Licharts: [work]

Students started passing LitCharts links to each other in dorm rooms and study halls. The site grew, not through advertising, but through a quiet, viral revolution. It was free. It was fast. And it was smart .

In the conference room, looking out at the Manhattan skyline, Justin thought about his students. He thought about the girl in his third-period class who had cried when she finally understood the ending of A Separate Peace because the "Themes" chart had helped her connect Finny’s fall to her own fear of growing up. He thought about the boy with dyslexia who had never finished a novel until the "Line-by-Line" translation of Beowulf turned Old English into a story he could actually read. licharts

They didn't. Instead, high school English departments started buying site licenses. A teacher in Chicago wrote to say that she used the "Quote Explanations" feature to build her entire final exam. A professor at NYU admitted that he used LitCharts to prepare his own lectures on Moby Dick . Students started passing LitCharts links to each other

Today, LitCharts is a quiet giant. It has produced over 1,500 literary guides. Its "How to Write a Literary Analysis" section has been cited in more college syllabi than most textbooks. The company still runs out of a converted warehouse where the coffee is strong and the bookshelves are overflowing. It was fast

In the cramped, book-lined office of a former high school English teacher in Portland, Oregon, an idea was born from sheer exhaustion. The year was 2008, and the teacher, Justin, had just spent his entire Sunday afternoon hunched over a stack of student essays. Each paper attempted to analyze the green light in The Great Gatsby . Each one, despite his best lectures, was painfully, achingly close to the argument presented in the ubiquitous yellow-and-black study guides from a certain well-known company based in Spokane, Washington.

"You will keep it until it stops being profitable," Justin replied. "And then you will bury it behind a paywall. I didn't build this to watch it die."

He called his brother, Ben, a data scientist in Seattle. "The problem with SparkNotes," Justin explained over the phone, the rain hammering against his attic window, "is that it’s a monolith. You read the summary, you read the analysis, and you’re done. It doesn't move . It doesn't show you how a theme evolves from Chapter 1 to Chapter 9."