A complete lesson plan by BookRags. This lesson plan is sold separately and is not included with any subscription or study pack.

William Styron (born 1925) was a Southern writer of novels and articles. His major works were Lie Down in Darkness,The Long March, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice. His major theme was the response of basically decent people to such cru...

The critics received Lie Down in Darkness (1951) as an auspicious first novel, perhaps the best to appear since World War II. Its style, if reminiscent of Faulkner, was distinctly the author's own; its psychological insights, accurate; and its moral visi...

The critics received Lie Down in Darkness (1951) as an auspicious first novel, perhaps the best to appear since World War II. If reminiscent of Faulkner, its style was distinctly the author's own; its psychological insights, accurate; and its moral visio...

Rarely has Nietzsche been taken so literally as in Ron Currie's God Is Dead (Picador, £12.99), wherein the deity adopts the form of a Sudanese refugee woman called Sora, and is blown to physical and metaphysical bits by a Janjaweed bomb. Just before He...

Natasha Cooper's heroine, Trish Maguire, is a barrister who subverts the stereotypes, an outsider whose troubled background sometimes gives her more in common with clients than colleagues. At the start of A Greater Evil (Simon & Schuster, £17.99), the latest novel in the series,...

Here are some facts and trivia about the American Film Institute's new list of top-100 U.S. movies, with some comparisons to the institute's first such list in 1998:_ Out of the 43 newly eligible films released from 1996 to 2006, only four made the new...

The American Film Institute's 2007 list of the top-100 American movies:1. "Citizen Kane," 1941.2. "The Godfather," 1972.3. "Casablanca," 1942.4. "Raging Bull," 1980.5. "Singin' in the Rain," 1952.6. "Gone With the Wind," 1939.7. "Lawrence of Arabia," 1962.8. "Schindler's List," 1993.9. "Vertigo," 1958.10. "The Wizard of Oz,"...

"Sophie's Choice" is a courageous, in some ways masterly book, a book very hard to review for the simple reason that the plot—even the double entendre in the title—cannot be given away. Certain things can be said without too much harming the novel's considerable effect: The story treats two doomed lovers, Nathan Landau, a brilliant, tragically mad New York Jew, and Sophie Zawistowska, a beautiful Polish survivor of Auschwitz, and their intellectual and emotional ent...

Sophie's Choice is an ambiguous, masterful, and enormously satisfying novel. It reconstructs Auschwitz, the ultimate system of falsehood organized, from the vantage point of the commandant's house, and perceives its litanies to human degradation through an appalling, ordinary focus of daily life. The extermination of the "undesirable" is measured in terms of their clothes piled in the laundry, and the stench of the smoke from the crematorium. Auschwitz is order imposed on quintes...

[In Sophie's Choice Styron] tries to address himself simultaneously to some of the fundamental issues of his own life as a writer and to a central dilemma of the moral history of our century. The novel he has shaped to confront these urgent questions is remarkably compelling, eloquent at its best, but not altogether satisfying—perhaps chiefly because the intertwined stories of a writer's coming of age and the meditation on the horrors of the Nazi death camps generate more static than re...