As the new school year begins in America, and teachers, parents, students, and all those who love to read are gathering ideas for new worlds to explore, I offer here my reading lists curated over forty years, many as a high school English teacher.
Of paramount importance is that school begins this year in a context of open hostility to education, a word from the Greek educatus which means to draw forth potential human being, meaning, and value rather than to stuff in facts, and which models and teaches not falsification, commodification, and dehumanization through the factory model of education as industrial production, but its opposite; citizenship in a democracy as the art of asking questions and testing answers. There are historical reasons why our democracy was born in the Enlightenment and the scientific model of reason, and why tyranny is often a product of theocratic subjugation to authority.
If we are to be a free society of equals, wherein citizens are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s rights, universal education in which nothing is Forbidden as an area of experiment, inquiry, and debate is crucial; democracy requires freedom of information and communication including those of free speech and a free press.
In a time of darkness, book bans and burning, politization of school boards as subversion of democracy and repression of dissent, the forbidding of inquiry in areas which may threaten elite hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, we must write, speak, teach, and organize democracy as Resistance to fascist tyranny and as revolutionary struggle.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks made for us by others and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
And our job as teachers and parents is to help, model, and guide our children in their ongoing self creation and choices about how to be human together and become citizens, not slaves.
We do not need to post and recite the Ten Commandments, pledge allegiance to gods or masters, or trade value with money which proclaims In God We Trust; because none of this is about our relationship with the Infinite, and everything to do with a state which wants to claim our obedience as its interpreter. Who stands between each of us and the Infinite serves neither.
We do need to learn as a nation and as a species to cherish our uniqueness and that of others, in solidarity and not division. And if we are to be a democracy, we need an education system founded on the Four Primary Duties of a Citizen; Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority.
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in literature and history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
To this end I offer here updated versions of the reading lists I used throughout my years of teaching AP and other English classes in high school, as supplementary choice reading lists for American Literature and World Literature as our education system has structured classes, to stand alongside and apart from the limits of government and school board approval and control, both of curriculum and of our human possibilities.
This was the key to empowerment and self actualization, happiness, and stellar academic achievement among my students and to success later in life; a free space of play in which to discover and create themselves. If we offer only this to our students, children, and future generations of citizens, a free space of play in the creation of themselves bearing many possible authorized identities without hierarchies of elite membership and exclusionary otherness, we have done our job as caretakers of the future. Each of us has one problem in common which we must solve in order to grow up and become ourselves; we must reinvent how to become human.
Find your bliss, as Joseph Campbell exhorts us to do; but first something must catch spark and engage our interest, provoke us to question and explore.
This is the role of literature, and why the canon is central to the project of civilization.
The canon represents nothing less than an authorized set of possible identities; this is why it must adapt and change with time.
I organized Modern American Literature as core lists by fiction, poetry, drama, science and other fictions, and also literature of the American South, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, Asian American, and Jewish American, and Hawaiian categories, as well as a nonfiction list I entitled A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity, part of which is the American Presidents Histories and Biographies list included here.
As Gertrude Stein invented the modern world after our civilization destroyed itself in World War One, my list begins with her. Where possible, superlative critical works accompany the primary sources from authors of world-historical significance.
World Literature is represented by 28 lists for Feminism and Women’s Literature, Fairytales, Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology, Existentialism, and lists of National Literatures including Australia, New Zealand, & Canada, Austria, Germany, & Switzerland, Africa, Britain & Ireland, the Caribbean, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, India, Iran, Islamic Peoples, Italy, Japan, Jewish People, Latin America, Netherlands, Palestine, Portugal, Russia, Scandinavia, and Spain.
Here I wish to signpost that nothing on my reading lists is chosen by any criterion other than quality as I so judge; in contrast to official reading lists chosen for reading level and objectives by grade and also appropriate age level content, because values are always negotiated truths and a ground of struggle, and in America the Texas Board of Education controls through purchasing power and ideological influence the publication of all textbooks nationally and is highly political and moreover falsified by the network of fundamentalist churches it represents. Ever wonder why our history text books make no mention of slavery as a cause of the Civil War?
How do we use reading lists as teachers, parents, readers exploring unknowns, ourselves, and the boundaries of our maps of becoming and of human being, meaning, and value?
One ongoing project which I ran for many years using these lists in high school may also be useful for private reading or home study, groups, partners, and getting to know one’s neighbors; I asked students to choose the list of a group with which they identify and then choose partners from a different group, then select two books, one from each other’s list, to read together and give a presentation as partners about each book to the class.
This project, which I called Becoming Human Through Literature, has three goals; to develop a broad personal culture, to discover maps of how to become human, and to operate transcontextually as a global family member.
As an activity for partners in any stage of a relationship, reading books together and discussing them as you progress makes a wonderful way to explore each others values and ideas. You may surprise and delight one another; you may also surprise and reimagine yourself.
For all of these lists I began with immortal classics and added whatever I thought merited inclusion on the basis of quality alone; this is how I found myself teaching a broad and inclusive curriculum. Yes, this means I’ve read all of the books listed, many in their original languages, and with some the major critical works and essays about them; and often taught, discussed, scored student critical essays and written about them for many years. It also means that if your favorite book is not on a list, I may simply not have read it yet.
I am a product of a Great Books of the Western World education, a set of works published by Encyclopædia Britannica based on the great Mortimer J. Adler’s course at the University of Chicago, which I read entirely through during my high school years, a second time while I was at university as an undergraduate, and a third during my graduate studies in literature, Jungian psychology, history, and philosophy. It is a practice which I recommend to everyone as both a starting point and a lifelong journey. This and Harold Bloom’s list in The Western Canon formed my starting point; as a teenager I began keeping lists of books I liked with notes, and the current version, in constant revision during the last forty years, I call Jay’s Revised Modern Canon 2024 Edition.
On these lists are the finest books I’ve discovered over a lifetime of reading, and I hope they will bring joy to your life as they have mine.
