Research Help Guide: Biography and Literature Guides

Biography.com:  From A&E Television comes this website dedicated to people.  At Biography.com, you can research current celebrities, history-makers, and lesser knowns with amazing stories.  From the famous to the infamous, there are lots of articles, stories, pictures, and media to be accessed at this website. 

InfoPlease--People:  Provided by FEN Learning, a trusted educational resource, Info Please offers over 300,000 biographies in their people section.  From historical figures to current headline-makers, you'll find a lot of material on a lot of people here.  You can search by category as well as search for famous Americans according to race or ethnicity. There's also a great feature to search any date in history and see what happened.  Go check it out!

Shawna Bryce. (2020, May 11). Literature Resource Center. [Video File] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=JuZoI6h09HE&feature=emb_title

Don't forget you have access to E-books, both through our digital library E-iNC and through NC LIVE.  There may be e-biographies you'd like to read, and the best thing about reading electronic versions is that wonderful "find" feature (ctrl+F) that allows you to search material for specific words and phrases.  

• Open Library:  Over 7,000 free biographies available for reading online.  These are especially good for more historic figures or works published later.

When you're reading, don't skip words you don't know.  Look them up with Dictionary.com.  This app can be installed on your mobile device and includes sound files for pronunciation. Toggle to the thesaurus feature when you find yourself repeating certain words in your writing and projects.

Need a good place that defines all the literary terms you encounter in your English classes?  Literaryterms.net is a comprehensive literary terms dictionary that is easy to use.  You might want to bookmark this one.

You're reading something, and it's just not clicking.  Or maybe you need some criticism on a specific author.  Try ABC-CLIO e-Books for the "Critical Companion" series.  From writers such as William Shakespeare to more modern novelists like John Irving, there is a wide variety of these e-books to help you understand some of the intricacies of the writer's craft.  Simply go to NC LIVE and choose "ABC-CLIO E-book Collection", then select the "Arts and Humanities" subject or search for "Critical Companion".  This is available through NC LIVE.

E-book Central:   A variety of subjects is available for research here, but you might be interested in the "English Language Arts" section with critical analyses of a variety of authors and titles.  ProQuest allows you to sign in with your Google account making researching and sharing much easier.  This is available through NC LIVE.

ProQuest Learning: Literature:  Explore a variety of authors, poets, and literary works.  This website enables you to search by author or title and provides images and media as well as study pages and timelines. This is available through NC LIVE.

The following are databases available through NC LIVE.  

Films on Demand:  If you are able to stream video, this is a great resource for more visual learners.  Many biographical films can be streamed on Films on Demand, and you can even create your own playlist as well as cut segments and splice pieces of videos together through this terrific tool.