Literature

Key Facts Initial reception for Murder on the Orient Express was overwhelmingly positive. The Times Literary Supplement from January 11, 1934 said stated that the crime would have been perfect had not Poirot been on board to solve the mystery. Other reviews around the world were equally positive in their view of the novel, seeing it as one of the finest examples of...

From: Literature Guides

Summary The novel is the tragic story of Okonkwo, the protagonist, and the Igbo culture of Nigeria. We learn from the outset that Okonkwo is a respected leader among the Igbo community in Umuofia, in eastern Nigeria. Though he grew up under the perceived weakness of his father, he his determined from an early age to distinguish himself. He first gains...

From: Literature Guides

If you are new to writing poetry, there is a strong likelihood that you spend most of your time making sure that each line rhymes. But, rhyme isn’t the only device that can be used to make sure that a poem sounds as good as it can. In fact, it isn’t even specifically necessary that a poem rhymes at all....

From: Poetry

CONTENTS Much of Huxley’s novel was directly inspired by places and things that really existed. Huxley visited San Francisco in 1920s and was struck by what he saw as rampant consumerism and unrestricted promiscuity in American youth culture. He saw this type of mass behavior as indicative of the world to come, a world driven entirely by physically and fleetingly...

From: Literature Guides

CONTENTS Introduction Nearly three thousand years ago, sometime between 800 and 600 BCE, the inhabitants of what is now known as Greece passed the time by relaying tales about a war of tremendous proportions. The individual credited for collecting all of these stories and sharing them as one unified collection was a man known only as Homer, who wrote the...

From: Literature Guides

Key facts Margaret Atwood’s novel was originally titled Offred. The atmosphere of paranoia in Atwood’s novel was inspired by  Orwell’s 1984 as well as her experience of feeling as if she was being spied on when she was writing the novel in 1984 in West Berlin before the fall of the Berlin wall. The novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award...

From: Literature Guides

Quotations and Analysis “It’s a great huge game of chess that’s being played—all over the world—if this is the world at all, you know.” Alice says this in Chapter 2 as she looks out on a landscape which appears to be a large chess board. She deduces that Looking-Glass World is like a great chess game, much like her own world....

From: Literature Guides

Key Facts Antoine de Saint-Exupéry used his love for doodling to create his own watercolor illustrations for The Little Prince. The Little Prince was first published in the U.S in English and French but would be later translated into over 250 languages. The French version of the novel was titled Le Petit Prince. It is said that the character of...

From: Literature Guides

Important Themes Trial by Jury This theme is problematic in Murder on the Orient Express. While Poirot solves a complicated crime, which implicates everyone on board the train, he also finds that those guilty of the crime acted in order to punish a man for another heinous crime. Those guilty on the train consist of 12 people, the same number...

From: Literature Guides

Introduction Flowers for Algernon is an award winning science-fiction novel written by Daniel Keyes in 1966 and is a form of social criticism influenced by Freud’s theory of Psychoanalysis which was prevailing at the time. Keyes’ novel is among the 100 most challenged books and it’s been banned in many libraries numerous times for its explicit sexual content. The novel is...

From: Literature Guides