Why is a diverse and limitless field of reading and study necessary to creating ourselves and our identities as we grow up? How does our education shape our political and social decisions about who we are and how to be human together?
As I wrote in preface to my Becoming Human project, Whose Story Is This? Prologue to My Revised Modern Canon of Literature for 2022; We are the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and one another. So it becomes important to ask of our stories and representations, whose story is this?
I call this the Narrative Theory of Identity, and my intention is that it serves as a lever for changing the balance of power in the world. Our idea of self derives from the persona, the ancient Greek theatrical mask through which characters speak, and the possibilities of becoming human are a function of the struggle between authorized identities and the self- ownership of autonomous individuals.
We have one problem in common as we grow up and create ourselves; each of us must reinvent how to be human. Our informing, motivating, and shaping forces, modeled and communicated to us by others, are necessary to our processes of growth and individuation, but also integral to the dialectics of self and others.
The struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves is the first revolution in which we all must fight.
As I wrote in my post in celebration of Juneteenth, Liberation, Memory, History, and Human Being: a Narrative Theory of Identity; On this Juneteenth we celebrate the final Emancipation of the Black peoples of America from slavery, and also the Liberation of Humankind from all forms of ownership by others. The first kind of freedom was won in the Civil War and is particular to our unique history; the second kind of freedom is universal and is yet to the achieved.
There has been much insightful and relevant discussion of our history of slavery and racial inequality and violence during the Black Lives Matter protests in the weeks before this holiday, of the silencing and erasure of people of color from our historical memory and of the divisions of exclusionary otherness and defense of unequal power in our society through state control of our identity and relations with others at every level of human interaction.
Beyond the state terror of racist police violence, this is the primary means of repression and power asymmetry perpetrated against us by the ruling class; not the secret prisons and assassinations, not the racist death squads or the dehumanization and commodification of the working class by the cabal of plutocratic capitalists, Gideonite fundamentalist patriarchs, and white supremacist terrorists who together comprise the fascist Republican conspiracy of atavistic barbarism, but their theft of the possibilities of human meaning and being through control of our educational system and rewritten history.
Why are we taught to revere Independence Day on the Fourth of July, but not Emancipation Day on June 19?
Much of our history has been stolen from us. Its time to take it back.
Why is this of vital importance? How is our liberty determined by our history and the quality of our humanity by our memory?
Whose stories shall we teach to future generations? Will it be songs of resistance and survival, of the unconquered freedom and glory of our humanity and the triumph of our seizures of power over who we are and may become? Or will it be elegies of our dehumanization and enslavement, of submission to tyrannical authorities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil?
America is a free society of equals, wherein no one is better than any other by reason of birth or condition, in which we are co-owners of our government. This new American humanity was intended to be a society of autonomous individuals, in which we are free from the tyranny of other people’s ideas of virtue, normality, beauty, and constructions of identity, and from the force and control of the state, especially in this context as falsification, rewritten histories, lies, and illusions which serve the power of those who would enslave us.
What is this freedom? What does it mean for us as we grow up and create ourselves?
Free to dream new possibilities of becoming human, to create ourselves as we choose with a free will and conscience in which no government stands between us and the limits of our imagination, and in which relations between persons are unmediated by the state so long as none are harmed and no other boundaries are authorized by law; a society which renounces the social use of force in the performance of our identities and in which we send no armies to enforce virtue.
We must seize our stories as informing and motivating sources through which we shape ourselves, authorize identities, and create Others for whom we are negative spaces and through whom we define ourselves as interdependent partners who exalt one another as guarantors of each others rights and humanity.
Always there remains the creative dynamism and revolutionary struggle between the masks that others make for us and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution in which we all must fight; the struggle to create ourselves.
Which future will we choose, America? Resistance or submission?”
As I wrote in my post of September 21 2020 History, Memory, Identity: Whose Story Is This?; Whose story is this? This question must be the beginning of a new pedagogy of education in history, and remain central to the project of its study. True education asks Socratic questions and teaches methods of research, analysis, interpretation, the publishing and presentation of insights and discoveries and testing our ideas in experiment and debate; education in general teaches us to interrogate and test claims of truth.
Trump has proclaimed the triumph of propaganda in authorizing an official state version of historical truth, whose purpose is to institutionalize the Mayflower Puritan/Pilgrim mythos as a competing narrative of national origins to the 1619 hypothesis. This seems to me an excellent idea, if we ignore the authorization of identity and government disinformation facets and instead make this interrogation of competing narratives itself the heart of our national story and curriculum.
Myths of colonialism, fictive inventions of national origin, and the roots of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil in our triumphalist narratives of Pilgrim and Puritan founders of America; this and all else we must always question. Though the Mayflower Compact was signed November 21, celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the voyage began last week with its departure for America, which are being promoted by our government as a reply to the 1619 Project. This I cannot abide, so say I in paraphrase of the hero in the film Inglorious Basterds; can you abide it?
As we learn from John Cage in music, Harold Pinter in theatre, and Piet Mondrian in art, it is the blank spaces which define and order meaning; and in history it is the silenced and erased voices to which we must listen most carefully, for here the emptiness speaks to us of secret power and of the key functions and relationships which authority must conceal to maintain its hegemony over us.
Always pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
We must ask ourselves as we raise our children to become citizens and as we ourselves continue to learn throughout our lives, Whose story is this?
Dollhouse Park Conservatory & Imaginarium
https://dollhouseparkconservatory.home.blog/
Modern American Literature
Modern American Fiction
Modern American Poetry
Modern American Drama
American Science and other fictions
Literature of the American South
Native American Literature
African American Literature
Hispanic American Literature
Jewish American Literature
Asian American Literature
Modern American Literature: Hawai’I
A Useful Past: Contexts and Sources for Constructing an American Identity
Yes, I once attempted to synthesize all knowledge and historical memory of our civilization specific to America under this banner as a resource for my high school students, including arts and sciences. I didn’t get as far as did Diderot with his Encyclopédie, all 23 volumes of it. I may have been influenced in this mad Quixotic quest by reading through our family Encyclopædia Britannica several times in my teens and twenties; ah, the folly of youth. I wasn’t trying to learn everything; I was trying to remember everything, the universe whole and entire, as the emergence of ideal forms and potentialities hidden within us.
