heralded career that...

Although he has written and published more than one hundred books, Walter Dean Myers is most famous for being the author of Monster, a book in memoir form about a school shooter. His works of fiction are usually directed at a young adult audience,...

“since feeling is first” was published in E. E. Cummings’s 1926 poetry collection is 5. Released at perhaps the height of the poet’s career, is 5 features poems that exemplify Cummings’s iconoclastic, experimental, witty, and often satirical...

"Havisham" appears in Carol Ann Duffy's fourth collection of poems, Mean Time, published in 1993. Havisham is written from the perspective of the character Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. The poems included in Mean...

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is Frank Capra's 1939 political "dramedy" starring a then-unknown James Stewart as Senator Jefferson Smith, a naive but good-hearted Western man with the political idealism to take down corruption in Washington. The...

Sissinghurst Castle in the county of Kent, England is renowned for both its beautiful landscaped gardens and for the speed with which tickets for its annual garden tours are sold out. Both of these factors are due to the landscaping design and...

Born in 1940 in Sussex, England, Angela would be dead from lung cancer by 1992. Today, Carter is notoriously one of the most studied writers of the 20th century, but even as late as the day she died she was, in the words of her most infamous fan...

The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is an American play co-authored by American playwrights Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence. Robert Lee is not to be confused with the Confederate general of the same name. The main character of the play is Henry...

Out of the Silent Planet is a science-fiction novel first published in 1938. Written by famous British author C.S. Lewis, the novel details the story of Dr. Ransom, who is on a planet that definitely is not Earth. The novel is a bit like H.G....