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Bernard Malamud’s story began like many self-made persons in America during his era, as a child born to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Malamud came of age during the start of the Great Depression and attended Erasmus Hall High School, a popular public high school at the time while Brooklyn’s population…
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Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, also known as V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in the early 1930s. Naipaul’s father had emigrated from India with his grandparents in the 1880s, who sought work as indentured servants in Trinidad’s sugar plantations. Three years before Naipaul’s birth, his father began contributing to the Trinidad Guardian as an English-language…
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Kurt Vonnegut was an author who found humorous and imaginative ways to write about disconcerting realities that face us every day, from the plagues of war to the looming presence of technology. In his first novel, Player Piano, Vonnegut brings the two themes together in the setting ten years after a third world war, a…
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“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” Those words were famously written by one of the most influential writers in the 20th century, James Joyce. The quote comes from Joyce’s work Ulysses, an epic novel that was originally published in parts throughout continuous issues of magazine The…
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Considered one of the greatest American architects of all time, Frank Lloyd Wright believed that structures should be designed in harmony with humanity and its environment. He coined this philosophy “organic architecture,” and it would eventually become what distinguished his innovative work. The best example of this philosophy is the Fallingwater house he designed in…
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Known for his magnum opus, The Human Comedy, Honoré de Balzac was one of those natural born talents that constantly went against the mold. As a child, his headstrong personality caused him much frustration as he navigated his way through grammar school. Shortly after graduation, Balzac took an apprenticeship in a law office but soon…
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1. The Christmas Books by Charles Dickens The only reason to shout “Bah! Humbug!” at this collection is when you’re trying to decide which book to read first! The entire first edition set of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Books include A Christmas Carol (first issue), The Chimes, The Battle of Life, Cricket on the Hearth, and…
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Written in 380 BC, The Republic is considered one of the Plato’s best works and a major staple for Western philosophical and political thought. The work was alternatively titled On Justice by ancient readers, as the main theme aims to find the perfect definition of justice in regards to both the individual and the city-state.…
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Alexander Pope taught the world that to be inspired by greatness could earn you your own name in history. In addition to his credentials as the third most quoted literary figure by The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, topped only by Shakespeare and Tennyson, and a celebrated poet and essayist, Pope is best known for his…
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“First and greatest classic of modern economic thought”: First Edition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations American economist and historian Robert L. Heilbroner writes about Adam Smith’s influence on capitalism: Adam Smith’s enormous authority resides, in the end, in the same property that we discover in Marx: not in any ideology, but in an effort…
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