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Published in 1922, Siddhartha is the most famous and influential novel by Nobel prize-winning (1946) German author Hermann Hesse. Though set in India, the concerns of Siddhartha are universal, expressing Hesse's general interest in the conflict...

Published in 1992 by Southern Methodist University Press, this novel is an historical account from a subjective humanized perspective rather than an objective event analysis. The novel delves in the American history through 1931 mining camp of...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was an 18th century philosopher. His doctrines predominantly pertain to politics and the function of government, his most important work being The Social Contract. He was interested in adapting society to be most...

Particularities of the author:

Until 1995, Bolaño was a practically unknown author. Finding himself in a precarious economic situation, he sent the manuscript of “Nazi literature in America” to various publishers, finally being accepted by Seix...

Albert Camus published The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942 in French which was translated first into English by Just O'Brien in 1955. The book is a philosophical essay in four parts, "An Absurd Reasoning," "The Absurd Man," "Absurd Creation," and "The...

"The Kreutzer Sonata" is Leo Tolstoy's novel, published in 1890 and immediately censored by the tsarist authorities. The book proclaims the ideal of abstinence and describes in the first person anger of jealousy. The name of the story gave number...

Many of Hemingway’s short stories appeared in various magazines before being anthologized in his short story collections. The first of these collections, and his first major published work, was Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923); this collection...

The Country Wife is a Restoration comedy, that is, an English theatrical comedy written during the period 1660-1710, when theatrical performances resumed in London following their 18-year spell of illegality under the reign of the Puritan...

Leaves of Grass has been considered by many critics to be the first and best example of American poetry, and Whitman to have been the first major American poet. Yet other critics have found the work obscene. Its greatness has been the topic of...

And Then There Were None was first published in 1939 in Great Britain and was published a few months later in the United States in January of 1940. It is Agatha Christie's bestselling novel. Over 100 million copies have been printed and it remains...

In Jacob's Room, the novel preceding Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf works with many of the same themes she later expands upon in Mrs. Dalloway. To Mrs. Dalloway, she added the theme of insanity. As Woolf stated, "I adumbrate here a study of...

Premiering in 1905 and published in 1907, Major Barbara is a three-part play written by George Bernard Shaw, an Irish playwright, and critic. The plot revolves around a young woman named Barbara who is in the Salvation Army, and her efforts to...

In 1942, Albert Camus published “The Myth of Sisyphus”, an essay about absurdism, which revolutionized the absurdist movement and inspired the theater of the absurd. Some of the early plays included “The Maids” by Jean Genet, “The Bald Soprano” by...

My Bondage and My Freedom, published in 1855, is an example of a genre of literature known as the slave narrative. This genre flourished from around 1760 and though the first few decades after the abolition of slavery. One of the most famous...

The Complete Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse is collection of fairy tales written by Hermann Karl Hesse, a German poet and novelist as well as a Nobel-Prize winning laureate, and was published in 1995 by Bantam Books. The stories have mainly been...

Karl Marx gets all the press, but it is important to realize that much of the writing which established the communist ideology was either co-written by Friedrich Engels or based on concepts and research established and conducted by Engels. Then...

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is a book written in 1883 by Howard Pyle. The story revolves around an archer who is extremely skilled and goes by the name of Robin Hood. He and his companions, called the Merry Men, live in Sherwood forest and...

The story goes that it was Robert Redford—who already was committed to bringing the book to the screen—who suggested to Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward that they abandon the idea of writing All the President’s Men from...

Published in London in 1767, The Man of Feeling made its author famous and became his most well-known work. The author of this story was a true man of his time and fell under the influence of sentimentalism. However, the idea of sentimentalism had...

Ivanhoe is most immediately notable within the expansive canon of Sir Walter Scott by virtue of its being his very first attempt at writing a tale exclusively devoted to a British subject. In fact, one is hard-pressed to get much more intensely...

He Knew He Was Right was written by the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, and was first published in Strahan and Co in 1869. The novel found great success among literary circles of that time and is one of Trollope's most famous works, alongside...

After the death of his father, John, James Bradley was inspired to research the lives of the six men (including his father) in the famous photograph of the raising of the American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima. His idea was turned down...

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008. The book took Junot Díaz eleven years to write, and was his first novel. The story is set both in the United States and in the Dominican Republic. The narrative...

Published in 2002 and written by William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault is a novel telling the story of a girl named Lucy. The book is split up into three sections that make up her life: her childhood, her maturing into adulthood, and her older...