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The Trumpet of the Swan is a book by acclaimed children's writer E.B.White. It was published in 1970 and tells the story of a trumpeter swan named Louis who is born mute. Over the course of the story, Louis tries to compensate for his lack of...

Joseph Campbell was a comparative mythologist who realized after years of studying that there was a dominant archetype for all human myths and stories. He set out to study many different cultures and their various ancient myths before concluding...

The Vercelli Book is an Old English codex, or book, compiled in the late 10th century and written in Anglo-Saxon square minuscule. Individual texts within the codex were originally written earlier--some possibly over two centuries before the the...

Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs holds a very unusual distinctive place in literary history. It is the first, last, and only utopian novel centering on African-American society published prior to the 20th century. Griggs was a college...

The legend of Tarzan was born from desperation and boredom. Edgar Rice Burroughs desperately wanted to be a writer, but had run through a long list of miscellaneous jobs: railroad cop, storekeeper, gold prospector, lightbulb peddler, and even...

The Taqwacores is Michael Muhammad Knight’s first novel, originally published in zines. After being endorsed by different labels and people, the novel was published by Autonomedia. The Taqwacores is a fictional novel that tells of an Islamic punk...

The Belle's Stratagem (A Comedy in Five Acts) was written by talented author Hannah Cowley and was published by Oliver and Boyd. Cowley was born during 1743 and died during 1809. This creative work is a romantic comedy that turned out to be the...

The House of Bernarda Alba was written in 1936 during a flurry of creative activity for Lorca. He liked to say that his plays took years to form in his mind, and then a matter of weeks to write. Though this claim is not represented in the process...

The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan's first novel, published in 1989. Just two years before the book's release, Tan was succeeding as a speech writer and self-proclaimed workaholic. Feeling unfulfilled, she found her calling in fiction writing. Tan...

The story of Sundiata recounts the story of the founding of the Mali Empire in West Africa. The Mali empire was one of the three great medieval West African empires (preceded by the Ghana Empire and followed by the Songhay Empire), and was located...

Mr. Popper's Penguins, written by Florence and Richard Atwater, was written in 1938. It is a children's classic now.

Richard Atwater wrote the book before he fell ill with a stroke and was disabled, where his wife, Florence Atwater finished and...

Sherman Alexie is an American novelist born on October 7, 1966 in Spokane, Washington. As a 6-month-old baby, he suffered from a brain condition called hydrocephalus and underwent surgery that successfully fixed his disability. Alexie grew up on...

The first autobiography written by a former slave, Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is also one of the most widely-read and well-regarded of the slave narrative genre. It was published in 1789, at a time...

She Stoops to Conquer was first produced in London in 1773, and was a massive success. It was reputed to have created an applause that was yet unseen in the London theatre, and almost immediately entered the repertory of respectable companies....

Published by Frederick Douglass in 1845 at the age of 27, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is one of the most significant and influential works by an American author in history. Douglass's narrative was an...

Yukio Mishima's The Sound of Waves was published in 1954 in Japanese. It was translated into English by Meredith Weatherby and published in North America in 1956. It is a sweet and simple tale of two lovers on an idyllic, isolated Japanese island...

Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V., was published in 1963. The novel won him many awards. America began to view Pynchon as a premier Postwar writer, an able representative of the paranoid generation coming out of the McCarthy era and facing the...

Fielding began writing Tom Jones in 1746. It was a wildly ambitious book which, in attempting to portray the nuances of real life, angered many but ultimately delighted generations of readers through both its influence and sprawling narrative.

The...

Enduring Love, published in 1997, is Ian McEwan's sixth novel and one of his most successful, shortlisted for several prizes. It was adapted into a film in 2004. It tells the story of Joe Rose, who struggles to maintain his comfortable life and...

Christopher Paolini began reading fantasy novels at 10 and started to work on Eragon when he was only 14years old. He quickly stopped, realizing that he had no idea how to write a full-length novel, let alone a series. Paolini read all the books...

In Cold Blood, which was published serially in The New Yorker in 1965 before appearing in book form in 1966, is the work that launched Truman Capote to literary stardom, and remains his best-known piece. It details the events of a real-life murder...

C.S. Lewis was a British novelist born on November 29, 1898 in Belfast, Ireland. Lewis was raised in a devout Christian family, but he identified as an atheist in his teens. However, as an adult, he once again found comfort and solace in religion,...

Speak is Laurie Halse Anderson's first young adult novel. It was published in 1999 by Penguin Group and re-released in 2006 as a "platinum edition" containing an interview with the author. The novel tells the story of Melinda Sordino, a Syracuse...

While she was researching her nonfiction history book Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, Esther Forbes became interested in the lives of ordinary people in colonial Boston. This interest resulted in Johnny Tremain, a coming-of-age story for...