Study guides: popular books, letter t - Page 5 | Just Great DataBase

“The Glass Menagerie” is a play that made Tennessee Williams famous immediately after its publication in 1944. The play made it to the Broadway and won numerous awards. The plot is very simple. Imagine a simple American family, it is the 1930s outside, the Great Depression seems never-ending, people are getting used to it. An energetic woman is keeping the whole family together. The...

“To the Lighthouse” is the fifth novel of the legendary author Virginia Woolf. The text offers a pleasurable journey to the magnificent Scottish land site called the Isle of Skye. Great focus on the philosophy and analysis in this book makes it a wonderful text where every reader will find something for himself. “To the Lighthouse” is a complex book, which doesn't...

Alexander Dumas wrote “The Count of Monte Cristo” in 1844 and it instantly became hugely popular among the public. Together with his other famous book, “The Three Musketeers”, it won a place in the world literature heritage forever. The events of the book happen in Italy and France during the Restoration area of the beginning of the 19th century. A young Edmond Dantes is...

“The Joy Luck Club” is the first book written by an American author of Chinese origins Amy Tan. The novel tells the story of four women and their daughters who talk about their lives as immigrants in San Francisco. Do you know anything in Chinese? Have you ever played a mahjong game? This could have greatly helped you in understanding the book better. It’s a challenge, but...

Sylvia Plath wrote only one novel and it was enough for her to make a name for herself as a great writer. “The Bell Jar” is in part an autobiographical book that talks about the mental state of the protagonist who tried to take her own life. The novel concerns the life of Esther Greenwood, who is a student living in Massachusetts. At the beginning of the plot, she is in New York...

The Misanthrope is a comedy of manners by Moliere that, as do his previous works, mocks the habits of the upper-class French society, so bright and magnificent at the first glance and so shallow inside. Because his previous works were already banned in France, the author had to tone down some accents in the story to the extent that we can’t understand if the main character, Alceste is a...

“The Red Badge of Courage” is an American novel about the civil war written by Stephen Crane. Unlike many other war novels, this story focuses on the inner feelings of a member of the Union Army who at one point fled the battlefield. The book was written at the end of the 19th century by an author who was born after the actual events depicted. But the text strikes the reader with its...

“The Last of the Mohicans” is one part of a number of historical novels written by James Fenimore Cooper. The events of the book take place in the second part of the 18th century when the French-Indian War took place. It is a must read for most American high school students and one of the best books about this period all over the world.  In the beginning the reader finds himself...

“The Color Purple” is a story about the social position of African-American women, written by Alice Walker in 1982. The book talks about pretty sad and explicit events in the lives of the most vulnerable members of the nation.   It is a known fact that it used to be okay for white people to think of themselves better in comparison to those of other skin colors. But that’s...

Not everybody knows that Tolkien first wrote “The Hobbit” and only then started working on the “Lord of the Rings”. It wasn’t his first text, but it brought together the author’s memories of the World War I, knowledge of philology, ancient myths, as well as the characters from previous stories. The full title of the book is “The Hobbit, or There and Back...

“The Poisonwood Bible” offers a different outlook on migration literature. Barbara Kingsolver talks about an American family who relocated to Africa. The text has made a powerful impact on the Western readers who often find themselves entrapped in the bubble of their smooth everyday life. The story takes place at the end of the 1950s. The protagonists are the Prince family: a father...

“The Brothers Karamazov” is the last book written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1880. It is a rare case where the philosophy of the content is successfully mixed with the excitement of the plot. One of the protagonists of the novel, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is a cold and rough man. He gets the joy in life while making money and sleeping with women, two of which he married. His children...

There’s no more popular plot in the science fiction genre than traveling in time. And Herbert George Wells is considered to be the father of time traveling as his works dwell a lot on this topic. “The Time Machine” was published in 1895 and has inspired many films, books, comics, TV series and other works of art that discover the concept of displacing the body forward and...

Despite such a title, the main character is a perfectly healthy man. Dostoyevsky ironically portrays the attitude of the society to the hero, whose only flaw is his kindness, open-heartedness and naivete. He is young, handsome and rich - moreover, he is the Prince. Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin just lacks the skill of deception and plotting that is so valuable amongst the upper-crust society. So, his...

“The Secret Life of Bees” of the authorship of Sue Monk Kidd is a book about a 14-year old girl who lost her mother. It is a story about losses and gains, faith and forgiveness. It is also a story about people who have faced the tough decision of choosing what really matters. Lily Melissa Owens still vaguely remembers the day when her mother died. Her father, T. Ray, treats her badly...

Barbara Kingsolver is an American writer and poet. Her first novel “The Bean Trees” was published in 1988. The book denotes multiple symbolic meanings about shared motherhood, life and death, and beauty. The narrator Taylor Greer, who is also the main character of the novel grew up among the tobacco fields of Kentucky and suddenly realized that she had no choice, no future. It is not...

“The Age of Innocence” is a romantic novel about duty, independence and unrequited love, that brought to its author fame and the unofficial title of “The First Lady of the Letters”. It is a beautiful story that lets us immerse into the radiance of Gilded Age and face the conflict between rigid morals and social expectations and the human desire to be happy no matter what...

Pilgrim Progress by John Bunyan is one of the most famous religious allegories in the Christian world. Once its popularity was second only to the Bible. The book is written in two parts, the first one was finished in 1678 and it took the author several years to finish the second part in 1684. The book is dedicated to the metaphorical journey of a person throughout their life. The symbolic...

House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is the novel that is often classified as social satire. It tells the readers the story of a well-educated, beautiful and virtuous woman of upper class, named Lily Bart and her downfall from the upper class to the very social bottom. The problem of Lily is simple and very common for the noble women with proper upbringing of that times: she is twenty-nine already...

Not everybody likes historical novels. And not every story makes a good inspiration source for a book. But some events are best to learn about from the literary genre. The Afghan war is one of them. An American author of Afghan origins wrote “The Kite Runner” where he talks about the Soviet intervention, a fallen regime, and the establishment of a Taliban movement. The novel is fine...