For decades, students desperate for a summary of Crime and Punishment or a thematic analysis of motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved looked no further than the yellow and black guides available at ...

IF reading Cliffs Notes’s “Hamlet” seems to be a pokey, 20th-century way to speed-comprehend Shakespeare, never fear. Now there’s a seven-minute cartoon version, complete with a talking Yorick’s skull ...

At this time of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avoid reading them. Nothing is new about that. CliffsNotes guides, with their familiar yellow and black covers, have been in ...

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the lovelorn Ophelia famously drowns. The prince of Denmark has cruelly spurned her, her father has died, and she’s stricken with grief. If only she had realized Taylor ...

Catherine MacDonald, co-founder of CliffsNotes, the popular study guides bound in black and yellow, died Sunday, her 94th birthday.