The great mystery of Being in Time is not that universals connect us, but that our memory and history allow us to conserve our identity while in constant processes of adaptation and change.
We need both conserving forces which buffer us from the shock of the new and as a prochronism, a history expressed in our form of how we solved problems of adaptation across vast epochs of time with damage to our morphology of human being, meaning, and value, but also we need revolutionary or innovational forces which allow us to meet new threats and capitalize on chaos.
This is the only list of context readings I have been able to complete; my studies of art and music being arbitrary and those of sciences changing too fast since the 1980’s for a definitive sum of knowledge;
America’s Presidents: History and Biography
But with literature I am on my own ground of struggle, publish in over a dozen languages and can speak with authority on both Modern American and World literatures.
World Literature
Feminism and Women’s Literature
Fairytales
Mythology, Psychology, & Anthropology
Existentialism
Australia, New Zealand, & Canada
Austria, Germany, & Switzerland
Africa
Britain & Ireland
Caribbean
China
Cuba
Eastern Europe
France
Greece
India
Iran
Islamic Peoples
Italy
Japan
Jewish Peoples
Latin America
Netherlands
Palestine
Portugal
Russia
Scandinavia
Spain
Where I began:
Great Books of the Western World, Mortimer J. Adler (Editor)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom’s magisterial list which follows below has for me some glaring limitations, both as a best books list and as representations of authorized identities and imaginal spaces to grow into and beyond.
First it excludes everything not central to the Western European Canon as historically construed.
Second it dismisses nearly all works by women and nonwhite authors as inferior in quality and a waste of time to study, something which by the mid 20th century should have been transparently biased and long abandoned.
Third it misunderstands modern American literature from World War One onward, ignores masterpieces of literature and includes irrelevant and ridiculous choices no one reads or needs to now.
Harold Bloom wrote the finest critical work on Shakespeare ever, and is reasonably trustworthy on works including the classics, British Romantics, and American Transcendentalists; but here his world ends, as do his maps of becoming human.
This is where we must begin, all of us, in the reimagination and transformation of the Canon and of our limitless possibilities of Becoming Human.
Harold Bloom’s List in The Western Canon, from the appendices:
“The Theocratic Age
Here, as in the following lists, I suggest translations wherever I have derived
particular pleasure and insight from those now readily available. There are
many valuable works of ancient Greek and Latin literature that are not
here, but the common reader is unlikely to have time to read them. As
history lengthens, the older canon necessarily narrows. Since the literary
canon is at issue here, I include only those religious, philosophical, historical,
and scientific writings that are themselves of great aesthetic interest. I would
think that, of all the books in this first list, once the reader is conversant
with the Bible, Homer, Plato, the Athenian dramatists, and Virgil, the crucial
work is the Koran. Whether for its aesthetic and spiritual power or the
influence it will have upon all of our futures, ignorance of the Koran is
foolish and increasingly dangerous.
I have included some Sanskrit works, scriptures and fundamental literary
texts, because of their influence on the Western Canon. The immense wealth
of ancient Chinese literature is mostly a sphere apart from Western literary
tradition and is rarely conveyed adequately in the translations available
to us.
THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST
Gilgamesh, translated by David
Ferry
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
The Holy Bible, Authorized King
James Version
The Apocrypha
Sayings of the Fathers (Pirke
Aboth), translated by R.
Travers Herford
ANCIENT INDIA (SANSKRIT)
The Mahabharata
There is an abridged
translation by William Buck,
and a dramatic version by
Jean·Claude Carriere,
translated by Peter Brook
The Bhagavad-Gita
The crucial religious section
of Mahabharata, Book 6,
translated by Barbara Stoler
Miller
The Ramayana
There is an abridged prose
version by William Buck, and
a retelling by R. K. Narayan
THE ANCIENT GREEKS
Homer
The Iliad, translated by
Richmond Lattimore
The Odyssey, translated by
Robert Fitzgerald
Hesiod
The Works and Days;
Theogony, translated by
Richmond Lattimore
Archilochos , Sappho, Aikman
translated by Guy Davenport
Pindar
The Odes, translated by
Richmond Lattimore
Aeschylus
The Oresteia, translated by
Robert Fagles
Seven against Thebes, translated
by Anthony Hecht and Helen
H. Bacon
Prometheus Bound
The Persians
The Suppliant Women
Sophocles
Oedipus the King, translated by
Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay
Oedipus at Co/onus, translated
by Robert Fitzgerald
Antigone, translated by Robert
Fagles
Electra
Ajax
Women of Trachis
Philoctetes
Euripides
(translated by William
Arrowsmith)
Cyclops
Heracles
Alcestis
Hecuba
The Bacchae
Orestes
Andromache
Medea, translated by Rex
Warner
Ion, translated by H. D. (Hilda
Doolittle)
Hippolytus, translated by Robert
Bagg
Helen, translated by Richmond
Lattimore
Iphigeneia at Aulis, translated by
W. S. Merwin and George
Dimock
Aristophanes
The Birds, translated by William
Arrowsmith
The Clouds, translated by
William Arrowsmith
The Frogs
Lysistrata
The Knights
The Wasps
The Assemblywomen (also called
The Parliament of Women)
Herodotus
The Histories
Thucydides
The Peloponnesian War
The Pre-Socratics (Heraclitus,
Empedodes)
Plato
Dialogues
Aristotle
Poetics
Ethics
HELLENISTIC GREEKS
Menander
The Girl from Samos, translated
by Eric G. Turner
“Longinus”
On the Sublime
Callimachus
Hymns and Epigrams
Theocritus
Idylls, translated by Daryl Hine
Plutarch
Lives, translated by John Dryden
Moralia
“Aesop”
Fables
Lucian
Satires
THE ROMANS
Plautus
Pseudo/us
The Braggart Soldier
The Rope
Amphitryon
Terence
The Girl from Andros
The Eunuch
The Mother-in-Law
Lucretius
The Way Things Are, translated
by Rolfe Humphries
Cicero
On the Gods
Horace
Odes, translated by James
Michie
Epistles
Satires
Persius
Satires, translated by W. S.
