Newest Study Guides
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.
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.
Mule Bone might well be termed the Great Lost (and Then Found) Play of the Harlem Renaissance. The work began as a collaboration at the height of that African-American artistic movement between two of its brightest stars, Langston Hughes and Nora...
Linden Hills, written by Gloria Naylor, was published in 1985. Though easily understood as a work of social commentary, this novel also references the literary past. The world that Naylor depicts is structured through an extended allegory...
The Known World earned Edward P. Jones a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for shedding light on one of the darkest corners of American history: black slave-owners. The novel is set in Virginia before the Civil War and spans several decades in the life Henry...
The Outlaw Sea is a maritime non-fiction, true crime novel written by William Langewische. It was first published on July 30, 2002. Langewische is an American author and journalist who also worked as an airplane pilot. He also works at the Vanity...
The Mezzanine is a 1988 novel by American novelist Nicholson Baker, an author who specializes in "stream of consciousness" style writing, as clearly demonstrated in this story.
The Mezzanine can be most basically summarized as what goes through an...
The Misanthrope is one of the most famous works of Molière, a playwright and one of the greatest authors in French literature. The comedy was written during the 17th century and first played on the 4th of June 1666 at the Palais-Royal, a Parisian...
Old Times is categorized as one of the Harold Pinter’ “memory plays” that characterized his evolution and development in the 1970’s through a series of productions that took a step back from the more cerebral experimentation of the playwright’s...
The Koran (Qur'an) is the holy scripture of the religion Islam, written by the prophet Muhammad, probably during the sixth or seventh century AD, and likely written over the course of 20-something years, as it was received through the prophecy of...
Moonlight is a one-act play by Harold Pinter which was first produced in September 1993 at the Almeida Theater in London. The play is divided into seventeen different sections which take place in three “playing areas” of the set: the...
The Joys of Motherhood was written by Buchi Emecheta, a Nigerian-born British author, and published by Allison & Busby in 1979. Emecheta has written and published over twenty works, from novels to plays, each of which delves into the...
Published by Perugia Press in Massachusetts in 2004, Kettle Bottom is a collection of poems written by Diane Gilliam Fisher, focusing on the 1920 and 1921 West Virginia labor battles.
An author's note at the beginning of the collectionexplains the...
Jonathan Edwards was an American preacher born on October 5, 1703 in East Windsor, Connecticut. He was raised in an actively religious household as his father was a minister and his mother was the daughter of a reverend. At only 13-years-old,...
The Satires are a compilation of the Roman author Juvenal’s satirical poems. Juvenal is known to have five books of sixteen total poems, all of which are considered satirical in the Roman genres, discussing society and morals in dactylic...
Author Brian Moore was born Belfast, had immigrated first to Canada and then the United States, and published several potboiler pulp fiction novels under a pen name before finally staking the claim to serious novelist using his own name for which...
The Name of the Rose is the first novel of Italian writer, professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna Umberto Eco. It was first published in Italian in 1980.
The novel is presented as an embodiment of the theoretical ideas of Umberto Eco’...
History of Rome, or Roman History, is a series of 80 books which chronicles the history of Rome from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy until the year 229 C.E., six years before the author’s death. The books were written over the course of 22 years...
Demons is the sixth novel written by Fyodor Dostoevsky and published in 1871-1872. It’s one of the most politicized novels, which Dostoevsky wrote under the impression from the occurrence of shoots of the terrorist and radical movements among the...
The Enigma of Arrival is a 1987 semi-autobiographical novel by V. S. Naipaul. The story tells of a young man from Trinidad who makes his way to England, and the novel thus encompasses themes related to the post-colonialism and imperialistic impact...
The year was 1919. Herman Hesse already published four novels. His fifth novel, Demian, would be published using a pen name, Emil Sinclair. Sinclair would go on to win the Theodore Fontane Prize for Best Debut Novel of the Year for Demian. Hesse...
Spawning a highly successful movie adaption, Eight Men Out is a sports novel written by Eliot Asinof and published in 1963. It is his most popular work.
Eight Men Out centers around the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, when eight members of the Chicago...
Meena Alexander's Fault Lines was first published in 1993 and expanded in 2003. It is a memoir that, like many of Alexander's other works, focuses primarily on "trauma, migration, and memory," as well as trauma's "impact on subjectivity, and the...
In between the more famous Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck published what may be viewed as a trial run for his famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath. In Dubious Battle is also set in California and is also concerned with migrant...
Doctor Faustus is the Thomas Mann’s novel. It had been started in 1943 and published 4 years later with the title: “The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend”.
Doctor Faustus is the most significant and large-scale work of...
Marcel Proust’s life-consuming literary epic is not just merely one novel, but a series of books. Throughout the 20th century, this collection of volumes was more often than not referred to by the collective title of Remembrance of Things Past....