Newest Study Guides

Christopher Okigbo was a Nigerian-born poet of the twentieth century. He was born during 1932 and died during 1967. He possessed a diverse taste in literature and culture, which largely influenced his poetic talent. For example, he drew...

A.E. Housman may well cast a longer shadow over the history of poetry than any other writer who published just thin collections during his lifetime. Those two collections link the 19th century to 20th century. The 1896 release of A Shropshire Lad...

Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan and has recently completed a stint as Poet Laureate, beginning in 2009. She was the first openly LGBTQ poet (Duffy is bisexual) to hold this...

With Meditations on First Philosophy (published in 1647), Descartes revolutionised Western philosophy, having a profound impact on society from the sciences to the arts. As such, Meditations is said to be a seminal - and arguably the first - text...

Born in Coventry, England in 1922, Philip Larkin belongs to the particular group of poets who maintained a steady job bringing in a reliable income while devoting his creative energy to his literary pursuits. Larkin’s 9-to-5 job for most of his...

Gerard Manley Hopkins lived from 1844 to 1889, and in 1858 he officially became a member of the Jesuit Order. The decision may have turned out well for him, but the world lost an unknowable surplus of great poetry as Hopkins made the fateful...

Cathedral was published in September of 1983. It was Carver's third and final major-press publication of all-new stories in his lifetime. Though Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories would follow in 1988, that book was comprised...

Elizabeth Barrett Browning is one of the most well known and respected Victorian writers. She began writing poetry at the age of six and entered the literary tradition in 1830s. Her works have been considered formative entries in the expansion of...

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was to the manor born among the Bostonian elites in 1821. He would eventually establish long-term correspondences with such literary elites of New England as Hawthorne and Longfellow. While attending Harvard, his tutor...

Elizabeth Bishop was born to become a poet. Like so many of the greatest names in American poetry, Bishop is a New Englander who came into the world in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1911. Almost immediately commenced a series of events of that would...

Nella Larsen; Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories was published in 2001. Nella Larsen wrote a couple short stories, and Quicksand and Passing, two books. However, as she could not find a publisher for her third book, she stopped writing and began...

Due to his chronological placement at the end of the line in the extensive use of the heroic couplet behind John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson, George Crabbe is often referred to as the last of the Augustan poets. His specialty was...

Comfort Woman is Nora Okja Keller's debut into full-length literature. Following her award winning short story "Mother-Tongue," Comfort Woman stays true to Keller's mission to speak the unspeakable concerning the plight of Japanese women...

Translated into English, the title of this epic Germanic poem means “Song of the Nibelungs.” A fact that is utterly meaningless, of course, unless you know that the Nibelungs were an ancient dynasty whose conquering by the hero is the subject of...

The Secret Scripture is a novel published recently in 2008 and written by Sebastian Barry. For this novel, Barry was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008, one of the two times that he has received the honor. In addition, The Secret...

The poems of Gwendolyn Brooks can effectively be separated into two distinct and starkly divided epochs. The line which bifurcates these two radically different periods in the life and work of Brooks slices through the year 1967 with the point of...

C. S. Lewis was already a well-known literary critic and religious writer by the time he embarked on what has become his best-loved project: The Chronicles of Narnia. The first in the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was published in...

Published in 2009, The Year of the Flood is the second novel in Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. In this speculative fiction trilogy, Atwood vividly describes a possible future created by ruthless corporations, disregard for the environment,...

Zeitoun is a nonfiction account of Abdulrahman Zeitoun's heroism and subsequent arrest in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, LA in 2005. Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant and American citizen, chooses to ride out the storm...

First released in 1936 and banned from the U.S. for nearly thirty years, Tropic of Capricorn, along with its predecessor Tropic of Cancer, set a new standard for explicitness of content. D. H. Lawrence’s novels, T. S. Eliot’s poetry, and other...

George Gordon, Lord Byron, began writing poetry in his youth. He published his first book of verse, Fugitive Pieces, at age 18, and he continued to write and publish poetry until his untimely death at 36. Although a lifelong poet, Byron did not...

By the time Never Let Me Go was published in 2005, author Kazuo Ishiguro was already one of the most renowned and critically acclaimed British writers. He had previously received the Whitbread and the Booker Prize for earlier works, and his The...

Published in 1989, Maestro is the first novel by Australian writer Peter Goldsworthy. A bildungsroman, it focuses on a teenage boy named Paul Crabbe and his relationship with his piano teacher, Herr Eduard Keller. The book draws on many...

In the preface to his new edition, Joseph Heller recalls when he originally submitted Catch-22 to various magazines, including The Atlantic and The New Yorker. He describes how the novel was dismissed, not even making the New York Times bestseller...