I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Angelou took the title from a poem of Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African-American poet whose works she had admired for years.
(Acknowledgement)

Maus by Art Spiegelman

Known for telling a holocaust story with people represented as animals, it became the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer.
(Acknowledgement)

The Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown

These are some of the clues which steer Langdon to the solution to the mystery.

Nasreddin Hodja

He appears in thousands of stories that are known in most parts of Asia.
(Acknowledgement)

Dostoyevsky

The crime of course has parallels to what happens in the classic Crime and Punishment.
(Acknowledgement)

Elmore Leonard

Among his best-known works are Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Hombre, Mr. Majestyk, and Rum Punch (which became the movie Jackie Brown directed by Tarantino).
(Acknowledgement)

Animal Farm by George Orwell

In the letter, Eliot argued that Orwell's "view, which I take to be Trotskyite, is not convincing." He took particular umbrage with Orwell's characterization of the pigs on Animal Farm. Napoleon, a Berkshire boar thought to be based on Stalin, triumphs, despite being the novel's baddie. He battles with Snowball, a much nicer pig modeled on Leon Trotsky, who genuinely works for the good of the other animals. It is Napoleon's bully boy tactics which seem to win the day, while Snowball is chased off the farm by dogs. This mirrored Trotsky's deportation from the Soviet Union after he criticized Stalin.
(Acknowledgement)

The Count of Monte Cristo (or) Edmond Dantès

In the popular 1844 novel of French author Alexandre Dumas (père).
(Acknowledgement)

Pollyanna

Pollyanna is a best-selling 1913 novel by Eleanor H. Porter that is now considered a classic of children's literature, with the title character's name becoming a popular term for someone with an optimistic outlook.
(Acknowledgement)

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

In the novel, Rochester's wife Bertha Mason is kept locked in the attic by her husband.
(Acknowledgement)

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans

The work was set around three white sharecropping families mired in desperate poverty at the time of FDR's New Deal.
(Acknowledgement)

Edwin Drood

G. K. Chesterton, best known for the Father Brown mystery stories, was the judge, while George Bernard Shaw was the foreman of the jury, made up of other authors. The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the final and incomplete novel by Charles Dickens in which the focus is on Drood's uncle, choirmaster John Jasper.
(Acknowledgement)

Translations

Most of their translations are of works in Russian, but also French, Italian, and Greek.
(Acknowledgement)

Locked-room mysteries

The Hollow Man was selected in 1981 as the best locked-room mystery of all time by a panel of 17 mystery authors and reviewers.
(Acknowledgement)

Kunta Kinte (Roots)

(Acknowledgement)

Dr. (Johann Georg) Faust

The cellar is described in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's play Faust I as the first place Mephistopheles takes Faust on their travels.
(Acknowledgement)

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;

The idea for the poem came as she was travelling to attend a ball. On her way to the celebration, there was a young woman dressed in black sitting across the aisle from her. The woman was crying. Miss Wheeler sat next to her and sought to comfort her for the rest of the journey. When they arrived, the poet was so unhappy that she could barely attend the festivities. As she looked at her own face in the mirror, she suddenly recalled the sorrowful widow. It was at that moment that she wrote the opening lines of the poem which was first published in a 1883 issue of The New York Sun.
(Acknowledgement)

Patricia Cornwell (creator of Dr. Kay Scarpetta)

She wrote Portrait of a Killer—Jack the Ripper: Case Closed, which was published in 2002 to much controversy.
(Acknowledgement)

Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Set in south-central England, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural environment, they are anthropomorphised.
(Acknowledgement)

Bear and dragon (The Bear and the Dragon)

Mark Twain

He invested not only the bulk of his book profits but also a large portion of the inheritance of his wife.
(Acknowledgement)

Severus Snape from the Harry Potter world

(Acknowledgement)

John F. T. Jane

Namesake of Jane's Defense Weekly, among others.
(Acknowledgement)

Kazuo Ishiguro (about The Remains of the Day)

(Acknowledgement)

The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Poe

It is considered the best example of Poe's "totality", where every element and detail is related and relevant.
(Acknowledgement)

(Sperm) whale

Inspiring Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.

