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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...

The early nineteenth century was not a good time to be a female writer -- particularly if one was audacious enough to be a female novelist. Contemporary beliefs held that no one would be willing to read the work of a woman; the fantastic success...

Camara Laye's The Dark Child is a 1953 French-language memoir about the author's childhood in Guinea. The son of a protective mother and a mystical-minded blacksmith and goldsmith father, Laye writes with affection about Malinke-Muslim traditions...

George Farquhar is an Irish writer born in Derry, Ireland in 1677. At a young age, Farquhar demonstrated a natural capacity for writing. At 7 years, he was writing short stories and always thinking up ideas for a new play. After graduating grade...

In his short novella Signs Preceding the End of the World (originally published in Spanish but later published in English), which The Guardian said "From its opening pages... this marvelously rich, slim novel is working on many levels," author...

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...

The Hunger Games is the first novel in a trilogy that also includes Catching Fire and Mockingjay. Together, they are known as the Hunger Games Trilogy. This first novel has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than sixty weeks, and...

Beauty and the Beast and Other Tales includes a story of Beauty and the Beast that was extended by the author. This version is the most well known, the plot of it is used for most movies covering the story.

Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont is a...

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, published in 1937, is one of the author's most widely read novels, largely due to its ubiquitous presence in the high school curriculum. As a result, this mythic story of two opposites - the clever, wiry George...

Throughout the twentieth century, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has become famous not only as one of Twain's greatest achievements, but also as a highly controversial piece of literature. In certain Southern states, the novel was banned due...

Eileen is writer Otessa Moshfegh's successful debut novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Eileen follows an unhappy and disturbed...

Markus Zusak began his career as a successful writer of young adult fiction, but for his fifth novel, Zusak set out to relate the experiences of his parents growing up during World War II for an adult audience. Zusak has said that much of the...

Although J.D. Salinger has written many short stories, The Catcher in the Rye is Salinger's only novel and his most notable work, earning him great fame and admiration as a writer and sparking many high school students' interest in great...

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...

Published in 1850, The Scarlet Letter is considered Nathaniel Hawthorne's most famous novel--and the first quintessentially American novel in style, theme, and language. Set in seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts, the novel centers around...

The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, is widely considered to be F. Scott Fitzergerald's greatest novel. It is also considered a seminal work on the fallibility of the American dream. It focuses on a young man, Jay Gatsby, who, after falling in...

Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was written after Hosseini traveled back to his native Afghanistan to examine for himself the nation’s situation in the aftermath of decades of turmoil. In early 2007, Hosseini told Time...

"Shakespeare Behind Bars" is a movie documentary that tells the story of the most unlikely Shakespeare Company in the world. It was one of only sixteen documentaries out of six hundred and twenty four submissions to be selected for its world...

Journals are commenced for a number of reasons. Sometimes they are begun as diaries which offer a psychological trail into self-reflection and a more intuitive level of self-awareness. Other journals offer the opportunity to write down immediate...

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman stems from both Arthur Miller's personal experiences and the theatrical traditions in which the playwright was schooled. The play recalls the traditions of Yiddish theater that focus on family as the crucial...

Most likely written between 750 and 650 B.C., The Odyssey is an epic poem about the wanderings of the Greek hero Odysseus following his victory in the Trojan War (which, if it did indeed take place, occurred in the 12th-century B.C. in Mycenaean...

Hawksmoor is a mystery novel written by the English author Peter Ackroyd. It was first published in 1985. Ackroyd's work mostly covers a societal issue or historical recaps. He won many awards for his literary works. Hawksmoor mainly narrates the...

Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit (released in 2017) nominally tells the story of the 1967 Detroit Race Riots and the horrible Algiers Motel incident in which police officers murdered several unarmed people - both white and black. More broadly, though, ...

The Slave was a novel written by Polish author Isaac Bashevis Singer and was published in 1962. Singer was born in 1902 and died in 1991. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature sixteen years after the novel was published.

The Slave talks about a...