Newest Study Guides

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...

Although she was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, Eudora Welty was also that rare thing in the literary field - an author who is more well-known for her short stories than for her essays, novels, or poems. From an early age she loved the written...

Willa Cather was not just an author - although she was a prolific one. She was also an unofficial anthropologist, writing about life on the Great Plains and basing the majority of both her novels and her short stories on the people and the lives...

Django Unchained is the highest-grossing film of Quentin Tarantino's career—an explosive, nearly three-hour Western epic that forces audiences to confront the brutal legacy of American slavery in a way rarely, if ever, glimpsed in Hollywood...

Dinner Along the Amazon is a book of twelve short stories by Canadian author Timothy Findley. He was a part of the Southern Ontario Gothic genre, a sub-genre of the gothic novel, and a title invented by Findley himself. The region provides the...

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is American Jesse Andrews' 2012 debut smash hit. Released in March 2012 in hardcover and May 2013 in paperback, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl follows Greg Gaines as he begins to really bond with another kid named...

The Butterfly Hotel is a collection of poetry by Trinidadian-British writer and activist Roger Robinson. The collection contains three sections, each about a different aspect of Robinson's life.

Raised in Trinidad, Robinson spent most of his adult...

Michael Chabon’s first book is called "The Little Knife" and Other Short Stories. It had, similarly to many other collections, different names depending on where and when it was published. "The Little Knife" and Other Short Stories is often called...

Galway Kinnell, award-winning poet, had a knack for poetry that explores the whole of humanity rather than focusing on trivial, mundane matters. His poems connect seemingly small, unrelated events of everyday life to large-scale, socio-cultural...

W.D. Snodgrass won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry after only one year in the public eye as a published poet. Born in Pennsylvania on 5th January 1926, William de Witt Snodgrass wrote under two pseudonymys; W.D. Snodgrass, an abbreviation of...

Henry Lawson (1867- 1922) is synonymous with Australian literature. He was writing fiction and poetry that has been essential in defining the Australian national character at the exact time that Australia itself was becoming a reality. Lawson’s...