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Singin’ in the Rain is generally regarded as Hollywood’s greatest original movie musical. Like The Wizard of Oz before it, Singin’ in the Rain is an original musical motion picture not based on an existing musical work. Unlike that fantasy about...

Some Like It Hot is a 1959 comedy film directed by Billy Wilder and starring Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. The film is based on the French movie Fanfares Of Love, a film with a nearly identical plot. Fanfares of Love, like Some Like...

Brown Girl Dreaming is an autobiography in verse written by Jacqueline Woodson, an African-American writer who grew up between Ohio, South Carolina, and New York in the 1960's and 1970's.

Brown Girl Dreaming was published in 2014 and was...

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 work of historiography by Jared Diamond. The book chronicles history from the beginning of humankind, attempting to explain why certain societies have survived and thrive, while so...

In 2014, Christopher Nolan's epic science-fiction odyssey Interstellar exploded into theaters with the kind of gravitas associated with only a handful of its genre predecessors. It was Nolan's first movie after finishing direction on the Dark...

Quicksand is a novel written by renowned author Nella Larsen, published in 1928. As there are direct links and correlations between the life of Nella Larsen and fictional character Helga Crane, both of whom are mixed race, this book can also be...

Perhaps no other work by William Shakespeare—and certainly none of the Bard’s tragedies—has been adapted for the stage or screen in a looser manner than Romeo and Juliet. The popularity of the play and its expansive potential for adaptation is in...

Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry was published in 1929, and is looked at today as one of the key novels in Harlem Renaissance Literature. At the time of its publication it was considered to be groundbreaking, because Thurman had the courage...

Home to Harlem (1928) is author Claude McKay's first published novel. It tells the story of young Jake Brown, the protagonist of the novel, after he deserts the United States Army and heads off to London and a writer who immigrates to Haiti after...

Exit West is Mohsin Hamid's 2017 follows a young couple, Saeed and Nadia, who live in a city in the midst of a civil war. Fearing for their safety, they are finally forced to flee the city through a series of doors that lead to other parts of the...

His Girl Friday was directed and produced by Howard Hawks in 1940, adapted from a stage play (and 1931 film) called The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Hecht and MacArthur, with the help of Charles Lederer, adapted the script from...

All About Eve was a critically acclaimed film in 1950 when it came out, and brought huge accolades for its cast as well as its director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Mankiewicz adapted the witty and sophisticated script from a short story called "The...

"The Liar" was published by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) in December 1963. It is the story of a man who deeply wants to understand himself and goes through a metamorphosis on his journey of self-discovery. The voice of the speaker is closely...

Uncle Vanya, Scenes of Country Life in Four Acts (1897) is one of Russian playwright Anton Chekov’s most notable dramas and a mainstay of the theater. The play is set at the estate of the first wife of Professor Serebryakov, where he and his...

Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 psychological horror film directed by Roman Polanski, with a screenplay adapted from Ira Levin's best's selling 1967 novel of the same name. It was Polanski's first feature to be distributed by a major Hollywood studio...

Many critics and film historians point to April 24, 1944 as the birth date of film noir, for it was on that date that Double Indemnity premiered. As is the case with so many other things to come out of Hollywood, film noir may be shaving a year or...

Willa Cather described the result of her bold experimentation into advancing the art of the novel in Death Comes for the Archbishop as “altogether a new kind of thing.” Reviewers, critics, scholars, and academicians have described the work in a...

Released in 1946, Notorious is a rather uncharacteristic Hitchcock film, in that it does not employ many of the horror-filled tropes of his other films, but it is nonetheless considered to be one of his greatest works and touted as one of his...

Stagecoach came out in 1939 to critical acclaim. It marked the first film of many in which director John Ford used Monument Valley as a backdrop for his narrative. It is also the film that made the iconic actor John Wayne a star. The film was shot...

Maya Angelou’s “Africa” was originally published in 1975 in her second volume of poetry, Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well. At the time of its publication, Angelou had already established herself as a prolific writer of both prose and verse....

What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a 1993 American drama movie. The film, directed by Lasse Hallström, stars Johnny Depp, Juliette Lewis, Darlene Cates, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Hallström's realistic aesthetic, often dubbed cinéma vérité, allowed the...

In 1992, Samuel Huntington first presented the central argument of what would become The Clash of Civilizations in a lecture. Huntington was the first scholar to argue that cultural identity would be the most important factor in shaping global...

Released in 1954, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront is considered by many to be one of the greatest American films ever made. While Kazan and his legacy have been complicated and in many ways tarnished by the fact that he testified against friends...