Arthur C. Clarke

Clarke emigrated to Sri Lanka in 1956, largely to pursue his interest in scuba diving.
(Acknowledgement)

Center of the earth

In Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. After their adventures, the travelers emerge out in southern Italy at the Stromboli volcano.
(Acknowledgement)

Pelican

It goes:
A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week
But I'm damned if I see how the helican!

(Acknowledgement)

Willows

(Acknowledgement)

Rain

It was made into a 1932 film starring Joan Crawford and Walter Huston.

The Haj

Poseidon

It concerns the capsizing of a luxurious ocean liner, the SS Poseidon, due to an undersea earthquake, and the desperate struggles of a handful of survivors to reach the bottom of the liner's hull before the ship sinks. The adaptations were in 1972, 1976, 2005, and 2006.
(Acknowledgement)

Firebird

The hint refers to the ballet, of course.

Doctor Doolittle

Aramis

The protagonist Jamal randomly picks the right answer and wins the grand prize.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Mowat's book is Never Cry Wolf.

Isaac Asimov

Most of the sixty-six stories follow the same basic convention: the six club members meet once a month at a private room at the Milano restaurant in New York.
(Acknowledgement)

Iago

From Othello.

Snow leopard

The Wise Men

(Acknowledgement)

Where the Wild Things Are by Sendak

He replaced the horses with caricatures of his aunts and uncles.

Copenhagen (2000)

It won the Tony Award for Best Play.

The Tay Bridge Disaster

McGonagall is widely acclaimed as the worst poet in history.
(Acknowledgement)

Guy Fawkes

Sanatorium

As his very goodness precipitates disaster, the story suggests that in a world obsessed with money, power, and sexual conquest, a sanatorium may be the only place for a saint.

Narrators are murderers

The Plague by Camus

Camus was born in Algeria and lived for several years there.

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

The lower portion of the cover is is a triptych, framed in a wooden border.

The Hound of the Bakervilles

This wide expanse of peat bog continues to be dangerous to walkers, especially after heavy rain.
(Acknowledgement)

As Henry Higgins in Shaw's Pygmalion

Homosexuality

The book is based on the true story of Roy and Silo, two male Chinstrap Penguins in New York's Central Park Zoo. Due to the penguin parents being of the same sex, some adults in the United States have objected to children reading the book.

JFK

(Acknowledgement)

He serves a man and not a household

The Count of Monte Cristo

Fatwa on Salman Rushdie

The publication of The Satanic Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in the Islamic world because of what was perceived as an irreverent depiction of the prophet Muhammad.

Swallow and Amazon

The series of 12 books starts with Swallows and Amazons. They involve adventures by groups of children almost all during the school holidays and mostly in England and Scotland, between the two World Wars. The stories revolve around outdoor activities, especially sailing.
(Acknowledgement)

Ernest Hemingway

One of them was first given to him by a ship's captain. Upon Hemingway's death in 1961, his former home in Key West, Florida, became a museum and a home for his cats, and it currently houses approximately fifty descendants of his cats.
(Acknowledgement)

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt

Roman history

Mommsen published over 1,500 works, and effectively established a new framework for the systematic study of Roman history. Gibbon's important work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788.

An apple and an orange!

Very appropriate for the contents within.

The Shipping Forecast

In the 2012 opening ceremony for the Olympic Games in London, the shipping forecast was played in the opening part of the production with Elgar's 'Nimrod' to represent the British Isles. It is immensely popular with the British public and it daily attracts listeners in the hundreds of thousands.
(Acknowledgement)

The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith

In the book, the dogs are kidnapped for their fur.

The Four Million

The collection opens as "assertion that there were only 'Four Hundred' people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen-the census taker-and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the 'Four Million.'"

Gormenghast

In the books, it is home to the ancient House of Groan.

Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) by Luigi Pirandello

An absurdist metatheatrical play about the relationship between authors, their characters, and theatre practitioners

Long names

It is a sort of origin myth about why Chinese names are so short today.

