Native Son by Richard Wright

Leatherstocking Tales

Listed chronologically by story action, the books are: The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers and The Prairie.

Gabriela Mistral

Mistral may be most widely quoted in English for Su Nombre es Hoy (His Name is Today): “We are guilty of many errors and many faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait. The child cannot. Right now is the time his bones are being formed, his blood is being made, and his senses are being developed. To him we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow,’ his name is today.”

Mephistopheles

Clive Barker

Barker's distinctive style is characterized by the notion of hidden fantastical worlds coexisting with our own, the role of sexuality in the supernatural and the construction of coherent, complex and detailed universes. Barker has referred to this style as "dark fantasy" or the "fantastique".

Carlos the Jackal

In the Trilogy Carlos is depicted as the world's most dangerous assassin, a man with international contacts that allow him to strike efficiently and anonymously at locations anywhere on the globe. His actual name (Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez) is used and details - a mixture of fact and fiction - are given about his upbringing and training, including the fictional account that he trained with Russian intelligence at Novgorod.

Alfred Tennyson (note: previously this site had the answer as 'Alexander Pope' which is incorrect as Pope comes third).

Tennyson wrote a number of phrases that have become commonplaces of the English language, including: "nature, red in tooth and claw", "better to have loved and lost", "Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to do and die", and "My strength is as the strength of ten,/Because my heart is pure".

A Bridge Too Far (1974)

It details the ill-fated assault by airborne forces on the Netherlands culminating in the battle of Arnhem and was made into a major motion picture in 1977.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

The novel was published in 1988, and on Feb 14, 1989, Ayatollah of Iran issued a fatwa calling on all Muslims to execute all those involved in the publication of the novel.

William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey

The Lake Poets all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement.

On War

On War is actually an unfinished work; Clausewitz had set about revising his accumulated manuscripts in 1827, but did not live to finish the task.

The birth of Kunta Kinte of Alex Haley's 'Roots'.

She was an English translator whose translations of nineteenth-century Russian classics first introduced them on a wide basis to the English public.

In 1893, shortly after a visit to Moscow and Petersburg during which she met Leo Tolstoy, she started translating Russian literature, which became her life's passion and resulted in English-language versions of dozens of volumes by Tolstoy, Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Turgenev, Ostrovsky and Chekhov.

Abbey Theatre

The Abbey first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904 and, despite losing its original building to a fire in 1951, it has continued to stage performances more or less continuously to the present day.

Thomas Hardy

Gore Vidal

Twenty years after its publication, Vidal changed the ending to what he had originally in mind, no longer having to defer to the wishes of his publisher, in The City and the Pillar Revised.

Mata Hari

Khalil Gibran (1883-1931)

He was born in Lebanon and spent much of his productive life in the United States. One of his most notable lines of poetry in the English speaking world is from 'Sand and Foam' (1926), which reads : 'Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you'. This was taken by John Lennon and placed, though in a slightly altered form, into the song Julia from The Beatles' 1968 album The Beatles (a.k.a. The White Album).

Epic of Gilgamesh

The essential story revolves around the relationship between Gilgamesh, a king who has become distracted and disheartened by his rule, and a friend, Enkidu, who is half-wild and who undertakes dangerous quests with Gilgamesh. Much of the epic focuses on Gilgamesh's feelings of loss following Enkidu's death, and is often credited by historians as being one of the first literary works with high emphasis on immortality. The epic is widely read in translation, and the hero, Gilgamesh has become an icon of popular culture.

The Catskill Mountains

The story is a close adaptation of Peter Klaus the Goatherd by J.C.C. Nachtigal, which is a shorter story set in a German village. The choice of "Van Winkle" for the character's name may have been influenced by the fact that Irving's New York publisher was C. S. Van Winkle.

Sinclair Lewis (1885 - 1951)

Some of his most famous books were 'Main Street' and 'Babbitt'. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 — which he rejected — for 'Arrowsmith', a novel about an idealistic doctor. 'Elmer Gantry' was the story of an opportunistic evangelist, if not an outright charlatan. It was banned in Boston and other U.S. cities; Main Street, Babbitt, Kingsblood Royal, and Cass Timberlane all were banned in their turn.