Merwin
Catullus
Attis, translated by Horace
Gregory
Other poems translated by
Richard Crashaw, Abraham
Cowley, Walter Savage Landor,
and a host of English poets
Virgil
The Aeneid, translated by
Robert Fitzgerald
Eclogues and Georgics,
translated by john Dryden
Lucan
Pharsalia
Ovid
Metamorphoses, translated by
George Sandys
The Art of Love
Epistulae heroidum or Heroides,
translated by Daryl Hine
Juvenal
Satires
Martial
Epigrams, translated by James
Michie
Seneca
Tragedies, particularly Medea;
and Hercules furens, as
translated by Thomas
Heywood
Petroni us
Satyricon, translated by William
Arrowsmith
Apuleius
The Golden Ass, translated by
Robert Graves
THE MIDDLE AGES: LATIN, ARABIC, AND THE VERNACULAR BEFORE DANTE
Saint Augustine
The City of God
The Confessions
The Koran
Al-Qur’ an: A Contemporary
Translation by Ahmad Ali
The Book of the Thousand Nights
and One Night
The Poetic Edda, translated by Lee
Hollander
Snorri Sturluson
The Prose Edda
The Nibelungen Lied
Wolfram von Eschenbach
Parzival
Chretien de Troyes
Yvain: The Knight of the Lion,
translated by Burton Raffel
Beowult translated by Charles W.
Kennedy
The Poem of the Cid, translated ·by
W. S. Merwin
Christine de Pisan
The Book of the City of Ladies,
translated by Earl Richards
Diego de San Pedro
Prison of Love
B.
The Aristocratic Age
It is a span of five hundred years from Dante’s Divine Comedy through
Goethe’s Faust, Part Two, an era that gives us a huge body of reading in
five major literatures: Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. In this
and in the remaining lists, I sometimes do not mention individual works by
a canonical master, and in other instances I attempt to call attention to
authors and books that I consider canonical but rather neglected. From this
list onward, many good writers who are not quite central are omitted. We
begin also to encounter the phenomenon of “period pieces,” a sorrow that
expands in the Democratic Age and threatens to choke us in our own
century. Writers much esteemed in their own time and country sometimes
survive in other times and nations, yet often shrink into once-fashionable
fetishes. I behold at least several scores of these in our contemporary literary
scene, but it is sufficient to name them by omission, and I will address this
matter more fully in the introductory note to my final list.
ITALY
Dante
The Divine Comedy, translated
by Laurence Binyon in terza
rima, and by John D. Sinclair
1n prose
The New Life, translated by
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Petrarch
Lyric Poems, translated by
Robert M. Durling
Selections, translated by Mark
Mus a
Giovanni Boccaccio
The Decameron
Matteo Maria Boiardo
Orlando innamorato
Ludovico Ariosto
Orlando furioso
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Sonnets and Madrigals,
translated by Wordsworth,
Longfellow, Emerson,
Santayana, and others
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince
The Mandrake, a Comedy
Leonardo da Vinci
Notebooks
Baldassare Castiglione
The Book of the Courtier
Gaspara Stampa
Sonnets and Madrigals
Giorgio Vasari
Lives of the Painters
Benvenuto Cellini
Autobiography
Torquato Tasso
Jerusalem Delivered
Giordano Bruno
The Expulsion of the
Triumphant Beast
Tommaso Campanella
Poems
The City of the Sun
Giambattista Vico
Principles of a New Science
Carlo Goldoni
The Servant of Two Masters
Vittorio Alfieri
Saul
PORTUGAL
Luis de Camoens
The Lusiads translated by
Leonard Bacon
Antonio Ferreira
Poetry, in The Muse Reborn,
translated by T. F. Earle
SPAIN
Jorge Manrique
CoplasJ translated by Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow
Fernando de Rojas
La CelestinaJ translated by
James Mabbe, adapted by Eric
Bentley
Lazarillo de TormesJ translated by
W. S. Merwin
Francisco de Quevedo
Visions, translated by Roger
L’Estrange
Satirical Letter of Censure, in
J. M. Cohen’s Penguin Book
of Spanish Verse
Fray Luis de Leon
Poems, translated by Willis
Barns tone
St. John of the Cross
Poems, translated by John
Frederick Nims
Luis de Gongora
Sonnets
Soledades
Miguel de Cervantes
Don Quixote, translated by
Samuel Putnam
Exemplary Stories
Lope de Vega
La Dorotea, translated by Alan
S. Trueblood and Edwin
Honig
Fuente ovejuna, translated by
Roy Campbell
Lost in a Mirror, translated by
Adrian Mitchell
The Knight of Olmedo,
translated by Willard F. King
Tirso de Molina
The Trickster of Seville,
translated by Roy Campbell
Pedro Calderon de Ia Barca
Life Is a Dream, translated by
Roy Campbell
The Mayor of Zalamea
The Mighty Magician
The Doctor of His Own Honor
Sor Juana Ines de Ia Cruz
Poems
ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND
Geoffrey Chaucer
The Canterbury Tales
Troilus and Criseyde
Sir Thomas Malory
Le Marte D’Arthur
William Dunbar
Poems
John Skelton
Poems
Sir Thomas More
Utopia
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Poems
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Poems
Sir Philip Sidney
The Countess of Pembroke’s
Arcadia
Astrophel and Stella
An Apology for Poetry
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke
Poems
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene
The Minor Poems
Sir Walter Ralegh
Poems
Christopher Marlowe
Poems and Plays
Michael Drayton
Poems
Samuel Daniel
Poems
A Defence of Ryme
Thomas Nashe
The Unfortunate Traveller
Thomas Kyd
The Spanish Tragedy
William Shakespeare
Plays and Poems
Thomas Campion
Songs
John Donne
Poems
Sermons
Ben Jonson
Poems, Plays, and Masques
Francis Bacon
Essays
Robert Burton