Brontë sisters

U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos

It covers the historical development of American society during the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Hunting man-eating animals, mostly big cats

Corbett authored the Man-Eaters of Kumaon, Jungle Lore and other books recounting his hunts and experiences, which enjoyed much critical acclaim and commercial success. He later became a conservationist.

Jack the Ripper's

The essay is not essentially about murders, but about British habits.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The garden is the book's central symbol, inspired by Burnett's interest in Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science theories. The secret garden at Misselthwaite Manor is the site of both the near-destruction and the subsequent regeneration of a family.
(Acknowledgement)

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

He wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway).
(Acknowledgement)

Shangri-La (from James Hilton's Lost Horizon)

The remote communities Rock visited show many similarities to the fictional Shangri-La.

Arthur Conan Doyle talking about his favorite Holmes' story

John Keats (1795-1821)

Keats wrote the first five poems, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Indolence, Ode on Melancholy, Ode to a Nightingale, and Ode to Psyche during the spring, and he composed To Autumn in September.
(Acknowledgement)

The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck

Jack Kerouac

Though sales were also poor at first, Kerouac's introduction helped it reach a larger audience because of the popularity of the Beat phenomenon.

Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc

It is a parody of the cautionary tales that were popular in the 19th century.

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

The work begins 'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.'

Pasta

The book won a Caldecott Honor in 1976.

Steppenwolf by Hesse

Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet

Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad

The story tells the tale of an introverted academic who happens upon a strange whistle which when blown unleashes a supernatural force.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep"

From Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost.

Why did Dante choose Virgil as a guide in The Divine Comedy?

It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature.

Mowgli (note that the name does not mean 'frog')

He is a feral child from Pench area in Central India who originally appeared in Rudyard Kipling's short story In the Rukh and then went on to become the most prominent and memorable character in The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book. Lost by his parents in the Indian jungle during a tiger attack, he is adopted by the wolves Mother (Raksha) and Father Wolf, who call him Mowgli the Frog because of his lack of fur and his refusal to sit still.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Ang Lee's 2000 film includes episodes and information from some of the other books in the series, apart from the novel which shares the same title as the film.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig

The trip is punctuated by numerous philosophical discussions. The book was originally rejected by 121 publishers, more than any other bestselling book, according to the Guinness Book.

The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

The book also contains a powerful anti-war and anti-Stalinist message, an extended analysis of communism and the Communist Party in England from the 1930s to the 1950s, and a famed examination of the budding sexual and women's liberation movements.

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Describing the land around the author's home in Sauk County, Wisconsin, the collection of essays advocate Leopold's idea of a "land ethic", or a responsible relationship existing between people and the land they inhabit. In a 1990 poll of the membership by the American Nature Study Society, A Sand County Almanac and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring stand alone as the two most venerated and significant environmental books of the 20th century.

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury

Bradbury has stated that the novel is not about censorship, but a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature, which leads to a perception of knowledge as being composed of factoids, partial information devoid of context.

Euclid's Elements

(Acknowledgement)

The Mahabharata by Vyasa

It is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, the other being the Ramayana.

Bell curve

The book was controversial, especially those parts in which the authors wrote about racial differences in intelligence and discussed the implications of those differences. The authors were reported throughout the popular press as arguing that these IQ differences are genetic.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837)

He fought with his wife's alleged lover and lost his life after sustaining wounds.

Allan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines

Translation of the Authorized Version (King James Version) of the Bible

The graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore (artist Dave Gibbons and colorist John Higgins)

The novel depicts an alternate history where superheroes emerged in the 1940s and 1960s, helping the United States to win the Vietnam War. The literal translation of Juvenal's quote is "Who will guard the guards themselves?" but it is popularly rendered as "Who watches the watchmen?"

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

The main character is Mma Precious Ramotswe, who features as the stories' protagonist and main detective.

The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade

Due to its themes of sexual violence and extreme cruelty, it has frequently been banned.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

Is this all?

The book is widely credited with sparking the beginning of second-wave feminism in the United States.

