“Self-Reliance” is one of the most famous and representative works of the transcendentalist philosopher/author Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism was a literary and philosophical movement of the early- and mid-19th century in the United States. Transcendentalist works stress the purity and goodness of individualism and community with nature, especially over the corruption and conformity of human society and institutions. This essay, published in 1841, is an exploration of self-reliance, or self-sufficiency, as a virtue. Emerson emphasizes... Read Self Reliance Summary

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Shogun is a 1975 novel by American author James Clavell. It is one of six books in Clavell’s Asian Saga, which chronicles the ways Europeans interacted with countries in Asia from the 17th to the 20th centuries. The novel tells the story of English ship pilot John Blackthorne, loosely based on the real life navigator William Adams, who becomes intimately involved in the rise to power of Yoshi Toranaga, a fictionalized version of Tokugawa Ieyasu... Read Shogun Summary

Sister Carrie is a novel published in 1900 by the American author Theodore Dreiser. Dreiser uses the story of Caroline Meeber, a naïve young woman who gets caught up in the gaudy venality of the city, to explore the emptiness of materialism, the tension between flesh and spirit, the inevitability of loneliness, and the role of women in the emerging America of the new century. Now recognized as one of the defining expressions of American... Read Sister Carrie Summary

As the play opens, a double-sided Kandinsky painting revolves above the stage, alternating between a vibrant side and a somber side. Ouisa and Flan Kittredge, a rich, middle-aged couple, come on stage and frantically tell the audience about the events of the previous evening. They had invited an extremely rich friend, Geoffrey, to dinner so that Flan, an art dealer, could borrow two million dollars to buy a Cezanne painting. Before they can leave for... Read Six Degrees of Separation Summary

Slaughterhouse-Five is a 1969 science fiction novel written by the American author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The novel deals with anti-war themes and time travel while centering its narrative around the bombing of Dresden, Germany during World War II. Slaughterhouse-Five is considered one of the most important anti-war and science fiction novels of the 20th century and has been adapted into films, theatre productions, and radio plays. Plot SummaryThe narrative of Slaughterhouse-Five is told in a... Read Slaughterhouse-Five Summary

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Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion’s 1968 collection of essays that document her experiences living in California from 1961 to 1967. It is her first collection of nonfiction (many of the pieces originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post) and is hailed as a seminal document of culture and counterculture in 1960s California. Didion’s style was part of what Tom Wolfe called “New Journalism,” which emphasized the search for meaning over the reporting of facts... Read Slouching Towards Bethlehem Summary

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“Soldier’s Home” is a short story first published in Ernest Hemingway’s 1925 debut collection In Our Time. The version discussed in this guide is from The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition (Scribner, 2003).The story’s protagonist is Harold Krebs, a young man who returns home to Oklahoma after serving in World War I. It is one of many works by Hemingway, a WWI survivor, to show the impacts of the war... Read Soldier's Home Summary

So Long, See You Tomorrow is the acclaimed final novel by American writer and editor William Maxwell. Originally published in two parts in New Yorker magazine in 1979, the book appeared the following year and received the prestigious National Book Award in 1982. Maxwell was the fiction editor of the New Yorker from 1936 to 1975, making him one of the most influential literary editors of the era. He worked closely with J. D. Salinger... Read So Long, See You Tomorrow Summary

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Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) is American author Ken Kesey’s second novel. The plot revolves around the Stampers, a family of independent loggers who choose to continue working in opposition to a logging union’s dispute with company leadership. The novel uses an experimental structure, switching between first-person and omniscient narrators and telling the story from the perspectives of multiple characters.Kesey and his counterculture group, the “Merry Pranksters,” were the precursors to the hippies of the... Read Sometimes a Great Notion Summary

“Song of Myself” is a free verse poem by the American writer, journalist, and poet Walt Whitman. The poem is often classified as a work of transcendentalist literature. Originally self-published by Whitman himself in 1855, it was considerably revised and expanded over subsequent decades. In 1889, “Song of Myself” was released in its final form as part of the last edition of the collection Leaves of Grass. This final version—the version referenced in this guide—is... Read Song of Myself Summary

Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon was published in 1977. Since then, the novel has won many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (1978). Morrison later won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel Beloved (1988) and the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993). Song of Solomon, Morrison’s third novel, follows the life of Milkman Dead, who uncovers the truth (the “song”) about his family when he travels south to Virginia... Read Song of Solomon Summary

“Sonny’s Blues” is a short story by author James Baldwin, which was published in the literary magazine Partisan Review in 1957. The story was later included in a 1965 collection of Baldwin’s stories, Going to Meet the Man. “Sonny’s Blues” describes the relationship between an unnamed narrator and his younger brother, Sonny. The story explores how the experience of growing up Black amid racism and poverty impacts a person’s psychology and relationships. This guide follows... Read Sonny's Blues Summary

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