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Sir Thomas Browne
Religio Medici
Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall
The Garden of Cyrus
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
Robert Herrick
Poems
Thomas Carew
Poems
Richard Lovelace
Poems
Andrew Marvell
Poems
George Herbert
The Temple
Thomas Traheme
Centuries, Poems, and
Thanksgivings
Henry Vaughan
Poetry
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Poems
Richard Crashaw
Poems
Francis Beaumont and
John Fletcher
Plays
George Chapman
Comedies, Tragedies, Poems
John Ford
‘Tis Pity She’s a W hare
John Marston
The Malcontent
John Webster
The White Devil
The Duchess of Malfi
Thomas Middleton and
William Rowley
The Changeling
Cyril Toumeur
The Revenger’s Tragedy
Philip Massinger
A New Way to Pay Old Debts
John Bunyan
The Pilgrim’s Progress
haak Walton
The Compleat Angler
john Milton
Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor
Poems
Samson Agonistes
Areopagitica
john Aubrey
Brief Lives
Jeremy Taylor
Holy Dying
Samuel Butler
Hudibras
john Dryden
Poetry and Plays
Critical Essays
Thomas Otway
Venice Preserv· d
William Congreve
The Way of the World
Love for Love
jonathan Swift
A Tale of a Tub
Gulliver’s Travels
Shorter Prose W arks
Poems
Sir George Etherege
The Man of Mode
Alexander Pope
Poems
john Gay
The Beggar’s Opera
James Boswell
Life of Johnson
Journals
Samuel Johnson
Works
Edward Gibbon
The History of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire
Edmund Burke
A Philosophical Enquiry into
. . . the Sublime and Beautiful
Reflections on the Revolution
in France
Maurice Morgann
An Essay on the Dramatic
Character of Sir John Falstaff
William Collins
Poems
Thomas Gray
Poems
George Farquhar
The Beaux’ Stratagem
The Recruiting Officer
William Wycherley
The Country Wife
The Plain Dealer
Christopher Smart
Jubilate Agno
A Song to David
Oliver Goldsmith
The Vicar of Wakefield
She Stoops to Conquer
The Traveller
The Deserted Village
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The School for Scandal
The Rivals
William Cowper
Poetical W arks
George Crabbe
Poetical W arks
Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders
Robinson Crusoe
A Journal of the Plague Year
Samuel Richardson
Clarissa
Pamela
Sir Charles Grandison
Henry Fielding
Joseph Andrews
The History of Tom Jones, a
Foundling
Tobias Smollett
The Expedition of Humphry
Clinker
The Adventures of Roderick
Random
Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
A Sentimental Journey through
France and Italy
Fanny Burney
Evelina
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
The Spectator
FRANCE
Jean Froissart
Chronicles
The Song of Roland
Francois Villon
Poems, translated by Galway
Kinnell
Michel de Montaigne
Essays� translated by Donald
Frame
Fran�ois Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel,
translated by Donald Frame
Marguerite de Navarre
The Heptameron
Joachim Du Bellay
The Regrets, translated by
C. H. Sisson
Maurice Sceve
De lie
Pierre de Ronsard
Odes, Elegies, Sonnets
Philippe de Commynes
Memoirs
Agrippa d’ Aubigne
Les Tragiques
Robert Gamier
Mark Antony, translated by
Mary (Sidney) Herbert,
Countess of Pembroke
The J ewesses
Pierre Comeille
The Cid
Polyeucte
Nicomede
Horace
Cinna
Rodogune
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Maxims
Jean de La Fontaine
Fables
Moliere
(translated by Richard Wilbur)
The Misanthrope
Tartuffe
The School for Wives
The Learned Ladies
(translated by Donald Frame)
Don Juan
School for Husbands
Ridiculous Precieuses
The Would-Be Gentleman
The Miser
The Imaginary Invalid
Blaise Pascal
Pensees
Jacques-Benigne Bossuet
Funerary Orations
Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux
The Art of Poetry
Lutrin
Jean Racine
(translated by Richard Wilbur)
Phaedra
Andromache
(translated by C. H. Sisson)
Britannicus
Athaliah
Pierre Cadet de Marivaux
Seven Comedies
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Confessions
Emile
La Nouvelle Heloise
Voltaire
Zadig
Candide
Letters on England
The Lisbon Earthquake
Abbe Prevost
Manon Lescaut� translated by
Donald Frame
Madame de La Fayette
The Princess of Cleves
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de
Chamfort
Products of the Perfected
Civilization, translated by
W. S. Merwin
Denis Diderot
Rameau’s Nephew
Choderlos de Lados
Dangerous Liaisons
GERMANY
Erasmus, a Dutchman living in
Switzerland and Germany,
while writing in Latin, is
placed here arbitrarily, but
also as an influence on the
Lutheran Reformation.
Erasmus
In Praise of Folly
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust� Parts One and Two,
translated by Stuart Atkins
Dichtung und Wahrheit
Egmont, translated by Willard
Trask
Elective Affinities
The Sorrows of Young Werther,
translated by Louise Bogan,
Elizabeth Mayer, and W. H.
Auden
Poems, translated by Michael
Hamburger, Christopher
Middleton, and others
Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship
Wilhelm Meister’s Years of
Wandering
Italian Journey
Verse Plays and Hermann and
Dorothea, translated by
Michael Hamburger and
others
Roman Elegies, Venetian
Epigrams, West-Eastern
Divan, translated by Michael
Hamburger
Friedrich Schiller
The Robbers
Mary Stuart
Wallenstein
Don Carlos
On the Naive and Sentimental
in Literature
Gotthold Lessing
Laocoon
Nathan the Wise
Friedrich Holderlin
Hymns and Fragments,
translated by Richard Sieburth
Selected Poems, translated by
Michael Hamburger
Heinrich von Kleist
Five Plays, translated by Martin
Greenberg
Stories
C.
