Newest Study Guides

Although Mann is considered to be a deeply German writer, at the time that he began writing, Germany itself was fairly new to the world. When Death in Venice was published in 1912, a unified Germany had existed for a mere 41 years. Although Mann...

Hurston wrote Their Eyes in 1937 in only seven weeks while doing anthropological research in Haiti. When Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God was first published in 1937, it did not receive the accolades and recognition that it...

Vladimir Nabokov started writing Lolita while teaching at Cornell University in 1949. He continued writing the novel while traveling with his wife around the country on summer butterfly hunting trips (Nabokov was an esteemed lepidopterist, or...

Theodor Fontane had enjoyed a long career as a travel writer, almost been executed as a spy and enjoyed a twenty-year long gig as a theater critic before he found the ideal medium for his literary expression. Fontane did not publish his first...

Although the origin of this novel was published under anonymous, it is assumed that the author was Madame de Lafayette, born Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne. In the year 1650, she was the maid-of-honour to the Queen and began to learn how to...

A Moveable Feast, written by Ernest Hemingway, was published in 1964. This volume was published by his wife, the fourth one, after his death; the book is a memoir about his life in Paris and other places, and Hemingway's relationships between...

White Teeth is Zadie Smith's acclaimed debut novel, first published when she had barely finished college. The novel began as a short story, and a single chapter gained Smith a contract with a prominent literary agency. The novel was released in...

Philippe Bourgois (born 1956) is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles. His most recognizable work, In Search of...

Gabriela Mistral who was born in 1889 and died in 1957, was perhaps the most famous female Latin American author, if not woman, of her time. What distinguished her as a writer was her bending of practices, drawing from European and native...

A Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright, Reinaldo Arenas was known for his defiance and rebellion against the Cuban government, despite the fact that he was initially quite sympathetic of their cause.His works have been seminal in the Latin...

Porcelain is a play written and directed by Singapore playwright Chay Yew. The play was released in 1993 in the United Kingdom, and was later moved to the London Royal Theater. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Yew said about the play,...

First published 1999, Wonderland is a play by Chay Yew, a gay, Singapore-born American writer of Chinese descent. Along with Porcelain and A Language of Their Own, Wonderland is part of Yew's "Whitelands Trilogy." It was also published in a...

Federico Garcia Lorca was born to a wealthy family in Spain in 1898. He grew up near Grenada where he received an excellent education and excelled as a piano player. After initially hoping to become a musician, Lorca began writing in 1916. Still,...

No Telephone to Heaven by Michelle Cliff was published in 1996. The main character is Clare Savage, where the novel follows her life. Clare must find her own identity, and this book shows a coming-of-age theme, where Clare grows up to be herself....

Doctor No is the sixth novel in Ian Fleming's James Bond series and was first published in 1958. The story centers on Bond's investigation into the disappearance of fellow MI6 operative Commander John Strangeways whilst in Jamaica. He establishes...

Peter Greenaway is an English filmmaker born on April 5, 1942 in Newport, Wales. As a child, he had his sights set on becoming a painter, but he also maintained a love for cinema and storytelling. He cites his main cinematic influences as Ingmar...

Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1913, Robert Hayden may seem to have made only a minor impact on the world when he died in nearby Ann Arbor in 1980. What that low figure on Hayden’s odometer does not reflect is the lives he touched over the course of...

Saturday is a novel written by Ian McEwan and published in 2005. The narrative is set in London in 2003, during a time in February where there were protests happening because of the United States’ invasion of Iraq during that time. The setting of...

Cold Sassy Tree is a historical novel set in the fictional town of Cold Sassy of Georgia in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century. It was written by Olive Ann Burns, and was her first work. When Burns wrote the novel, she...

Meera Syal is an Indian-British actor and writer born on June 27, 1961 in Wolverhampton, England. As a child, she noticed she was the only Asian person in her school, and this division she felt between the rest of her peers was heavily influential...

The novel A Pale View of the Hills was written in 1982. This is the debut novel of Kazuo Ishiguro - a British writer with Japanese roots. It is difficult to answer unequivocally whether this is a British novel with Japanese coloring or vice versa....

America Is in the Heart, sometimes (albeit infrequently) called America Is in the Heart: A Personal History is a semi-autobiographical novel written by the Filipino-American author, immigrant, and activist Carlos Bulosan, originally published in...

Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud was written by Herbert Marcuse and first published in 1955 by Beacon Press. In it, Marcuse, a German philosopher, explores and analyses the social theories espoused by Sigmund Freud and, to...

Awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney was one of most prolific poets and playwrights of recent times. Born in County Londonderry in Northern Ireland in 1939, in his lifetime he published numerous poetry collections to great...