‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’ is a poem by Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-84), who was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 when she was probably still in her early twenties. Because Wheatley stands at […]
Apples are a common fruit, and so it’s little surprise that apples have come to have powerful and distinctive symbolic properties in works of literature, religion, and myth over the centuries. But there are a number of misconceptions and wrong assumptions about apple-symbolism. How can we tell the bad apples […]
‘The Lost Decade’ is one of the shortest works by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the American author best-known for The Great Gatsby. Published in Esquire magazine in December 1939, just one year before Fitzgerald died, ‘The Lost Decade’ is one of his most powerful short stories to deal with the […]