I Ching

It is also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi and has a significant influence on the culture of China.

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

The goat belongs to Esmeralda, or La Esmeralda whose birth name is Agnes.

Emma Bovary from Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Long established as one of the greatest novels ever written, the book has often been described as a 'perfect' work of fiction.
(Acknowledgement)

Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

Wimpy kid

The series is Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney.

Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

Golden listed Iwasaki as a source in his acknowledgments for the novel, causing her to face a serious backlash. In 2003, Golden's publisher settled with Iwasaki out of court for an undisclosed sum of money. Iwasaki later went on to write her own autobiography, which shows a very different picture of twentieth-century geisha life than the one shown in Golden's novel. The book was published as Geisha, a Life in the U.S. and Geisha of Gion in the U.K.

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"Call me Ishmael."

From Moby-Dick, of course.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Hobbit

The Oxford English Dictionary since the 1970s has credited Tolkien with the invention of the word. Since then, however, it has been noted that there is prior evidence of the word, in a 19th century list of legendary creatures.

Chicken Soup for the Soul

It was started by speakers Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield.
(Acknowledgement)

A Moveable Feast

It is about his years in Paris as part of the American expatriate circle of writers in the 1920s.

George Smiley

At the time the Holmes stories were published, 221B Baker Street did not exist but Smiley's address is an actual existing address.

Miss Havisham from Great Expectations

Dickens though never visited Australia.

80 days

The proposed schedule in Verne's classic Around the World in Eighty Days.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Matsuo Bashō (known for his haiku verses)

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

Rome

The book is about the computer modeling of unchecked economic and population growth with finite resource supplies. It predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil.

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

A major preoccupation of Hesse in writing the book was to cure his 'sickness with life' (Lebenskrankheit) by immersing himself in Indian philosophy such as that expanded in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.

Anton Chekov

Chekhov's gun is the term for a literary technique whereby an apparently irrelevant element is introduced early in the story whose significance becomes clear later in the narrative. It is often interpreted as a method of foreshadowing, but the concept can also be interpreted as meaning "do not include any unnecessary elements in a story."

The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll

The poem introduces the Bellman's rule-of-three: What I tell you three times is true.

The Vampyre by John William Polidori

The story is regarded as a progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

The dialogue is when Hamlet holds the skull of the court jester, Yorick, and says "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!" In 2005, Time included Infinite Jest in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.

Fagin from Oliver Twist

The novel refers to Fagin 257 times in the first 38 chapters as 'the Jew', while the ethnicity or religion of the other characters is rarely mentioned. After receiving a complaint, Dickens barely used the word to describe Fagin as such in the next 179 references in the further serialization of the novel.

The Canterbury Tales (1387) by Geoffrey Chaucer

The participants are a group of pilgrims as they travel together on a journey from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral. Structurally, the collection resembles The Decameron, which Chaucer may have known during his first diplomatic mission to Italy in 1372.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

Some critics believe that this story was added to One Thousand and One Nights by one of its European translators.

Tarzan

The Mangani language is depicted as a primal universal language shared by a number of primate species in the books.

The White Man's Burden

Although the poem mixed exhortation with sober warnings of the costs involved, imperialists within the United States understood the phrase as justifying imperialism as a noble enterprise.

For Dummies

The name of the cartoon comes from Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was Percy Shelley's wife.

Night by Elie Wiesel

It is the first book in a trilogy - Night, Dawn, and Day - reflecting Wiesel's state of mind during and after the Holocaust.

The Lord of the Rings (Bored of the Rings is the parody)

Bored of the Rings was written by Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney, who later founded National Lampoon. It was published in 1969 by Signet for the Harvard Lampoon.

Marcel Proust

Known for In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past of course.

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

London acknowledged using it as a source and claimed to have written a letter to Young thanking him.

"Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n"

From Paradise Lost, of course.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Kvetch

The Yiddish word 'kvetch' means 'to complain/to whine.'

