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Melville finished his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, when he was all of thirty-two years old. Still a young writer, he had crafted one of the most incredibly dense and imaginative works in all of literature, a book now praised by many as the greatest...

Written in the 5th century CE, City of God, or The City of God Against the Pagans, is one of the best known and most influential of Saint Augustine’s works. The book was completed less than two decades after the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in...

Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings is a collection of writings and reflections by the medieval philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas. Saint Thomas Aquinas was an Italian friar, priest, and Christian philosopher. He was alive during the 13th century and...

Philip K. Dick was an American novelist born on December 16, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. Dick’s parents divorced when he was five, so he was raised by his mother in Washington D.C. Although he did not receive stellar grades, his elementary and...

In the Time of the Butterflies was published in 1994. It was selected as a Notable Book for 1994 by the American Library Association, and it was also a 1994 Book of the Month Club choice. In 1995, it was a finalist for the National Book Critics...

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone tells the story of an eleven-year-old orphan who suddenly discovers that he is a wizard. J.K. Rowling began writing the book in 1990, prompted by a delayed train ride from Manchester to London during which she...

Ragtime is a novel written by Edgar Lawrence Doctorow that was published in 1975. Ragtime is a historical fiction novel that is set in New York City. Doctorow is a New York City native, and after going to school at Kenyon College and Columbia...

My Mortal Enemy is a novel written by Willa Cather in 1926. The novel revolves around Myra and her husband Oswald who return to their home in Illinois, USA to visit their relatives. Oswald soon receives silver-buttons for his shirt from an old...

Born in Christmas Eve of 1818 in the South-wark section of London, Eliza Cook found early success as a poet. She published her first collection while still a teenager in 1835. The verse featured in Lays of a Wild Harp found a receptive audience...

Ethan Frome was published in 1911, when Wharton was already an established and successful writer. She lived primarily in Paris between 1905 and the outbreak of World War II, and these years were productive. She was growing more self-assured in her...

The Road (2006), Cormac McCarthy's most recent novel, describes the bleak journey of a father and son across a post-apocalyptic American landscape. He was visiting El Paso, Texas, with one of his sons, John Francis McCarthy, in 2003 when the...

Parallax is defined as the illusion that a given object in the distance appears to change position viewed from a different position. You can demonstrate this effect by focusing on an object off the distance as you are reading this and looking at...

Stanley Kubrick. Sidney Lumet. George Roy Hill. According to film critic Daniel O’Brien, these Hollywood luminaries were among a dirty dozen or so who all turned down the opportunity to direct a film adaptation of Richard Hooker’s comic novel...

Annie Hall: The most perfectly imperfect love story ever

Woody Allen, a legendary director, screenwriter and comedian is famous for his bittersweet slapstick comedies and unique Jewish humor. Allen's heartfelt tribute to his muse and actress Diane...

The highly dubious “auteur theory” that distinguishes the director as the “author” of a film in the same way that a writer is the author of a novel simply does not hold when applied to Network. The film that reveals a shocking ability to produce...

Woyzeck is based on a true account of a poor man who was executed for stabbing his wife, Marie, to death. Buchner became fascinated with the case, so much so that he used it as inspiration for the play that would culminate his short literary...

The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca is a Moroccan folklore written by Tahir Shah and was released on October 26 2006 by Bantam Dell publishers.

The story follows the life of Tahir Shah, an Anglo-Afhan immigrant, who travels with his family to...

Stephenie Meyer began to write Twilight on the first day after a vivid dream she had about a young woman and a very handsome vampire in a field discussing their love for each other and the problem of the vampire’s hunger for her scent and her...

Shakespeare's sonnets comprise 154 poems in sonnet form that were published in 1609 but likely written over the course of several years. Evidence for their existence long preceding publication comes from a reference in Francis Mere's 1598 Palladis...

Susan Glaspell wrote Trifles in 1916, basing this brief, one-act play on the murder of the sixty-year-old John Hossack, which she had covered extensively during her stint as a journalist with the Des Moines Daily News after her graduation from...

As with many extant Greek tragedies, we have no exact date for the the writing of Electra, though scholars have argued that some of its stylistic features suggest it was written towards the end of Sophocles' life.

The story of Orestes' revenge is a...

The Upanishads (also commonly known as the Vedanta) are a collection of ancient Sanskrit texts of religious and philosophical subjects. There are many concepts that are central to Hinduism and related to Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. They are...

Having finished “The Legend of Saint Julien," Flaubert, as he said, was too excited to take on much work. In March 1876, he began his second novel “A Simple Heart”, completed in September of the same year.

He had already somewhat developed the...

Lucky Jim is a novel written by Kingsley Amins in 1954. The novel mainly revolves around the story of Jim Dixon, who is a history lecturer at a university in England. He is a middle-class man who is grammar school-educated who has just started out...