Bluejays

Maudie later explains that it is a sin because mockingbirds do no harm. They only provide pleasure with their songs: "They don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us". The mockingbird is used as a recurring motif to symbolise innocence and victims of injustice throughout the novel. It is a symbol of innocence and beauty against racism and hatred.

What magnificent adventures follow?

X is Sindbad and he proceeds to narrate his seven wondrous voyages.

The Arabian Nights, the collection of stories in which the cycle of Sinbad is found, takes the form of tales told by the beautiful maiden Scheherazade over a period of a thousand and one nights. At the close of the 536th night, Scheherazade gives the setting for the tales of Sinbad.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 - 1873)

Lord Lytton was a florid, popular writer of his day, who coined such phrases as "the great unwashed", "pursuit of the almighty dollar", "the pen is mightier than the sword", and the infamous incipit "It was a dark and stormy night." in his 1830 novel 'Paul Clifford'. Despite the popularity in his heyday, today his name is known as a byword for bad writing.

Plato's 'Republic'

It is a perfect version of Republic wherein the beauties of society reign (eg: equalism and a general pacifist attitude), although its citizens are all ready to fight if need be.

The First Folio

Its actual title is Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. Printed in folio format and containing 36 plays, it was prepared by Shakespeare's colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. Although eighteen of Shakespeare's plays had been published in quarto prior to 1623, the First Folio is the only reliable text for about twenty of the plays, and a valuable source text even for many of those previously published. The Folio includes all of the plays generally accepted to be Shakespeare's, with the exception of 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre' and 'The Two Noble Kinsmen'.

Anton Chekov (1860-1904)

Chekhov is now the most popular playwright in the English-speaking world after Shakespeare; but some writers believe his short stories represent the greater achievement. Raymond Carver, who wrote the short story 'Errand' about Chekhov's death, believed Chekhov the greatest of all short-story writers.

Alex Haley for Roots

Haley claimed that the appropriation of Courlander's passages had been unintentional. He has been accused of fictionalizing true stories in both his book Roots and The Autobiography Of Malcolm X.

Kaavya Viswanathan

The Harvard Crimson reported that several portions of 'How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got A Life' appeared to have been plagiarized from 'Sloppy Firsts' and 'Second Helpings', both written by Megan McCafferty. On April 26, 2006, Viswanathan appeared on The Today Show with Katie Couric. In the interview with Couric, she maintained her innocence, saying that any and all similarities were "completely unintentional" and that she must have "internalized" those details without realizing it.

Layla and Majnun

There were two Arabic versions of the story at the time.In one version, he spent his youth together with Layla tending their flocks. In the other version, upon seeing Layla he fell in a most passionate love with her. In both versions, however, he went mad when her father prevented him from marrying her; for that reason he came to be called Majnun Layla, which means "Driven mad by Layla". To him were attributed a variety of incredibly passionate romantic Arabic poems.

'Cat's Cradle' by Kurt Vonnegut

The novel explores issues of science, technology and religion, satirizing the arms race and many other targets along the way. Having turned down his original thesis, in 1971 the University of Chicago awarded Vonnegut his Master's degree in anthropology for Cat's Cradle.

The Jungle Book stories and Kim

The junior movement is called the Wolf Cubs. These connections still exist today. Not only is the movement named after Mowgli's adopted wolf family, the adult helpers of Wolf Cub Packs adopt names taken from The Jungle Book, especially the adult leader who is called Akela after the leader of the Seeonee wolf pack.

A Giant Marlin

Though the book has been the subject of disparate criticism, it is noteworthy in twentieth century fiction and in Hemingway's canon, reaffirming his worldwide literary prominence and significant in his selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards

It operated in the New City community area of Chicago, Illinois for 106 years, helping the city become known as "hog butcher to the world" and the center of the American meat packing industry for decades. From the Civil War until the 1920s and peaking in 1924, more meat was processed in Chicago than in any other place in the world.

Poets Corner

The first person to be interred there was Geoffrey Chaucer, whose burial in the abbey owed more to his position as Clerk of Works of the Palace of Westminster than to his fame as a writer.

Gothic fiction

Prominent features of gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets and hereditary curses.

'Things Fall Apart' by Chinua Achebe

It has achieved the status of the archetypal modern African novel in English and is widely read. It was followed by two sequels, 'No Longer at Ease' (1960, originally written as the second part of a larger work together with 'Things Fall Apart'), and 'The Arrow of God' (1964), both featuring the descendants of Okonkwo and the problems they face under colonialism.