Oz

Nickname of Dickens - Boz, Shelley poem - Ozymandias, Biblical home of Job - Land of Uz, what Baum saw on a file cabinet - O-Z. Snopes.com lists the origin as undetermined.

How Much Land Does a Man Need?

James Joyce once called it "the greatest story that the literature of the world knows."

"library"

It is from his Poema de los Dones (Poem of the Gifts) that he wrote after going blind. The poem talks about the the irony of God making him blind but giving him the love of books.

Isak Dinesen/ Karen Blixen

She is of course best known for Out of Africa.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe

It has been claimed as the first detective story.

China

The works are considered to be the pinnacle of China's achievement in classical novels, influencing the creation of many stories, theater, movies, games, and other entertainment throughout East Asia.

Gimpel the Fool

It was translated from Yiddish into English by Saul Bellow.

Scientology

All covers of post-1967 editions of the book feature an exploding volcano.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The novel follows Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier, and a number of other characters. Most events occur while the Airmen of the fictional 256th squadron are based on the said island.

Arthur Conan Doyle

The book was written in 1883 and 1884, a few years before the publication of A Study In Scarlet, the first story to feature Holmes.

The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

Mr. Micawber from David Copperfield

He was modelled on Dickens' father, John Dickens.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

It was studied, as if factual, in German classrooms after the Nazis came to power in 1933, despite having been exposed as fraudulent years before. It was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the twentieth century. Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies which were distributed throughout the United States in the 1920s.

Don Quixote

"benign indifference"

In the original French, the sentence is "la tendre indifférence du monde." The word 'gentle' replaces 'benign' in another translation.

Memory hole

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the memory hole is a small chute leading to a large incinerator used for censorship.

How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis

It documented the squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. Due to the recent invention of flash photography, Riis was able to capture the unlit areas of tenements and expose wretched working and living conditions.

Flying carpets

If- by Rudyard Kipling

The poem's line, "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same" is written on the wall of the Centre Court players' entrance at Wimbledon.

Isaac Asimov

The Three Laws form an organizing principle and unifying theme for Asimov's fiction. Runaround is notable for featuring the first explicit appearance of the Three Laws of Robotics, which had hitherto only been implied in Asimov's robot stories.

Mina Murray from Dracula, Allan Quatermain from King Solomon's Mines and Hawley Griffin from The Invisible Man

Essay

He became famous for his ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with anecdotes. His volume Essais (translated literally as Attempts) contains some of the most widely influential essays ever written.

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia")

The book was called "a novel traveling under the cover of autobiography," and is Lawrence's personal version of the historical events of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks of 1916 to 1918.

The Nine Billion Names of God

The story was the winner (in 2004) of the retrospective Hugo Award for Best Short Story for the year 1954 and also received a response from Dalai Lama.

Red Star Over China

Along with Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, it was the most influential book on Western understanding and sympathy for China in the 1930s.

Sohrab and Rustum

The Monkey's Paw

Joel Chandler Harris, known for recording Brer Rabbit stories

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Coral Island

Orhan Pamuk

Pamuk is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006 - the first Nobel Prize to be awarded to a Turkish citizen.

The Alexandria Quartet

Published between 1957 and 1960, the books present four perspectives on a single set of events and characters in Alexandria, Egypt, before and during World War II.

Professor Moriarty, the nemesis of Sherlock Holmes

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

It focuses on four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco, California who start a club known as "the Joy Luck Club," playing the Chinese game of mahjong for money while feasting on a variety of foods. The book is structured somewhat like a mahjong game, with four parts divided into four sections to create sixteen chapters.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon

Rabbit

All works of John Updike, of course

HIV/AIDS

Shilts' premise is that while AIDS is caused by a biological agent, incompetence and apathy toward those who were initially affected by AIDS allowed the spread of the disease to become much worse; AIDS was allowed to happen.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

The Luck of Barry Lyndon

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)

The novels present a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815.

Stieg Larsson

Known for his Millennium Trilogy, of course.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The book's epigraph reads: "Sixty Million and more," by which Morrison refers to the estimated number of slaves who died in the slave trade. A survey of writers and literary critics conducted by The New York Times found Beloved the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years.