The Democratic Age
I have located Vico’s Democratic Age in the post-Goethean nineteenth century, when the literature of Italy and Spain ebbs, yielding eminence to
England with its renaissance of the Renaissance in Romanticism, and to a
lesser degree to France and Germany. This is also the era where the strength
of both Russian and American literature begins. I have resisted the backward
reach of the current canonical crusades, which attempt to elevate a number
of sadly inadequate women writers of the nineteenth century, as well as
some rudimentary narratives and verses of African-Americans. Expanding
the Canon, as I have said more than once in this book, tends to drive opt
the better writers, sometimes even the best, because pragmatically none of
us (whoever we are) ever had time to read absolutely everything, no matter
how great our lust for reading. And for most of us, the harried young in
particular, inadequate authors will consume the energies that would be
better invested in stronger writers. Nearly everything that has been revived
or discovered by Feminist and African-American literary scholars falls all
too precisely into the category of “period pieces,” as imaginatively dated
now as they were already enfeebled when they first came into existence.
ITALY
Ugo Foscolo
On Sepulchres, translated by
Thomas G. Bergin
Last Letters of ]acopo Ortis
Odes and The Graces
Alessandro Manzoni
The Betrothed
On the Historical Novel
Giacomo Leopardi
Essays and Dialogues, translated
by Giovanni Cecchetti
Poems
The Moral Essays, translated by
Howard Norse
Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli
Roman Sonnets, translated by
Harold Norse
Giosue Carducci
Hymn to Satan
Barbarian Odes
Rhymes and Rhythms
Giovanni Verga
Little Novels of Sicily, translated
by D. H. Lawrence
Mastro-Don Gesualdo,
translated by D. H. Lawrence
The House by the Medlar Tree,
translated by Raymond
Rosenthal
The She-Wolf and Other Stories,
translated by Giovanni
Cecchetti
SPAIN and PORTUGAL
Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
Poems
Benito Perez Gald6s
Fortunata and Jacinta
Leopoldo Alas (Clarin)
La Regenta
Jose Maria de E�a de Queir6s
The Maias
FRANCE
Benjamin Constant
Adolphe
The Red Notebook
Francois-Auguste-Rene de
Chateaubriand
Atala and Rene, translated by
Irving Putter
The Genius of Christianity
Alphonse de Lamartine
Meditations
Alfred de Vigny
Chatterton
Poems
Victor Hugo
The Distance, The Shadows:
Selected Poems, translated by
Harry Guest
Les Miserables
Notre-Dame of Paris
William Shakespeare
The Toilers of the Sea
The End of Satan
God
Alfred de Musset
Poems
Lorenzaccio
Gerard de N erval
The Chimeras, translated by
Peter Jay
Sylvie
Aurelia
Theophile Gautier
Mademoiselle de Maupin
Enamels and Cameos
Honore de Balzac
The Girl with the Golden Eyes
Louis Lambert
The Wild Ass’s Skin
Old Goriot
Cousin Bette
A Harlot High and Low
Eugenie Grandet
Ursule Mirouet
Stendhal
On Love
The Red and the Black
The Charterhouse of Parma
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary, translated by
Francis Steegmuller
Sentimental Education
Salammbo
A Simple Soul
George Sand
The Haunted Pool
Charles Baudelaire
Flowers of Evil, translated by
Richard Howard
Paris Spleen
Stephane Mallarme
Selected Poetry and Prose
Paul Verlaine
Selected Poems
Arthur Rimbaud
Complete Works, translated by
Paul Schmidt
Tristan Corbiere
Les Amours jaunes
Jules Laforgue
Selected Writings, translated by
William Jay Smith
Guy de Maupassant
Selected Short Stories
Emile Zola
Germinal
L ‘Assommoir
Nana
SCANDINAVIA
Henrik Ibsen
Brand, translated by Geoffrey
Hill
Peer Gynt, translated by Rolf
Fjelde
Emperor and Galilean
Hedda Gabler
The Master Builder
The Lady from the Sea
When We Dead Awaken
August Strindberg
To Damascus
Miss julie
The Father
The Dance of Death
The Ghost Sonata
A Dream Play
GREAT BRITAIN
Robert Burns
Poems
William Blake
Complete Poetry and Prose
William Wordsworth
Poems
The Prelude
Sir Walter Scott
Waverley
The Heart of Midlothian
Redgauntlet
Old Mortality
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
Emma
Mansfield Park
Persuasion
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Poems and Prose
Dorothy Wordsworth
The Grasmere Journal
William Hazlitt
Essays and Criticism
Lord Byron
Don juan
Poems
Walter Savage Landor
Poems
Imaginary Conversations
Thomas De Quincey
Confessions of an English
Opium Eater
Selected Prose
Charles Lamb
Essays
Maria Edgeworth
Castle Rackrent
John Galt
The Entail
Elizabeth Gaskell
Cranford
Mary Barton
North and South
James Hogg
The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a justified
Sinner
Charles Maturin
Me/moth the Wanderer
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poems
A Defence of Poetry
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Frankenstein
John Clare
Poems
John Keats
Poems and Letters
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
Death’s ]est-Book
Poems
George Darley
Nepenthe
Poems
Thomas Hood
Poems
Thomas Wade
Poems
Robert Browning
Poems
The Ring and the Book
Charles Dickens
The Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club
David Copperfield
The Adventures of Oliver Twist
A Tale of Two Cities
Bleak House
Hard Times
Nicholas Nickleby
Dombey and Son
Great Expectations
Martin Chuzzlewit
Christmas Stories
Little Dorrit
Our Mutual Friend
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poems
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Poems and Translations
Matthew Arnold
Poems
Essays
Arthur Hugh Clough
Poems
Christina Rossetti
Poems
Thomas Love Peacock
Nightmare Abbey
Gryll Grange
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Poems and Prose
Thomas Carlyle
Selected Prose
Sartor Resartus
john Ruskin
Modern Painters
The Stones of Venice
Unto This Last
The Queen of the Air
Walter Pater
Studies in the History of the
Renaissance
Appreciations
Imaginary Portraits
Marius the Epicurean
Edward FitzGerald
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
Autobiography
