Newest Study Guides

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is Ben Fountain's groundbreaking debut war satire novel. Published in May 2012 by Ecco Press, the novel follows a group of war veterans as they go on a victory tour following an intensely violent firefight which by...

Before I Fall is Lauren Oliver's 2010 debut smash-hit young adult novel. This book follows a very popular high-school girl named Samantha ("Sam") as she is forced to relieve the day of her death - resulting from a tragic car accident - every day...

The Beautiful and Damned is the second novel of Fitzgerald first published in 1921 in the magazine “Metropolitan”. The novel is the second after This Side Of Paradise and the one that precedes The Great Gatsby, so the novel is considered as a...

Art is a French comedy play by Yasmina Reza. The play has run in London’s West End Wyndham’s Theatre, Broadway at the Royale Theatre, and at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées in Paris, where the play had its premiere on October 28th, 1994. The...

Chris Kyle’s 2012 debut narrative American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History tells Kyle’s story as a Navy SEAL from 1999 – 2009, during which time he completed four tours in Iraq, as well as his childhood...

**Study Guide: *An American Childhood* by Annie Dillard** --- ###

Overview:

*An American Childhood* is a memoir by Annie Dillard, published in 1987. It is a reflective and poetic narrative that explores Dillard's experiences growing up in...

A charming but also deeply philosophical novella for children, The Little Prince was first published in the United States in April 1943, and published in France only in 1946, two years after its author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry died. Today a...

Published in 1979, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler appeared near the end of Italo Calvino’s career. This literary work is considered one of his greatest, especially for the nontraditional style and structure that almost spits in the face of...

An irreverent science-fiction adventure novel, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy constitutes the first installment of a five-book “trilogy” by Douglas Adams. The story is derived largely from a radio show, the scripts of which Adams compiled to...

Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis was published in 1999. Like his main character Bud, Curtis grew up in Flint, Michigan.

Curtis drew many of the book's events from the actual circumstances of the Great Depression and stories of the 1930s...

When Breath Becomes Air is neurosurgeon and author Paul Kalanithi's 2016 memoir chronicling his life and his life-ending illness -- stage IV metastatic lung cancer. He begins to notice symptoms as he is on the verge of completing nearly ten years...

Published in 1884, Ramona is an American novel written by Helen Hunt Jackson. The novel is set in Southern California after the Mexican-American War and is the story of a mixed-race Scottish-Native American orphan girl growing up in Southern...

Tucker: The Man and His Dream is one of the more lauded films of Francis Ford Coppola's from the 1980s. The backstory for the project dates all the way to Coppola's childhood, when his father invested in the Tucker car company, an innovative...

I Am Legend is a science-fiction horror novel written by Richard Matheson, published in 1954. It dives deep into a plot with disease-infested zombie-vampires taking over the world through an apocalypse. It follows the story of Robert Neville, an...

In 1928, Charlie Chaplin's The Circus was released to positive reviews. However, things were starting to change, as silent films were getting replaced with "talkies"—movies with sound. The first talking picture, called The Jazz Singer, was...

Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” appears as the last poem in his career-altering book Life Studies, published in 1959, but as Lowell described to Al Alvarez, a fellow writer and critic, the poem was the first in the book to be completed. The final...

Lost in Yonkers is a play by Neil Simon, a highly acclaimed work that bridged his career into the 1990s and established his reputation as one of America’s major playwrights of the latter 20th century. In the 60s and 70s, Simon's reputation had...

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is the sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, one of the most famous and beloved works of children’s literature. It was published in 1972, eight years after the original. Elevator continues the story of...

It is not known who wrote The Brome Play of Abraham and Isaac; what is known is that it was written in middle England in the fifteenth century in East Anglian English. East Anglian English was one of the dialects that had the greatest influence on...

If the last name "Durrell" seems familiar to you, it is probably because the author's brother, Gerald, is the author of a series of incredibly popular comedic autobiographical novels, the most famous of which, My Family and Oher Animals, has been...

Zitkala-Sa is a Sioux activist and writer, and the stories collected in this anthology represent the horrible and difficult experiences the Native Americans endured at the special schools created just for them by European missionaries. The...

By G.K. Chesterton's own admission, this poem is not meant to be historically accurate; in fact, it is a highly romanticized account of the adventures of King Alfred the Great, King of Saxon Britain, and in the introductory prose to the poem,...

Bonnie and Clyde is an American film directed by Arthur Penn, released in 1967, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. The plot follows the criminal collaboration and love affair between Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow in the 1920s in Texas. The...

The Triumph of the Will is widely considered - and considered for the worse - to be the most effective piece of political propaganda ever produced. When you consider the amount of propaganda that has been given to the world by oligarchs and...