An old man died in Nebraska last week. The event was noted briefly in newspapers across America, and people reading about it over their breakfasts probably experienced two sensations: a moment of surprise and then a rush of wry, affectionate memories. The old man's name was Clifton Keith Hillegass, not one that anybody had ever heard of. What caused America to choke on its coffee was the information in the obituary notices that Hillegass was the "Cliff" of Cliffs Notes, the bumblebee-striped study guides that have helped millions of American students scrape through high-school and college English classes. As a nation reared on Cliff-style prose absorbed this revelation, it must have thought as one: What a character! What a theme!

Moreover, in the best Cliffs tradition, both character and theme shed light on life in the United States in the past half-century, as well as, inevitably, in all the places to which postwar American culture has spread (Cliffs Notes are not just an American success story anymore). We'll sketch the main character and give a synopsis of the plot, followed by an analysis of that all-important theme.

Hillegass, the son of a rural mail carrier and a gladiolus grower, was working as a salesman for the Nebraska Book Co. when he got the idea of writing study guides for the more unapproachable literary classics way back in 1958. He wrote and self-published his first, a guide to Shakespeare's "Hamlet," in the basement of his Lincoln home and hawked it to college bookstores nationwide. It was a hit, and within a year Hillegass had produced 15 more. In the ensuing decades, the little black-and-yellow striped books, elucidating some 250 different works from the Old Testament to "The Great Gatsby," became a fixed part of the American educational landscape. In 1998, Hillegass sold Cliffs Notes to IDG Books, now Hungry Mind Inc., for $14 million. Today there are "CliffsNotes" on everything under the sun -- including test preparation, algebra, stock-market investment and Web design -- but the "Lit Notes" remain the core of the business.