John Henry Newman
Apologia pro Vita Sua
A Grammar of Assent
The Idea of a University
Anthony Trollope
The Barsetshire Novels
The Palliser Novels
Orley Farm
The Way We Live Now
Lewis Carroll
Complete W arks
Edward Lear
Complete Nonsense
George Gissing
New Grub Street
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Poems and Letters
Charlotte Bronte
jane Eyre
Villette
Emily Bronte
Poems
W uthering Heights
William Makepeace Thackeray
Vanity Fair
The History of Henry Esmond
George Meredith
Poems
The Egoist
Francis Thompson
Poems
Lionel Johnson
Poems
Robert Bridges
Poems
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Collected Poems
The Man Who Was Thursday
Samuel Butler
Erewhon
The Way of All Flesh
W. S. Gilbert
Complete Plays of Gilbert and
Sullivan
Bah Ballads
Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone
The Woman in White
No Name
Coventry Patmore
Odes
James Thomson (Bysshe Vanolis)
The City of Dreadful Night
Oscar Wilde
Plays
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Artist as Critic
Letters
John Davidson
Ballads and Songs
Ernest Dowson
Complete Poems
George Eliot
Adam Bede
Silas Marner
The Mill on the Floss
Middlemarch
Daniel Deronda
Robert Louis Stevenson
Essays
Kidnapped
Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Treasure Island
The New Arabian Nights
The Master of Ballantrae
Weir of Hermiston
William Morris
Early Romances
Poems
The Earthly Paradise
The Well at the World’s End
News from Nowhere
Bram Stoker
Dracula
George Macdonald
Lilith
At the Back of the North Wind
GERMANY
Navalis (Friedrich von
Harden burg)
Hymns to the Night
Aphorisms
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Fairy Tales
Eduard Morike
Selected Poems, translated by
Christopher Middleton
Mozart on His Way to Prague
Theodor Storm
Immensee
Poems
Gottfried Keller
Green Henry
Tales
E. T. A. Hoffmann
The Devil’s Elixir
Tales
Jeremias Gotthelf
The Black Spider
Adalbert Stifter
Indian Summer
Tales
Friedrich Schlegel
Criticism and Aphorisms
Georg B iichner
Danton’s Death
Woyzeck
Heinrich Heine
Complete Poems
Richard Wagner
The Ring of the Nibelung
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Birth of Tragedy
Beyond Good and Evil
On the Genealogy of Morals
The Will to Power
Theodor Fontane
Effi Briest
Stefan George
Selected Poems
RUSSIA
Aleksandr Pushkin
Complete Prose Tales
Collected Poetry, translated by
Walter Arndt
Eugene Onegin, translated by
Charles 1 ohnston
Narrative Poems, translated by
Charles 1 ohnston
Boris Godunov
Nikolay Gogo)
The Complete Tales
Dead Souls
The Government Inspector,
translated by Adrian Mitchell
Mikhail Lermontov
Narrative Poems, translated by
Charles 1 ohnston
A Hero of Our Time
Sergey Aksakov
A Family Chronicle
Aleksandr Herzen
My Past and Thoughts
From the Other Shore
Ivan Goncharov
The Frigate Pallada
Oblomov
Ivan Turgenev
A Sportsman’s Notebook,
translated by Charles and
Natasha Hepburn
A Month in the Country
Fathers and Sons
On the Eve
First Love
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground
Crime and Punishment
The Idiot
The Possessed (The Devils)
The Brothers Karamazov
Short Novels
Leo Tolstoy
The Cossacks
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
A Confession
The Power of Darkness
Short Novels
Nikolay Leskov
Tales
Aleksandr Ostrovsky
The Storm
Nikolay Chernyshevsky
What Is to Be Done?
Aleksandr Blok
The Twelve and Other Poems,
translated by Anselm Hollo
Anton Chekhov
The Tales
The Major Plays
THE UNITED STATES
Washington Irving
The Sketch Book
William Cullen Bryant
Collected Poems
James Fenimore Cooper
The Deerslayer
John Greenleaf Whittier
Collected Poems
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature
Essays, first and second series
Representative Men
The Conduct of Life
Journals
Poems
Emily Dickinson
Complete Poems
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass, first edition
Leaves of Grass, third edition
The Complete Poems
Specimen Days
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
Tales and Sketches
The Marble Faun
Notebooks
Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
The Piazza Tales
Billy Budd
Collected Poems
Clare/
Edgar Allan Poe
Poetry and Tales
Essays and Reviews
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym
Eureka
jones Very
Essays and Poems
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
The Cricket and Other Poems
Henry David Thoreau
Walden
Poems
Essays
Richard Henry Dana, Jr.
Two Years before the Mast
Frederick Douglass
Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Selected Poems
Sidney Lanier
Poems
Francis Parkman
France and England in North
America
The California and Oregon Trail
Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres
Ambrose Bierce
Collected Writings
Louisa May Alcott
Little Women
Charles W. Chesnutt
The Short Fiction
Kate Chopin
The Awakening
William Dean Howells
The Rise of Silas Lapham
A Modern Instance
Stephen Crane
The Red Badge of Courage
Stories and Poems
Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady
The Bostonians
The Princess Casamassima
The Awkward Age
Short Novels and Tales
The Ambassadors
The Wings of the Dove
The Golden Bowl
Harold Frederic
The Damnation of Theron Ware
Mark Twain
Complete Short Stories
The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn
The Devil’s Racetrack
Number Forty-Four: The
Mysterious Stranger
Pudd’nhead Wilson
A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court
William James
The Varieties of Religious
Experience
Pragmatism
Frank Norris
The Octopus
Sarah Orne Jewett
The Country of the Pointed Firs
and Other Stories
Trumbull Stickney
Poems
And here is the list of the volumes of The Great Books of the Western World do read them as I did beginning in eighth grade at the age of fourteen, using Adler’s Ten Year Plan which took me three to four years during the three times I read it in my teens, twenties, and thirties, using his ten volume synopticon of the Great Books, the Great Ideas Program Series.