Dr. Fu Manchu

The First Folio (collection of Shakespeare's complete plays)

Heminges and Condell were in a position to do this because they, like Shakespeare, worked for the King's Men, the London playing company that produced all of Shakespeare's plays (in Elizabethan England, plays belonged to the company that performed them, not to the dramatist who had written them).

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

The story is based upon a black family's experiences in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood. A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, as well as the first play with a black director (Lloyd Richards) on Broadway.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

The book met with a wide range of response, ranging from generally favorable to outright rejection of its approach. In 1998 it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the Royal Society's Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books.

V. S. Naipaul

It was selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the Times' 10 Best Books of 2008.

Italo Calvino

Mario Vargas Llosa

Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. Like many Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career; over the course of his life, he has gradually moved from the political left towards the right.

The Dark Tower series by Stephen King

They describe a "Gunslinger" and his quest toward a tower whose nature the books call both physical and metaphorical. King has described the series as his magnum opus.

Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot

The drama portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral.

Paris

The original bookstore's proprietor was Sylvia Beach. Between 1919 and 1941, the store was considered to be a center of Anglo/American literary culture in Paris. The shop was often visited by artists of the "Lost Generation," such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, George Antheil, Man Ray and James Joyce. The contents of the store were considered high quality and reflected Beach's own literary taste.

Flash (Gordon)

At the time, the predominant meaning of "flash" was "showy", connoting dishonesty.

Pyramus and Thisbe

The tale is told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses.

The Horla

The story has been cited as an inspiration for Lovecraft's own The Call of Cthulhu, which also features an extraterrestrial being who influences minds and who is destined to conquer humanity.

Curious George (the king was George VI)

In each of the books, Curious George is identified in the text as a monkey, though in the illustrations he does not correspond exactly to any non-fictional species of monkey (and has more of the characteristics of an ape, especially a chimpanzee, which does not possess a tail, as does a monkey). George is brought from his home in Africa by "The Man with The Yellow Hat" to live with him in a big city.

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

It tells the story of his childhood in Brooklyn and Ireland.

Banality of Evil

Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on Adolf Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker.

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Black Like Me

In 1959, at the time of the book's writing, race relations were particularly strained in North America; Griffin's aim was to explain the difficulties facing black people in certain areas. To expedite this, under the care of a doctor, Griffin artificially darkened his skin to pass as a black man.

Love's Labour's Lost

Things Fall Apart (1958)

Things Fall Apart was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease (1960), originally written as the second part of a larger work together with Things Fall Apart, and Arrow of God (1964), on a similar subject.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The lyrics describe a shooting on a beach, in which the Arab of the title is killed by the song's narrator; in Camus' story the main character, Meursault, shoots an Arab standing on a beach after staring out at the sea and being overwhelmingly blinded by the sun, reflected on the sea, the sand and the knife the Arab was holding. The track has a controversial history, since it has often been viewed as promoting violence against Arabs.

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)

The Theory of the Leisure Class

In the book, Veblen argues that economic life is driven not by notions of utility, but by social vestiges from pre-historic times. Drawing examples from his time (turn-of-the-Twentieth Century America) and anthropology, he held that much of today's society is a variation on early tribal life. According to Veblen, beginning with primitive tribes, people began to adopt a division of labor along certain lines. The "higher-status" group monopolized war and hunting while farming and cooking were considered inferior work.

Runcible spoon

Lear does not appear to have had any firm idea of what the word "runcible" means. His whimsical nonsense verse celebrates words primarily for their sound, and a specific definition is not needed to appreciate his work. However, since the 1920s (several decades after Lear's death), modern dictionaries have generally defined a runcible spoon to be a fork with three broad curved prongs and a sharpened edge, used with pickles or hors d'oeuvres, such as a pickle fork.

Ozymandias

Ozymandias was another name for Ramesses the Great, Pharaoh of the nineteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt. The poem is frequently anthologized and is probably Shelley's most famous short poem.

Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825)

He similarly edited Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His expurgation was the subject of some criticism and ridicule and, through the eponym bowdlerise (or bowdlerize), his name is now associated with censorship of literature, motion pictures and television programmes.

"salad days"

More modern use, especially in the United States, refers to a person's heyday when somebody was at the peak of his/her abilities-not necessarily in that person's youth.

Three Billy Goats Gruff

Penguin Island

The longest chapter and probably most well known is a satire of the Dreyfus affair.

Oh, the Places You'll Go!

It was first published by Random House on January 22, 1990, making it his last book published before his death. It is perhaps best known for the refrain, "Will you succeed? Yes, you will indeed. (98 3/4% guaranteed.)"

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever:"

This is the Keats poem Endymion which he based on the Greek myth of the shepherd Endymion who was beloved by the moon goddess Selene.

Reading Lolita in Teheran by Azar Nafisi

The title is an indirect reference to the Islamic state, which took power in 1979 and soon afterward lowered the marriage age for boys and girls.

Carlos Castenada (1925-1998)

The books and Castaneda, who rarely spoke in public about his work, have been controversial for many years.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

In Russia before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, landowners were entitled to own serfs to farm their land. Serfs were for most purposes considered the property of the landowner, and could be bought, sold, or mortgaged against, as any other chattel. To count serfs (and people in general), the measure word "soul" was used: e.g., "six souls of serfs." The plot of the novel relies on "dead souls" (i.e., "dead serfs") which are still accounted for in property registers.

Jane Austen (1775-1817)

The Moon and Sixpence

Based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin, it is told in episodic form by the first-person narrator as a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character, Charles Strickland, a middle aged English stock broker who abandons his wife and children abruptly in order to pursue his desire to become an artist. Presumably Strickland's "moon" is the idealistic realm of Art and Beauty, while the "sixpence" represents human relationships and the ordinary pleasures of life.

Comic book industry

It led to the creation of Comics Code Authority. At the height of its influence, it was a de facto censor for the U.S. comic book industry. The CCA had no legal authority over other publishers, but magazine distributors often refused to carry comics without the CCA's seal of approval.

Prince Edward VI (son of Henry VIII of England)

Though not as popular among critics as Twain's other works, the book has foreshadowed the author's successful forays into historical fiction with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land

Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem - its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures - the poem has nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and the Sanskrit "Shantih shantih shantih" (its last line).

Jeffrey Archer

Judgement of John M. Woolsey approving James Joyce's Ulysses

United States v. One Book Called Ulysses was a 1933 case in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dealing with free speech. At issue was whether James Joyce's novel was obscene. In deciding it was not, Judge John M. Woolsey opened the door to importation and publication of serious works of literature, even when they used coarse language or involved sexual subjects. The decision was affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, but it is Judge Woolsey's trial court opinion which is now often cited as an erudite and discerning affirmation of literary free speech.

The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss

Hersey asked toward the end of the article: Why should [school primers] not have pictures that widen rather than narrow the associative richness the children give to the words they illustrate - drawings like those of the wonderfully imaginative geniuses among children's illustrators, Tenniel, Howard Pyle, "Dr. Seuss", Walt Disney? Dr. Seuss responded to this "challenge," and began work. His publisher supplied him with a list of 400 words, ones that the publisher thought children would be learning in school. His publisher told him to cut the list in half and to try and write an interesting enough book for children. Nine months later Dr. Seuss created The Cat In The Hat, which used 223 words from the list he was given.

P. G. Wodehouse

During WWII, Wodehouse made a series of radio broadcasts aimed at America (but not England) that the Germans persuaded him to make from Berlin. Wartime England was in no mood for light-hearted banter, however, and the broadcasts led to many accusations of collaboration with the Nazis and even treason.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving

It also marks Irving's first use of the pseudonym "Geoffrey Crayon," which he would continue to employ throughout his literary career. The Sketch Book, along with James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, was the first widely read work of American literature in Britain and Europe. It also helped advance the reputation of American writers with an international audience.

