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.
To fully appreciate the context and background of Glengarry Glen Ross it helps to know who Thorstein Veblen was, to be familiar with postmodern literary techniques and—perhaps most importantly—not assume that just because you saw the movie you...
Published in 1958, The Question (French title: La Question) was a largely autobiographical work that described methods of torture used by the French military during the Algerian War of Independence. The text recounts the author's arrest by French...
The Life of Omar Ibn Said is an autobiography written by Senegalese scholar, Omar ibn Said, who documented his life living under slavery in this book. The book was written in 1831 and written in Arabic. It was sold to the Library of Congress in...
It is perhaps not straying too terribly far from the certainty known as absolute truth that without the release of the so-called “Kinsey Report” in 1948 and the subsequent release of two highly regarded semi-autobiographical novels dealing openly...
Michael Cunningham is an American author born on November 6, 1952 in Cincinnati, Ohio. He showed great potential to be a writer as a teenager, leading to him studying English literature at Stanford University and later the University of Iowa for...
The Bean Trees draws from many of the experiences of its author, Barbara Kingsolver, whose personal life and academic training provide some of the background for the novel. The novel is not autobiographical, but there are numerous parallels...
Art Spiegelman's Maus is the most unlikely of creations: a comic book about the Holocaust. Yet when the first volume of Maus was published in 1987, it met with enormous critical and commercial success, and to this day it is widely considered to be...
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or: How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning German author Heinrich Böll. It was first published in 1974 in the Federal Republic of Germany (better known as West Germany). The...
Herman Hesse published his novel Steppenwolf in 1927, but its mixture of psychological and philosophy about a rebellious non-conformist dropping out of a society he cannot abide would not find a truly appreciative audience for more than three...
Lorraine Hansberry, in an August 1959 Village Voice article, wrote:
In an almost paradoxical fashion, it disturbs the soul of man to truly understand what he invariably senses: that nobody really finds oppression and/or poverty tolerable. If we...
The Nietzsche Reader, by Friedrich Nietzsche himself, is a collection of many of his analyses and stories. Nietzsche was influenced by many famous scientists and artists, such as Goethe, Darwin, Schopenhauer, and Wagner. His was born in 1844, but...
"Atonement" is the eleventh book written by Ian McEwan. It was published in 2001 and won the W.H. Smith Literary Award in 2002, the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award in 2003, the L.A. Times Prize for Fiction in 2003, and the Santiago...
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy to acknowledge and celebrate the yin and yang of life. This book was originally published during 1871 and was later published during 2003 by Penguin Classics. Specifically, Nietzsche was aiming to...
Soren Kierkegaard is a Danish philosopher and Christian theologian whose contributions were critical in the development of existential philosophy. In fact, he is regarded by some as the first true existential philosopher. He wrote Philosophical...
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel composed an original work, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, in 1820. This book holds Hegel’s “legal, moral, social and political philosophy” within its pages. He goes into a deeper expansion of the topics he...
On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Lifeis an essay by Friedrich Nietzsche published as part of his Untimely Meditation in 1874. The essay is a definitively modernist argument against a politically motivated retelling of the events of...
The Gay Science was originally published in 1882 with a second edition published five years later expanded to include an additional “fifth book” as well as an appendix of songs. Although the title is perhaps not quite as familiar to those...
The Professor’s House was published in 1925, but had been in the works since Cather’s 1915 trip to Mesa Verde National Park in Montezuma County, Colorado. The park is widely recognized as the home of some of the world's best-preserved cliff...
The Marrow of Tradition is considered to be one of the most important works of African American realist fiction. It is a novel based upon a historical account of the Wilmington, North Carolina race riots of 1898. The riots were, actually, a coup d...
Tuesdays with Morrie is based on the real-life relationship with author Mitch Albom and his college professor Morrie Schwartz. Morrie had been one of Mitch's favorite professors in college, and on graduation day, Mitch presented Morrie with a...
The Death of Iv?n Ilych was published in 1886, several years after a period of depression and personal intellectual turmoil (1875-1878) that ended with Tolstoy's conversion to Christianity.
Tolstoy's Christianity is well known, but his ideas about...
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle. It was published in 1993 and received the Booker Proze later that year.
Tge story is about a ten-year-old boy living in Barrytown, North Dublin, in 1968, and tells of the events that...
Acquainted With the Night is a non-fiction novel written by Christopher Dewdney in 2004. The book revolves around the 'night' and its various aspects of it. The book has 14 chapters and each chapter refers to a certain hour of the night and...
In 1994, Lois Lowry was awarded one of the highest annual honors given out for juvenile literature when her novel The Giver won the Newberry Award. That book remains her signature work, but in the decades since she has revisited the dystopia she...
