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Should you ever find yourself on a raft, floating down the Mississippi River, you're going to want something to do. Reading Mark Twain's classic, T...

Could one of America’s most famous anti-slavery books be racist? Well, the book’s offensive caricatures combined with today’s perspective on...

The book is as big as the whale.

Moby-Dick - una ballena extraña. Nuestro amigo capitán Ahab la había perseguido para años, pero no es el mejor lider en el mundo. Piensas que p...

Are you a leader or a follower? The herder, or the herded? Unfortunately for Ishmael and crew, they let themselves be Ahab’s flock in this story....

River raft. A good friend. Adventures. Tricks. Lots and lots of surprise feelings. Basically, our boy Huck has 'em all.

Dig up your trench coat, grab your magnifying glass, and stick on that fake mustache (we know you have one): it's time to unleash your inner Sherlo...

This novel is all about finding yourself, which hopefully you can accomplish before you find yourself smack dab in the middle of an ocean without a...

The title is pretty ironic when you consider how little sleep you'd be getting if you had a headless horseman chasing you.

We know we say this for all of his stories, but here's Edgar Allan Poe at his creepiest. Well, if you don’t include that time you went into the b...

Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage about the Civil War not long after the war had ended. And get this: he didn't even fight in the war. W...

Puritan adultery=big scarlet “A.” Puritan's know how to keep it simple. What’s not so simple? Hester Prynne’s adamant refusal to reveal who...

In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," Louise Mallard has a rather peculiar response to the news of her husband's death: instead of mourning for...

"The Telltale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe is the epitome of creepy. (We know we could say that about all of EAP's stories, but it's especially true f...

How much skill does it take for Tom to get someone to pay him so that they can do his chores? We know it sounds confusing, so just think about how...

What would YOU do if the heart of the person you buried under the floorboards started making noise? Only one way to find out... (Note: Shmoop does...

We're going to pardon Emily Dickinson's sister for publishing Em's personal diary after she died... We did get some pretty sweet poetry out of the...

Use this video to defend yourself when your teacher asks why you've drawn the same picture of your cat four different times.

Where's Waldo? Well, if you're talking about Ralph Waldo Emerson, chances are he's out in the woods somewhere communing with God by talking to a st...

If you ever feel like taking off, living in the woods alone, and refusing to pay for anything, just tell people you're a transcendentalist. They'll...