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The Jungle was published in 1906, three years after Upton Sinclair’s failed first novel, and it became an immediate success. Sinclair based the novel on the American meatpacking industry, an industry that had received scrutiny in the decade before...

Tristram Shandy is, almost beyond argument, the most unusual, outrageously experimental and subversive novel that most people who possess basic literacy skills could ever read. While James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake definitely outstrips this novel in...

Geoffrey Trease is a well-known twentieth century poet and children's novelist. He has a prolific career which is dominated by his historical fiction. Revered for his candid approach to history for children, he presents historical settings in his...

The Lottery and Other Stories is a collection of twenty-five of Shirley Jackson's short stories, plus an epilogue. This collection was first named The Lottery--Adventures of the Daemon Lover by Jackson. The collection was first published in 1949...

During Henry James's youth, James came into contact with many of the literary greats of the time due to his family's prominence. When he was a young boy, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited often and he once was introduced to William Thackeray. As he grew...

"The Open Boat" and Other Stories is a collection of four stories by Stephen Crane, listed in chronological order as follows: “Maggie: A Girl of the Streets” (1893), “The Open Boat” (1897), “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898), and “The Blue...

A Modest Proposal and Other Satires is a collection of satirical works of political, social, and religious commentary by Jonathan Swift. The most famous of his essays—perhaps the most famous essay of satire in the English language—is “A Modest...

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust is one of the greatest works of German literature in the modern age and one of the greatest epic poems in Western literature. Faust consumed much of Goethe's thought and work throughout his entire life. He...

Published in 1944 when Somerset Maugham was 70 years old, The Razor’s Edge would come to be considered the last of his major works of fiction. The philosophical awareness that any man naturally arrives at by the advanced age at which Maugham...

Published in 1857, Barchester Towers is Anthony Trollope’s sequel to The Warden and almost certainly the most well-known of the author’s Barsetshire series. Ostensibly a portrait of life the clerics in a “cathedral town” the renowned social...

Eleanor H. Ayer is an American novelist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her book Parallel Journeys. She was born and raised in Vermont, and was inspired to write at an early age by her mother's career as a teacher. After graduating...

Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy was published the very same year as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Both novels present a portrait of what it meant to be an American in the early part of the 20th century, but in reading one can be...

Under the Jaguar Sun is a novel written by Italo Calvino and published in 1986. Calvino is an Italian author and journalist. This novel was first written and published in Italian, but it was soon translated into English in 1988. In fact, Calvino...

Published in 1894, The Story of a Modern Woman was written by Ella Dixon. The novel was actually first printed in a series in The Lady’s Pictorial. The book was written in the late Victorian age in England, and is one of the works in the New Woman...

Tracks is a novel that was written by Louise Erdrich and was published in 1988. It is the third book in a series of four books that tell the story of four Anishinaabe families that are all somehow connected to each other. All of them live on an...

Some novelists knock it out of the park on their first try and spend an entire career trying to live up to the great promise. Other writers must take time to mature and grow before it all comes together toward the end of their life. Very few...

The infinitely rebellious writer known as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) would have been one of those real life people who show up as disguised as fictional characters in works by others if she hadn’t been a a writer herself. In an age...

The novel Cold Mountain was published in the year 1997 by the American author Charles Frazier and is generally regarded as a historical romance, with the action being set during the American Civil War.

The main character of the novel is an...

"Metamorphoses" means transformations, and transformation is the governming theme of the text. But, Metamorphoses is also a compilation of myths, some complimentary and some almost contradictory, that were well-known in Ovid's society. Indeed, one...

Published in 1999, A Star Called Henry is a novel written by Roddy Doyle, an Irish author. A Star Called Henry is the second book in “The Last Roundup” series. The protagonist of the novel is named Henry Smart. Smart, as a child, lived in the...

Set against the stark background of World War II, City of Thieves is a historical fiction novel by David Benioff published in 2008. Centering around two young boys in Soviet Russia and their daring quest, the story qualifies for the Bildungsroman...

The story of O Pioneers! begins in the dedication and poem which precede the work. Cather dedicates O Pioneers! "To the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, in whose beautiful and delicate work there is perfection that endures." Cather met Jewett in 1908,...

Ulysses, a Modernist reconstruction of Homer's epic The Odyssey, was James Joyce's first epic-length novel. The Irish writer had already published a collection of short stories entitled Dubliners, as well as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young...

Allen Ginsberg's work can be considered a culmination of modernist poetry while, at the same time, it is also a prime example of the deconstruction of the modernist form. Ginsberg sought to move away from the formal styles of poetry that...