Bloomsbury Group

The group's contributions were primarily in the worlds of literature and art, although prominent economist Maynard Keynes also socialized with them frequently. The writers of the group included Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf.

A Sound of Thunder

It was first published in Collier's magazine in 1952. The Locus Index to Science Fiction Anthologies and Collections lists it as the first of the top ten most republished science fiction stories.

And Then There Were None

Ten people, each with a deadly secret, find themselves trapped on an island where they become the subjects of a cruel game played by a figure styling himself Mr. U. N. Owen ("Unknown"). They are killed according to an old nursery rhyme, Ten Little Indians.

451 degrees Fahrenheit is stated as "the temperature at which book-paper catches fire and burns …".

The novel reflects several major concerns of the time of its writing: what Bradbury has called "the thought-destroying force" of censorship in the 1950s, the book-burnings in Nazi Germany starting in 1933, Stalin's suppression of authors and books in the Soviet Union, and the horrible consequences of the explosion of a nuclear weapon.

Three Men in a Boat (1889) by Jerome K. Jerome

A Limerick

The archetypal "man from Nantucket" is a recurring theme in limericks. This can be attributed to the many whalers who once lived on Nantucket and the popularity of the limerick genre in whaling culture.

Stream of consciousness

It is a literary technique which seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose internal interior monologue, or in connection to his or her sensory reactions to external ocurrences.

Ovid, Horace and Virgil

V.S. Naipaul

It was precipitated by a falling-out between the two men a few years earlier.

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)

Wole Soyinka

He is a Nigerian writer, poet and playwright and some consider him Africa's most distinguished playwright. Soyinka has played an active role in Nigeria's political history. In 1967, during the Nigerian Civil War he was arrested by the Federal Government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for his attempts at brokering a peace between the warring parties.

Rapunzel

Walter Scott

Among the early critics of Scott was Mark Twain, who blamed Scott's "romantacization of battle" for the South's decision to fight the US Civil War.

George Smiley

Smiley is sometimes considered the anti-Bond in the sense that Bond is an unrealistic figure who relies on gadgets and is more a portrayal of a male fantasy than a realistic government agent. George Smiley, on the other hand, is quiet, mild-mannered and middle-aged. He lives by his wits and, unlike Bond, is a master of bureaucratic manoeuvring rather than gunplay.

Goneril, Regan and Cordelia

Iago (Othello)

Iago is one of Shakespeare's most sinister villains.

King Solomon's mines

Rider Haggard wrote the novel as a result of a wager with his brother, namely that he could not write a novel half as good as Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Treasure Island' (1883).

They were 'Waiting for Godot'. These are the two primary characters in the famous play.

Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play by Samuel Beckett, written in the late 1940s and first published in 1952. It originally received widely varied reactions from critics, and was seen as deliberately obscure, with Beckett himself resolutely refusing to aid interpretation by saying, "It means what it says."

Bloomsday

The day is a secular holiday in Ireland. The name derives from Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, and 16 June was the date of Joyce's first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, when they walked to the Dublin village of Ringsend.

Douglas Adams

He is best known as author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

Margaret Salinger, daughter of J.D. Salinger

The Wretched of the Earth

It is Frantz Fanon's best-known work, written during and regarding the Algerian struggle for independence from colonial rule. As a psychiatrist, Fanon explored the psychological effect of colonisation on the psyche of a nation as well as its broader implications for building a movement for decolonization. It has become a handbook for political leaders faced with any type of decolonization and is still read in the Pentagon today as advice on dealing with the conflict in Iraq.

Edgar Allan Poe (X - Poe)

The unexplained tradition began in 1949 and has occurred on the author's birthday (January 19) of every year since. In the early hours of the morning on that date, a black-clad figure with a silver-tipped cane enters the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore, Maryland. The individual proceeds to Poe's grave, where he or she raises a cognac toast. Before departing, the Toaster leaves three red roses and a half-bottle of cognac on the grave. The roses are believed to represent Poe, his wife Virginia, and his mother-in-law Maria Clemm, all three of whom are interred at the site. The significance of the cognac itself is unknown. Many of the bottles left behind have been taken and stored by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore.

The classic Panchatantra

The original Sanskrit text, now long lost, and which some scholars guess might have been written around 200 BCE, is attributed to Vishnu Sarma.

