Study guides: popular books - Page 13 | Just Great DataBase
Margaret Atwood, born in Canada, wrote “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 1985. The book touches upon increasing influence of religious conservatism in the society at that time. After the world has openly admitted to sexual revolution, there were parties and people who openly criticized it and made sex, contraception, women voting and other rights look indecent and unnecessary. Even...
John Knowles wrote “A Separate Peace” in 1959. It is a story about many stories. There’s a little bit of war, patriotism, growing up difficulties, morals, and breaking the rules in the text. If one had to summarize the book in one sentence it would be a novel about a challenging process of growing up being locked up in a foster home with a shadow of World War II on its...
“A Raisin in the Sun” is a play written by an American writer Lorraine Hansberry. She was born into a family of well-educated African Americans, who were active and successful examples of those who fought racial discrimination and segregation. These events found their reflection in Lorraine’s writing. If today talking about tolerance and movement for racial equality has...
Prepare to discover the jewel of American literature impersonated in a play of Tennessee Williams. “A Streetcar Named Desire” is about a confrontation of two or even three different modes of life that happen to be close by but are so far away from each other at the same time. Some might say that the play is a sad but very common life story. That is why the book leaves the biggest...
Susan Eloine Hinton started writing early. At the age of fifteen she already had a first draft of “The Outsiders” and it took her another year and a half to send it to publishing. The book was intended to be read by her young counterparts and is now considered a great example of the adult fiction genre. “The Outsiders” vividly show how young generations give into social...
“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” is a chronicle of the first 16 years of Maya Angelou's life. She is one of the most heard and visible figures of the African American women movement both in terms of her literary and social activity. "The Caged Bird" starts with Maya, whose full name is Marguerite, she is traveling together with siblings to stay with their grandparents...
“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...
Virginia Woolf was an English writer and literary critic. She was the leading figure of the modernist literature of the first half of the 20th century. Her works became the classics of the “flow of consciousness.” And her essay “A Room of One's Own” became the classics of feminist critics. The essay is based on two reports called “Women and Fiction” that...
“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...
“In Cold Blood” is more than just a thriller or a detective story. Truman Capote wrote a truly diverse and multidimensional text that tells a story of a real quadruple murder in the USA. The murder happened in Kansas in 1959 and immediately after it, the author went down to interview the locals. The book was published six years after in 1966. The murderers were caught and executed...
“The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus” or simply “Doctor Faustus” is a tragedy written by Christopher Marlowe. Mr. Marlowe lived in the same period as William Shakespeare and it’s hard to compete with the fame of the latter. But he was very famous in the circles of Queen Elizabeth and his works were widely popular. The idea of a person selling the soul to the...
Samuel Beckett is the father of the famous theatrical movement called Theatre of the Absurd. He managed to stage the elements of everyday life in a way that they became uncommon and brought revelation into people’s brains. The text couldn’t even provoke criticism upon its appearance and thus immediately established a new art niche. “Waiting for Godot” was written in 1949...
Prepare to explore the depth of contemporary mystery writing with “And Then There Were None” written by the legendary Agatha Christie. It is the most known and the best-selling novel of the author. The book is also known under the title of “Ten Little Niggers” which was changed due to the technicalities of the publishing adaption. A group of different people finds...
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...
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It represents a typical Latin text with all its colors, passions, brightness and grotesque. The events of the book take place in Colombia and are centered around one family of Buendias. They founded a separate city Macondo that is isolated from the outside world. A patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, who is a...
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...
Mildred Taylor wrote “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” in 1976 as a continuation of her previous novel written a year before that. The novel is set during the Great Depression times and talks about racial issues in the society. The book is intense. The events are taking place in the geographical heart of the racist movement, the language used by characters is harsh, the actions can&rsquo...
“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...