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In January 1993, Jon Krakauer published an article in Outside magazine about the death of Chris McCandless, a young Emory graduate who had donated all of his money to charity, gotten rid of all his belongings, changed his name, and, in April 1992,...

Born a Crime is the first book written by Trevor Noah, who is better known as a comedian and actor. The comedic memoir was first published in November 2016. It received mostly favorable critical reviews, and it also became a New York Times...

Gulliver's Travels, a misanthropic satire of humanity, was written in 1726 by Jonathan Swift. Like many other authors, Swift uses the journey as the backdrop for his satire. He invents a second author, Captain Lemuel Gulliver, who narrates and...

Animal Farm was published on the heels of World War II, in England in 1945 and in the United States in 1946. George Orwell wrote the book during the war as a cautionary fable in order to expose the seriousness of the dangers posed by Stalinism and...

"The name is Great Expectations. I think a good name?" Dickens to his editor before he started publishing the novel.

When Dickens started his thirteenth novel , Great Expectations, in 1860, he was already a national hero. He had come from humble...

The Alice books were written during the Victorian era, a time now remembered for its stifling propriety and constrictive morals. Carroll had something of an outsider's perspective on this world; he was painfully shy, and he often stuttered. His...

The Alchemist is one of the most important literary phenomenons of the 20th century, selling more than 30 million copies worldwide. The book has been translated into over 67 languages and tops the all-time best-seller list in 18 countries. The...

Pride and Prejudice is Jane Austen's first novel, published in 1813. Some scholars also consider it one of her most mature novels.

Austen began writing Pride and Prejudice under the title First Impressions in 1796, at the age of twenty-one. She...

John Steinbeck wrote The Pearl during the time in which he was at the height of his fame. He had completed The Grapes of Wrath, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was renowned and reviled as a subversive, unpatriotic man who...

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in 1932, is a dystopian novel set six hundred years in the future. The novel envisions a world that, in its quest for social stability and peace, has created a society devoid of emotion, love, beauty, and...

Published in 1967 by Viking Press, The Outsiders was S.E. Hinton's first novel. The rivalry between the "greasers" and the "socs" was based on events in her own high school, the Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Hinton began writing the...

Though her novel The Bell Jar has brought Sylvia Plath copious literary praise throughout the decades, it is not outlandish to assert that her poetry might in fact be her crowning achievement. Bold, visceral, moving, evocative, wrenching,...

After celebrating the joy and charity of Christmas, A Christmas Carol is foremost a condemnation of 19th-century Victorian England's division between the rich and poor, the Haves and Have-Nots. London was a great world power, rich from industry...

The “Spider and the Fly” and other poems is a picture book by Mary Howitt. The book’s genre is imaginary. “Spider and the Fly” is a warning narrative about flattery. Howitt personifies both the spider and the fly to caution people against falling...

Nemesis, published in 2010, chronicles the impact of the 1944 polio epidemic on a middle-class Jewish community in Newark, New Jersey. The protagonist, 23-year-old Bucky Cantor, is ineligible to serve in the war and instead works as the...

Age of Iron was published in 1990 and is the sixth novel written by South African author J. M. Coetzee. It was an international critical success, and although it didn't receive any of the prestigious literary awards that some of his other novels...

Although best-known for his novels, acclaimed Indian writer Dhanpat Rai Shrivastava (better known by his pen name Munshi Premchand) wrote quite a few short stories, and among these is "The Shroud," published in 1935. Telling the story of a poor...

By the time Pearl S. Buck published “The Enemy” in 1942, the United States had officially been at war with Japan for nearly a year, she had won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth, and she had become the first (and, for more than a half...

Arthur O’Shaughnessy was a British poet and zoologist, known also for his significant work with reptiles which would result in his name a part of scientific names of several types of reptiles. In the poetry department he is most known for his poem...

Toni Morrison's short story "Sweetness," published in 2015, is about a light-skinned black mother who gives birth to a dark-skinned daughter who the mother fears and struggles to love. The mother justifies her prejudice by reflecting on how...

Originally published in 2017, The Marrow Thieves is a young-adult novel by Cherie Dimaline, a Métis writer and activist from the Georgian Bay Métis Nation in Canada. Critics have described the novel as dystopian, speculative fiction, science...

Phillip K. Dick was one of the most prominent American science fiction authors. Ubik is a science fiction novel published in 1969 and is revered as one of the greatest of the author’s science fiction work.

It is set in a futuristic world in the...

Bronwen Wallace was a Canadian whose work in poetry impacted many people during the last two decades. Most of his work touch on women's roles. Wallace articulates the emotions that are concealed underneath the surface of everyday activities. The...

Sarah Kay is an American poet, known in particular for her spoken word poetry. She was born in 1988 and has founded a group called V.O.I.C.E, which seeks to educate people using spoken word poetry. Kay has performed spoken word poetry herself for...