1. Born on September 4th, 1908, Richard Wright was born in Roxie, Mississippi (outside of Natchez) on a plantation where his illiterate father was a sharecropper. Wright was raised by his relatives at by the age of 17, he was ready to get out into the world. He headed into Memphis, Tennessee (his...

Stephen Crane Today in modern America, it has become almost impossible to avoid the tales of horror that surround us almost anywhere we go. Scandals, murders, theft, corruption, extortion, abuse, prostitution, all common occurrences in this day in age. A hundred years ago however, people did no...

Magic Realism appeared as a critical term for the arts and it later extended to literature. The term was first used by the German critic Franz Roh in 1925 to characterize a group of Post-Expressionist painters. Franz Roh described it as a form in which "our real world re-emerges before our...

In the times of slavery, there were two popular stereotypes of a black female – the loyal mammy and the promiscuous temptress. The former represented an "adamantine, kind, unattractive, and sexless woman" and it justified "abusive treatment of black women on the grounds that th...

A Hated and Loved hero Have you ever met a smart mouthed, bewildered teen with uncanny wisdom that grabbed people in a way that didn't seem right? Here is an introduction to that distressed teen, Holden Caulfied. Being the protagonist of "The Catcher in the Rye", Holden has intr...