I've written nine books best described as entertaining guides to literary and intellectual history. I began in 1990 with Brush Up Your Shakespeare! -- a particular specialty -- and then moved on to classical writings, mythology, the Bible, and great ideas. (See Books for more details.)

HarperCollins published the second edition of Brush Up Your Shakespeare! in 2000 with an added chapter on Shakespearean films.

In the fall of 1997, Cader Books / Andrews & McMeel published Naughty Shakespeare, an irreverant survey of the Bard's huge catalogue of vice. It reveals what the footnotes usually don't: that our all-encompassing Poet encompassed a lot of things people wish he hadn't. That includes a fair helping of sex, violence, crime, horror, anti-authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, sexism, jealousy, profanity, satire, controversy, and political incorrectness of all kinds.

Brush Up Your Poetry! (Cader / Andrews & McMeel), a tour through some of the best-remembered lines from English and American verse, appeared late in 1996. Earlier that year, Crown published Lessons on Living from Shakespeare, a collection of the Bard's little instructions on the economy, love, the economics of love, virtues and vices, judgment and law, greatness and knowledge.