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The wide range of topics in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia has made it a popular for faculty freshman-year read-alongs, as a book which, ideally, may appeal to anyone from emo poets to science nerds. Early reviewers of Arcadia's initial run remarked that Tom Stoppard, like the Tin Man at The Wizard of Oz, had at long last discovered his heart.

After almost three decades of plays that a saw more as intellectual exercises compared to heartfelt drama (Stoppard's first success was with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a play that retells Hamlet from the point of view of its two most insignificant characters), lots of commentators felt that Stoppard was eventually getting his emotional groove on. While his subsequent plays have been successful both in London and on Broadway, Arcadia and great old Rosencrantz and Guildenstern remain the plays for which Stoppard is best known.

While Arcadia can seem as a model of English-ness (which can make it a little confusing for an American audience), Tom Stoppard was actually born in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), under the name Tomas Straussler. He lived in India before moving to England. While England has become his adopted home, Stoppard has also never forgotten his origins: his play Indian Ink is set, not surprisingly, in India, and his latest work, Rock 'n' Roll, moves between Cambridge and Prague. Along with the Czechs haven't forgotten him either: there's a Tom Stoppard Prize, given to writers of Czech origin. Besides his plays, Stoppard has also worked for decades on human rights problems in Eastern Europe and elsewhere...so maybe those critics shouldn't have needed Arcadia to know that he had a heart.

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