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

The book is divided into twelve sections named after the months of the year. Each section begins with a recipe of some sort, involving Mexican foods. The chapters outline the preparation of the dish and ties it to an event in the protagonist's life. The phrase "like water for chocolate" comes from the Spanish "como agua para chocolate."
(Acknowledgement)

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

The books' titles are taken from actual streets in Cairo, the city of Mahfouz's childhood and youth. He was an Egyptian novelist who won the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature and who managed to modernize Arabic literature. He is regarded as one of the first writers of Arabic literature, along with Tawfiq el-Hakim, to explore themes of existentialism.

The Road to Serfdom

Hayek's central thesis is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which had gone down "the road to serfdom" and reached tyranny. Hayek argued that within a centrally planned economic system, the distribution and allocation of all resources and goods would devolve onto a small group, which would be incapable of processing all the information pertinent to the appropriate distribution of the resources and goods at the central planners' disposal. Disagreement about the practical implementation of any economic plan combined with the inadequacy of the central planners' resource management would invariably necessitate coercion in order for anything to be achieved.

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

The focus of the book is to provide the history of World War I from the declaration of war through the start of the Franco-British offensive that stopped the German advance through France. In addition, the book provides a brief history of the plans, strategies, world events and international sentiments prior to and during the war. The Pulitzer Prize nomination committee was unable to award it the prize for outstanding history because Joseph Pulitzer's will specifically stated that the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for history must be a book on American history. Instead, Tuchman was given the prize for general non-fiction.

Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

The money available was insufficient to support the project, so it was neglected for a time. That changed when his estate began earning significant royalties from the rights to Pygmalion once My Fair Lady became a hit. However, the Public Trustee found grounds to challenge the will as being badly worded. In the end an out-of-court settlement granted only £8600 for promoting the new alphabet, which is now called the Shavian alphabet.

Albert Camus

Scarlett O'Hara

A Room of One's Own

The essay examines whether women were capable of producing work of the quality of William Shakespeare, amongst other topics.

Animal Liberation

Singer himself rejected the use of the theoretical framework of rights when it comes to animals: he argued that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to feel suffering and that the idea of rights was not necessary in order to consider them. The central argument of the book is an expansion of the utilitarian idea that 'the greatest good for the greatest number' is the only measure of good or ethical behaviour. Singer argues that there is no reason not to apply this to animals.

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:"

Kubla Khan, or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment is a famous poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which takes its title from the Mongol and Chinese emperor Kublai Khan of the Yuan dynasty.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence

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.

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.

V. S. Naipaul

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Švejk 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 as well.

Wide Sargasso Sea

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

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 Jungle by Upton Sinclair

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.

Edgar Allan Poe

In 2010, for the first time since 1949, the Poe Toaster did not make his annual appearance at the grave.

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.

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.

On War

It was written mostly after the Napoleonic wars, between 1816 and 1830, and published posthumously by his wife in 1832. Clausewitz integrates politics and social and economic issues as some of the most important factors in deciding the outcomes of a war.

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.

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.

To Kill a Mockingbird

The mockingbird is used as a recurring motif to symbolise innocence and victims of injustice throughout the novel.

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.

Boris Pasternak

Thomas Hardy

Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

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.

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.

J. D. Salinger

The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill

The play contains many allusions to political topics, particularly anarchism and socialism.

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.

Mines of King Solomon

Rider Haggard wrote King Solomon's Mines 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).

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.

The Riddle of the Sands

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.

She was an English translator whose translations of nineteenth-century Russian classics 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.

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.

Purgatory

Mata Hari

Alfred Tennyson

Some other phrases by Tennyson that have become commonplace in the English language include: "nature, red in tooth and claw", "better to have loved and lost" and "My strength is as the strength of ten,/Because my heart is pure."

The Jungle Book 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.

Catskills

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.

Stories of Sindbad

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.

The Panchatantra

Literally 'Five Principles', it is a collection of originally Indian animal fables in verse and prose. The original Sanskrit work, now long lost, and which some scholars believe was composed in the 3rd century BCE, is attributed to Vishnu Sarma.

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.