Summary: America’s magnificent storyteller Mark Twain has crafted an intriguing and classic tale of mistaken identity, deceit, and murder. At the center of it all is a slave woman who cradle-switches her master’s son with her own light-skinned baby…a child, though raised as white, who never fulfills her hopes and dreams for him as he becomes an arrogant and cruel man. Acclaimed actor Ken Howard...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1983

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Summary: Hadleyburg has a reputation for unshakable honesty. The smug townspeople are proud of this virtue and keep themselves honest by simply avoiding temptation. That is until “the man that corrupted Hadleyburg” arrives in town. Robert Preston stars as the stranger who plots a revenge on the hypocritical residents by promising a fortune to the citizens who once showed him charity many years before....

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1980

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Summary: Seems like a simple enough storyline, considering it became one of the most significant, beloved, acclaimed, and studied novels ever written. This classic motion picture is the definitive adaptation of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - splendidly filmed, lovingly produced for PBS’s American Playhouse, with an acclaimed all-star cast, and presented in an unedited, full-length version....

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1985

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Summary: This overview of Henry James' life and literature from the Famous Authors series begins with James' comfortable boyhood in New York, during which his father moved James and his brother around and back and forth from Europe frequently for the sake of education. He eventually went to Harvard to study law and began writing, but felt uncomfortable with American culture and left for England, where...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006

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Summary: Set in 18th-century Italy, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter is the tale of a young scholar named Giovanni (Kristoffer Tabori) who falls in love with a beautiful yet forbidden girl who tends her father’s poison garden. The strange and unearthly beauty of Beatrice (Kathleen Beller) masks a terrifying curse which Giovanni must tragically discover. Her father, the mysterious Dr....

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1980

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Summary: Nebraska in the 1880s: bleak, lonely, and far from what you’d expect the Wild West to be. But for a naïve Swedish immigrant (David Warner), the frontier parlor of The Blue Hotel represents the quintessential Western fantasy. No one can convince The Swede that his dime-store notions about the West are foolish. He sees murderous intentions all around him, and in his terror he turns everybody...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1984

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Summary: Julie Harris takes viewers into Emily Dickinson’s everyday world in a small New England town to compare and contrast facts about the poet with her extraordinary, original insights. Dickinson’s reclusive life in her father’s mansion on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts, meant that she wrote almost all of her surviving work in this house. From cellar to cupola, we invoke her “certain slant of...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1977

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Summary: A selection of Frost’s poems chosen to suit a perfect New England autumn day. Filmed in the beautiful farm country of Massachusetts.

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1997

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Summary: “Madness, but will you say that I am mad? Murder, perhaps you judge too soon. For when you hear my story, you will certainly understand why, very gradually - I made up my mind to take the life of the old man.” True to the words of master storyteller Edgar Allan Poe, this stunning adaptation brings to life what is perhaps Poe’s best-known short story. Murder, madness, and betrayal from within...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2000

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Summary: Edgar Allan Poe was truest to his heart a poet. He has blessed American literature with some of the most striking and moving imagery ever created. His phrasing and lyricism have forever changed the landscape of poetic verse. Includes “The Conqueror Worm,” “To My Mother,” “Israfel,” “Annabel Lee,” “The City in the Sea,” “Eldorado,” “To Helen,” “The Haunted Palace,” “Evening Star,” and “The Raven.”

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2000

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Summary: In 1925 Luigi Pirandello brought his troupe to England as part of a worldwide tour. This program re-creates one day in London as "The Einstein of the Theater" watches his plays and, away from the footlights, confronts the paradoxical nature of his life. Portions of Six Characters in Search of an Author; Henry IV; Right You Are, If You Think You Are; and The Rules of the Game are meticulously...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2009

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Summary: Prolific Swedish playwright August Strindberg wrote over 70 plays in his lifetime, most obsessively preoccupied with the "battle of the sexes." In this BBC production, Michael Simpson directs Strindberg's classic tragedy of class and sexual warfare. The neurotic, aristocratic daughter (Janet McTeer) of a count breaks off her engagement to her irresolute fiancé. Despondent and bored, she idly...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006

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Summary: Henrik Ibsen scrutinized and interpreted human hearts and minds in such a manner as to prompt Sigmund Freud to create a typology based on the dramatist's principal characters. Yet the evidence of Ibsen's life argues that he himself lived with a dual nature that went largely unreconciled. This program seeks to understand the man known as "The Sphinx" by tracing his travels, examining excerpts...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006

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Summary: Second only to Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen is the most-performed playwright in the world. This program, as much a tribute to the art of theater as to the immortal Ibsen, reveals a perennial fascination with Norway's master playwright. Excerpts from A Doll's House, Peer Gynt, and other productions captured on film in the United States, Canada, Britain, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Serbia, Iran,...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005

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Summary: This program pays lyrical homage to the enigmatic relationship between the poet/dramatist Goethe and the Baroness Charlotte von Stein and explores its influence on his work. Excerpts from a selection of the more than 2,000 letters exchanged by Goethe, Charlotte, and their friends bear testimony to the intensity and intimacy of the relationship-one which most experts believe was platonic,...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2007

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Summary: For biographer Michael Holroyd, playwright George Bernard Shaw is practically an alter ego. Using archival footage and Holroyd's painstaking detective work, this intriguing program questions the extent to which Shaw's life and art fed upon each other, addressing issues including the effects of the triangle between his father, his mother, and Vandeleur Lee on his plays, as seen in Misalliance...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005

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Summary: Seamus Heaney, one of the finest poets writing in the English language, and the late Richard Ellmann, biographer of Joyce and Wilde, and critic of Yeats, in literary dialogue about these three brilliant Dublin writers. The literary dialogue between Heaney and Ellmann uses documentary material pertaining to Joyce, Yeats, and Wilde, and was filmed at such literary landmarks as the Hill of Howth,...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2005

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Summary: The Civil War. A nation torn apart. A war fought in great battles, and a war fought on a much smaller scale…within the minds and hearts of a nation’s young men. On a lonely bridge, a group of soldiers prepare for the somber task of hanging one of their countrymen, now an enemy, for sabotage. This classic retelling of Ambrose Bierce’s acclaimed story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” from...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 1962

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Wheeler, Sara

Summary: A witty and insightful tour of contemporary Russia, using its Golden Age writers, from Pushkin to Tolstoy, as guides: part history, part sociopolitical commentary, Mud and Stars reveals the heart of a country that never fails to surprise us.

Format: text

Publisher / Publication Date: Pantheon Books 2019

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Summary: How did three women-who lived in almost total isolation from others and sought with every means at their disposal to avoid human contact-except with one another-manage to write some of the greatest fiction in the English language, and some of the most insightful into the human heart? This program goes far towards finding the explanation, as it shows how their writings were woven out of the...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2008

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Summary: Through the character Jane, orphan and governess, Charlotte Bronte introduced a style of heroine that markedly departed from the previous norm in Victorian literature. In this program, Dr. Tom Winnifrith-Bronte expert and author of The Brontes-and Dr. Sally Poulson of the University of Warwick discuss a variety of topics, including whether Jane Eyre is feminist literature, the theme of the...

Format: software, multimedia

Publisher / Publication Date: Films Media Group 2006

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