Newest Study Guides
Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
After the critical and commercial success of Reservoir Dogs, and garnering considerable studio interest in scripts like Natural Born Killers and True Romance, Quentin Tarantino was one of the most sought-after directors in early-to-mid 1990s...
David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), loosely based on the short story of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, was nominated for a miraculous thirteen Academy Awards, winning three - Best Art Direction, Best Makeup, and Best...
Heartland is a memoir by writer Sarah Smarsh to be published on September 18, 2018. Set in 1980's and 1990's Kansas, the book follow the story of young Smarsh, daughter of a poor wheat farmer. With themes of America's continuously changing...
Robert Graves is considered one of England's pre-eminent war poets - one of a group of young men whose poetry written in the trenches of France during World War One came to symbolize the awfulness of the conditions that they were sent to fight in,...
Coleridge composed "Metrical Feet" sometime between December 1806 and March 1807, enclosing it in a letter to his son, Derwent. Originally, the poem was composed in some form in December 1806 to assist Coleridge's eldest son, Hartley, with whom he...
In 1938, George Orwell published Homage to Catalonia, an autobiographical novel that detailed his participation and experiences in the Spanish Civil War. The war was fought between the left-leaning Republicans, who were forged in an alliance with...
Darkness at Noon is the best-known work of Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler. It was published in 1940 during World War Two and speaks far louder about Koestler's feelings of disgruntlement and disillusionment with the Russian...
Gail Godwin is an American novelist and short story writer, born in 1937. Throughout her career, she has published 14 individual novels, as well as two collections of short stories. Godwin was raised in North Carolina, where she gradually picked...
The River Between is the first novel written and the second novel published by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He wrote the book in 1965 while a student of English at Makerere University, an affiliate of the University of London in Kampala, Uganda. It was...
Published in 1854, The Lamplighter is realistic fiction novel by American novelist Maria Cummins. The novel takes on a sentimental point of view, with themes that try to persuade the reader towards the righteous path of being kind towards...
Sometimes, writing feels easy: you sit at your desk, uncap your pen, and a poem pours out of you. But other times you struggle to figure out the first line, and you find yourself waiting for the words to form, for inspiration to strike. This is...
Stanley Kubrick released Full Metal Jacket in 1987, a full seven years after his previous project, the psychological horror film The Shining. Kubrick was contemplating making a war film as early as 1980, when he initiated contact with writer and...
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the first and bestselling book by science journalist Rebecca Skloot. Blending the line between nonfiction and narrative, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the story of Henrietta Lacks, her family, and...
All the President's Men is a 1976 American political thriller film that follows Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward as they uncover the crimes committed by the Nixon Administration, in what would come to be known as the...
Published in 1894, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is a collection of short stories and poems. It is one of the best-known and beloved works of children’s literature; however, Kipling’s complex views on colonialism and race justifiably factor...
The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able To Present Itself as a Science was written by Immanuel Kant in 1783. Kant was one of the greatest philosophers of the German Enlightenment. He worked to synthesize the two main...
During the occupation of Japan by U.S forces following its surrender at the end of World War II, samurai films fell out of favor. The controlling U.S. political machine looked unkindly on the samurai code of Bushido, which required allegiance to...
Chungking Express was Wong Kar-Wai’s third film to be released and his international breakout feature. Neither of those facts should have been the case.
Wong Kar-wai decided to follow up his second film Days of Being Wild—-a critical sensation but...
Adapted from the novel of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby is a 1974 film directed by Jack Clayton, starring Robert Redford as the eponymous Jay Gatsby. The film also features Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, Sam Waterston as...
The Journal of John Woolman is one of the most successful and widely read; in fact, since it's first printing in 1774, it has never been out of print. So, who exactly was John Woolman?
Born in 1720, Woolman was an American merchant, journalist and...
About a Mountain is an essay-like book-length narrative published in 2010 by American author-essayist John D’Agata. At 240 pages long, D’Agata tells the story of himself in Las Vegas, following a case of a nuclear-waste storage plan by the...
Christina Rossetti was a 19th century English poet. She grew up in a family of writers, all three of her siblings also becoming accomplished poets or authors over her lifespan. From a young age, she wrote poetry, fascinated with wordcraft. She...
Possession was published in 1990; it is Byatt's fifth novel, and widely considered to be her most successful. The novel is inspired by Byatt's interest in Victorian literature, and her own work as an academic researcher and lecturer. It also...
"The Wild Swans at Coole" was written in 1916 when Yeats fifty-one. He was staying with his friend and patron Lady Gregory at her home near Coole Park, located in Galway, Ireland, a county located on Ireland's Atlantic coast. It was published in ...