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Here’s a timed quiz for you: name a memorable African-American female character living in the post-Civil War era from American Literature published before the Civil Rights Movement that wasn’t either a mammy, a prostitute or an ill-fated jazz...

The Secret Life of Bees is Sue Monk Kidd's first novel, following several acclaimed works of nonfiction. The novel follows Lily Owens in the summer of 1964 in South Carolina. On a quest to discover her mother's past, Lily travels to a honey farm...

Published in 1973, Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye, Blue Monday! was Kurt Vonnegut's 50th birthday present to himself. It also marked the end of a period of depression that had followed his 1969 publication of Slaughterhouse Five.

The alternate...

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is an exaggerated account of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s personal experiences. In 1887, shortly after the birth of her daughter, Gilman began to suffer from serious depression and fatigue. She was referred to Silas Weir...

A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Williams' most famous play and the one that catapulted him to success, changed the American theater and won Williams his first Pulitzer prize. Following this smash hit, however, the playwright staged a series of...

Seneca’s Phaedra was modeled on Euripides’ Hippolytus, which told roughly the same story. It is not clear whether Phaedra was ever performed on stage in Seneca’s time. It seems likely that it was meant instead purely for recitation, as would befit...

There is a major political context to Nabokov's novel Pale Fire. Within the chronology of Nabokov's works, Pale Fire was published in 1962, years after Lolita and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Pale Fire conjures up the unreal world of Zembla,...

The novel, written in 1864, reflects the changes in Dostoevsky's thought that had occurred as a result of recent events in his life. As a result of his liberal political leanings, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death along with a group of liberals in...

Nine Stories, published in 1953, is a collection of Salinger’s short stories, and is considered one of the finest short-story collections in the English language. Taking his cues from such masters of the medium as Guy de Maupassant and James...

Tropic of Cancer was first published in Paris in 1934. Few other novels of the century have created as much of a stir. Some writers, including Anais Nin, proclaimed it a work of genius, while others were baffled; critics began to bicker about its...

In 1865, Dostoevsky was heavily in debt, having taken on his brother Mikhail's debts after he died and amassing his own through gambling. Desperate, he signed an agreement with bookseller F. T. Stellovsky, promising that if he did not hand...

Written in 1944 while Brecht was living in America, The Caucasian Chalk Circle was initially intended for Broadway. It never quite made it there, but was instead premiered by students at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota in 1948. Brecht's...

Medea was first performed in 431 BC. Its companion pieces have been lost, but we know that this set of plays won third prize at the Dionysia, adding another disappointment to Euripides' career. Although we know nothing of the other pieces, the...

When The Fountainhead was released in 1943, Rand's publishers did not expect much from it. To their surprise, the work quickly became a word-of-mouth bestseller. While most people consider Atlas Shrugged her most important work, The Fountainhead...

Persuasion is Jane Austen’s last completed novel. She began work on it in the summer of 1815 and completed it by the summer of 1816. The work was published with Northanger Abbey posthumously in December of 1817, six months after Austen’s death in...

In her preface to the Tenth Anniversary Edition of The Color Purple, Walker explains: “This book is the book in which I was able to express a new spiritual awareness, a rebirth into strong feelings of Oneness I realized I had experienced and taken...

Dismissed as a piece of light satirical fluff at the time of its publication, Candide has only recently been elevated to a canonical status and included on the list of the "world's greatest books." Originally presented in January 1759 under the...

Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of Ray Bradbury's most popular works. It tells the story of two friends, Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway, who are thirteen and yearn to be older. The story thus examines themes of maturity and aging,...

Freud published Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria in 1905, four years after completing his final draft. He held off on publication for fear of damaging the reputation of his patient and her family. His apprehension is noticeably present in...

Pudd'nhead Wilson was written during Mark Twain's "pessimistic period." At the time, Twain was living in Italy, attempting to recover from his recent bankruptcy. To raise some funds, he sold the rights to the novel to Century Magazine for $6,500....

Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn follows a long tradition of Russian critical realists - a school which includes nineteenth-century Russians Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Goncharev. In fact, Solzhenitsyn's style of writing and subject...

After receiving rave reviews for his book The Call of the Wild in 1904, Jack London became very enthusiastic about a new idea for a book that would not be a sequel but a "companion" to The Call of the Wild. "I'm going to reverse the process," he...

Wilson Rawls based Where the Red Ferns Grows largely on his own boyhood in Scraper, Oklahoma. With encouragement from his wife, Sophie, he wrote the book in three weeks. She edited his poor grammar, it was serialized in the "Saturday Evening...

First serialized in Harper's Magazine in 1880, Washington Square is one of Henry James' most famous (and most accessible) novels. In 1881, Washington Square was published in novel formthe same year that Portrait of a Lady was published. Unlike...