Purgatory

Paradise is divided into 9 spheres.

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."

It is often interpreted as "things are what they are". In Stein's view, the sentence expresses the fact that simply using the name of a thing already invokes the imagery and emotions associated with it.

Beatrix Potter (1866 - 1943)

The basis of her many projects and stories were the small animals that she smuggled into the house or observed during family holidays in Scotland and the Lake District.

Yukio Mishima

He is recognized as one of the most important post-war stylists of the Japanese language. Mishima wrote 40 novels, 18 plays, 20 books of short stories, and at least 20 books of essays as well as one libretto.

Sidney Sheldon

His TV works spanned a 20-year period during which he created I Dream of Jeannie (1965-70), Hart to Hart (1979-84), and The Patty Duke Show (1963-66), but it was not until after he turned 50 and began writing best-selling novels such as Master of the Game (1982), The Other Side of Midnight (1973) and Rage of Angels (1980) that he became most famous.

Robinson Crusoe

The story was probably influenced by the real-life events of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway marooned on a Pacific island (currently Alexander Selkirk Island, Chile) for four years.

Moby Dick

The novel describes the voyage of Captain Ahab, who leads his crew on a hunt for the great whale. The book's language is highly symbolic, and many themes run throughout the work and the novel is often considered the epitome of American Romanticism.

Robinson Crusoe

Nobel Prize-winning (2003) author J. M. Coetzee in 1986 published a novel entitled Foe, in which he explores an alternative telling of the Crusoe story, an allegorical story about racism, philosophy, and colonialism.

The Day of the Jackal

As published in the Israeli press at the time, police investigators believed that the assassination was partially inspired by the book, and that Amir used it as a kind of "how to" manual.

The Wild Duck (1884)

Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

Nick Carraway

Wide Sargasso Sea

It was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923.

Picaresque

This style of novel originated in Spain and flourished in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and continues to influence modern literature. Some modern novelists have used some picaresque techniques, as Gogol in 'Dead Souls' (1842-52). Rudyard Kipling's 'Kim' (1901) combined the influence of the picaresque novel with the then new spy novel. Jaroslav Hašek's 'The Good Soldier Svejk' (1923?) was the first example of the picaresque technique in Central Europe. Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' was consciously written as a picaresque novel, as were many other novels of vagabond life, such as Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road' (1957) and Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer'. Saul Bellow's 'The Adventures of Augie March' is a picaresque novel.

'The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency' by Alexander McCall Smith

The series is generally light-hearted, though it touches on serious issues such as domestic violence and clinical depression.

Robert A. Heinlein

In his fiction, Heinlein coined words that have become part of the English language, including "grok", "TANSTAAFL" and "waldo."

Babar the Elephant

Which one?

'The Lady or the Tiger' by Frank Stockton

Did the princess save her love by pointing to the door leading to the lady-in-waiting, or did she prefer to see her lover die rather than see him marry someone else? That discussion hook has made the story a staple in English classes in American schools, especially since Stockton was careful never to hint at what he thought the ending would be.

Oliver Mellors

The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence's own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Ilkeston in Derbyshire where he lived for a while. According to some critics the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues also influenced the story. The publication of the book caused a scandal due to its explicit sex scenes, including previously banned four-letter words, and perhaps particularly because the lovers were a working-class male and an aristocratic female.

'The Riddle of the Sands' (1903) by Erskine Childers

It was one of the early invasion novels which predicted war with Germany and called for British preparedness. The plot involves the uncovering of secret German preparations for an invasion of the United Kingdom.

Pablo Neruda (1904 - 1973)

Having his works translated into dozens of languages, Pablo Neruda is considered one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century. Critic and biographer Alistair Reid has stated that Neruda is the most widely read poet since William Shakespeare. In 1971, Neruda was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature after several years of being overlooked for his political activism.

A Passage to India by E.M.Forster

It is set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. Arguably Forester's finest novel, it was selected as one of the 100 great works of English literature by the Modern Library.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the Prime Minister of India

Gerald Durrell (1925-1995)

He founded what is now called the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Jersey Zoo (now renamed Durrell Wildlife) on the Channel Island of Jersey in 1958, but is perhaps best remembered for writing a number of books based on his life as an animal collector and enthusiast.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)