Juliet Ivey

Poet Langston Hughes (1907–1967) and playwright August Wilson (1945–2005) created works that document and reflect the African American experience and struggle for equality in the twentieth century....

The 1950 short story “To Serve Man” by Damon Knight is a science fiction version of the classic proverb caveat emptor, buyer beware. The aliens in the story, the Kanamit, make a wonderful promise...

In Fahrenheit 451, author Ray Bradbury depicts a future totalitarian state in which ignorance and distractions are promoted, firemen burn books, and preserving works of literature becomes an act of...

In his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, author Ray Bradbury exaggerates elements of twentieth-century society in his depiction of a dystopian future society. This is meant as a way to explore how then...

The Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play Fences is part of playwright August Wilson’s Pittsburgh cycle. Written over a twenty-year period, the cycle presents the lives of African-Americans in...

In his 1932 memoir Black Elk Speaks, Oglala Lakota medicine man and Wounded Knee Massacre survivor Nicholas Black Elk shared his life, cultural traditions, and work with anthropologist and poet...

As a young adult novel, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a coming-of-age story, and therefore, relationships play a key role in Esperanza’s development as a character. How she...

In The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, protagonist and narrator Esperanza Cordero witnesses and experiences various forms of prejudice directed against her ethnicity while growing up in a...

Published in 1884, the novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott combines a satirical view of Victorian society in Britain with elements of science fiction and math theory...

Published in 1915, Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters presents the life histories of the residents of a small town through a series of free verse poems representing epitaphs on their...

The play The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter features a pianist named Stanley Webber who lives in a seaside boarding house owned by an older couple named Meg and Petey Boles. Their day begins with...

The novel The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis provides readers with a backstory about the origin of Narnia. The nephew in the title, Digory Kirke, goes through a development arc that will lead him...

In his short story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe employs his skills in description to give readers a definition impression of the Usher home and how it matches the psyches of...

The 1945 novella Animal Farm by George Orwell is an allegorical fable about power and corruption, as based on then-recent history of the Soviet Union. The narrator introduces Napoleon in chapter 2...

The Metamorphosis describes a tragic event in the Samsa family, yet on further examination, Kafka’s story can be read as a dark, surreal twist on tragicomedy. Plot, narrative structure, and the...

The poem “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll appears in the first chapter of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the author’s sequel to his previous novel Alice’s Adventures in...

When it comes to studying the works of James Thurber—and writing your own story while referencing his style—there are several themes to consider. Imagination “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was...

In examining Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, it becomes evident that books, literacy, and access to information shaped the...

In addition to its meditation on mortality, “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe also examines communication—both its possibilities and its limitations. “The Raven” is an example of Romanticism, a...

“The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka begins with one of the most memorable opening lines in literature: As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed...

In A Christmas Carol, the classic novella by Charles Dickens, an old miser named Ebenezer Scrooge must confront himself and make a decision about what kind of person he will be. A series of ghosts...

Published in 1919, Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson presents the lives of the residents of a small town through a series of related short stories. The main character who connects the stories is...

When analyzing tree imagery in literature, especially in a coming of age story like The House on Mango Street, it’s instructive to note how humans and trees have been connected in the history of...

Set during the Depression era, Brighton Beach Memoirs by Neil Simon is an autobiographical two-act play about the Jeromes, a Jewish family in Brooklyn. The Jerome family consists of Kate and Jack...

The novel A Tiger for Malgudi by R. K. Narayan presents the life story of a tiger named Raja, who is born as a wild animal in the jungle, experiences a period of captivity as a circus animal, and...

Published in 1839, “The Fall of the House of Usher” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s finest short stories. The tightly constructed tale engages the reader from the opening paragraph to its dramatic...

In the classic novel The Call of the Wild by Jack London, a pet dog named Buck is kidnapped from his California home and taken to Alaska where two French-Canadian dispatchers train him as a sled...

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a coming-of-age novel told in vignettes from the point of view of Esperanza, a young girl who grows up in a barrio neighborhood in Chicago. How the...

The Diary of a Young Girl (also entitled The Diary of Anne Frank) is written from the first-person point of view in diary format by Anne Frank, a young girl in hiding during the Nazi occupation of...

In an interview featured in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Stanley Kunitz related that he didn’t have particular themes in mind when he wrote his poems. Instead, material for poems came to him...

A hero is someone who can perform acts of courage and selflessness to solve a problem, help a community, or change a situation for the better. The current term “first responder” reflects this...

The most recognizable quote from Of Mice and Men indicates how the need for friendship and the dream of a better life drive the decisions and actions of the two main characters. On the way to the...

The first line and opening paragraphs of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury immediately inform readers that Guy Montag enjoys his job as a fireman who burns books, thus setting the dystopian tone of...

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros presents the life of Esperanza, a young girl growing up in a working class Latino neighborhood in Chicago through a series of related short stories....

“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury demonstrates the author’s talent for exploring how contemporary trends could play out in future scenarios. This story in particular shows an understanding of how...

With Ray Bradbury’s classic short story “A Sound of Thunder,” the reader should note it was first published in 1952. As of that time, the United States had fought through and won a long and...

Wonder, a novel by R. J. Palacio, presents the story of August Pullman (Auggie), a boy with a facial disfigurement as he attends a private middle school and learns to deal with life outside the...

This question highlights the central conflict and competing value systems between father and son in the 1967 novel The Vendor of Sweets by R. K. Narayan. Jagan and Mali present two models of a...

The Death of Vishnu, the 2001 novel by Manil Suri, presents the reader with a social and spiritual allegory of twenty-first century India. Vishnu, a drifter who performs odd jobs for an apartment...

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (La Rivière du hibou), written and directed by Robert Enrico, is a 1961 film adaption of the 1890 Ambrose Bierce short story by the same name. Presented with an...

Presented as a series of vignettes, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros is a coming-of-age story narrated from the point of view of Esperanza Cordero, a young Latina girl growing up in a...

The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities is a 1931 short fiction and humor collection by author and illustrator James Thurber, featuring pieces that were previously published in The New Yorker....

Summer of My German Soldier, a YA historical fiction novel published in 1973 by Bette Greene, explores themes of self-worth, relationships, empathy, hypocrisy, and prejudice. Patty Bergen, a...

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling tells the coming-of-age story of Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves in a forest in India. In the chapter “Tiger, Tiger!” Mowgli encounters the world of men, balancing...

The Vendor of Sweets by R. K. Narayan explores generational conflict in the setting of the author’s fictional town of Malgudi in southern India. The novel features a traditional father and his...

The 1939 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden displays an intertextual relationship with previous works, referencing the classical Greek myth about Icarus and the 16th century painting...

In Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions by Daniel Wallace, a son attempts to understand his dying father through the tall tales and myths created about his father’s life. In a collection of...

In Middle Passages, Barbadian author Kamau Brathwaite presents a collection of layered and nuanced poems featuring vernacular language and word play, jazz rhythms, and references to the cultures...

“The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka examines the concepts of loss, isolation, and the epiphanies that manifest when a person must confront an extraordinary situation. Dehumanization, monstrosity,...

In Dance Hall of the Dead, Tony Hillerman depicts the differences and tensions among the Navajo, Zuñi, and Anglo communities in New Mexico. Navajo detective Joseph Leaphorn investigates the death...