I spent around one sixth of my life in this study, and wouldn’t trade a moment of it. I hope you too may find joy in this.
How to Think about the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization
“Comprised of the edited transcripts of the 1950s television series The Great Ideas produced by the Institute for Philosophical Research in San Fransisco, this book introduces laypeople to 52 great ideas of philosophy through dialogue between an interviewer and the philosopher Mortimer Adler.”
The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought, Mortimer J. Adler
“Mortimer Adler sat down at a manual typewriter with a list of authors and a pyramid of books. Beginning with “Angel” and ending with “World,” he set out to write 102 essays featuring the ideas that have collectively defined Western thought for more than twenty-five hundred years. The essays, originally published in the “Syntopicon,” were, and remain, the centerpiece of Encyclolpaedia Britannica’s “Great Books of the Western World.”
The Great Ideas Program Series
https://www.goodreads.com/series/170535-the-great-ideas-program
As written in Wikipedia; “Originally published in 54 volumes, The Great Books of the Western World covers categories including fiction, history, poetry, natural science, mathematics, philosophy, drama, politics, religion, economics, and ethics. Hutchins wrote the first volume, titled The Great Conversation, as an introduction and discourse on liberal education. Adler sponsored the next two volumes, “The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon”, as a way of emphasizing the unity of the set and, by extension, of Western thought in general. A team of indexers spent months compiling references to such topics as “Man’s freedom in relation to the will of God” and “The denial of void or vacuum in favor of a plenum”. They grouped the topics into 102 chapters, for which Adler wrote the 102 introductions. Four colors identify each volume by subject area—Imaginative Literature, Mathematics and the Natural Sciences, History and Social Science, and Philosophy and Theology. The volumes contained the following works:
Volume 1
The Great Conversation
Volume 2
Syntopicon I: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, and Love
Volume 3
Syntopicon II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World
Volume 4
Homer (rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler)
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Volume 5
Aeschylus (translated into English verse by G.M. Cookson)
The Suppliant Maidens
The Persians
Seven Against Thebes
Prometheus Bound
The Oresteia
Agamemnon
Choephoroe
The Eumenides
Sophocles (translated into English prose by Sir Richard C. Jebb)
The Oedipus Cycle
Oedipus the King
Oedipus at Colonus
Antigone
Ajax
Electra
The Trachiniae
Philoctetes
Euripides (translated into English prose by Edward P. Coleridge)
Rhesus
Medea
Hippolytus
Alcestis
Heracleidae
The Suppliants
The Trojan Women
Ion
Helen
Andromache
Electra
Bacchantes
Hecuba
Heracles Mad
The Phoenician Women
Orestes
Iphigenia in Tauris
Iphigenia in Aulis
Cyclops
Aristophanes (translated into English verse by Benjamin Bickley Rogers)
The Acharnians
The Knights
The Clouds
The Wasps
Peace
The Birds
The Frogs
Lysistrata
Thesmophoriazusae
Ecclesiazousae
Plutus
Volume 6
Herodotus
The History (translated by George Rawlinson)
Thucydides
History of the Peloponnesian War (translated by Richard Crawley and revised by R. Feetham)
Volume 7
Plato
The Dialogues (translated by Benjamin Jowett)
Charmides
Lysis
Laches
Protagoras
Euthydemus
Cratylus
Phaedrus
Ion
Symposium
Meno
Euthyphro
Apology
Crito
Phaedo
Gorgias
The Republic
Timaeus
Critias
Parmenides
Theaetetus
Sophist
Statesman
Philebus
Laws
The Seventh Letter (translated by J. Harward)
Volume 8
Aristotle
Categories
On Interpretation
Prior Analytics
Posterior Analytics
Topics
Sophistical Refutations
Physics
On the Heavens
On Generation and Corruption
Meteorology
Metaphysics
On the Soul
Minor biological works
On Sense and the Sensible
On Memory and Reminisence
On Sleep and Sleeplessness
On Dreams
On Prophesying by Dreams
On Longevity and Shortness of Life
On Youth and Old Age, On Life and Death, On Breathing
Volume 9
Aristotle
History of Animals
Parts of Animals
On the Motion of Animals
On the Gait of Animals
On the Generation of Animals
Nicomachean Ethics
Politics
The Athenian Constitution
Rhetoric
Poetics
Volume 10
Hippocrates
Works
The Hippocratic Oath
On Ancient Medicine
On Airs, Water, and Places
The Book of Prognostics
On Regimen in Acute Diseases
Of the Epidemics
On Injuries of the Head
On the Surgery
On Fractures
On the Articulations
Instruments of Reduction
Aphorisms
The Law
The Ulcer
On Fistulae
On Hemorrhoids
On the Sacred Disease
Galen
On the Natural Faculties
Volume 11
Euclid
The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements
Archimedes
On the Sphere and Cylinder
Measurement of a Circle
On Conoids and Spheroids
On Spirals
On the Equilibrium of Planes
The Sand Reckoner
The Quadrature of the Parabola
On Floating Bodies
Book of Lemmas
The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems
Apollonius of Perga
On Conic Sections
Nicomachus of Gerasa
Introduction to Arithmetic
Volume 12
Lucretius
On the Nature of Things (translated by H.A.J. Munro)
Epictetus
The Discourses (translated by George Long)
Marcus Aurelius
The Meditations (translated by George Long)
Volume 13
Virgil (translated into English verse by James Rhoades)
Eclogues
Georgics
Aeneid
Volume 14
Plutarch
The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (translated by John Dryden)
Volume 15
P. Cornelius Tacitus (translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb)
The Annals
The Histories
Volume 16
Ptolemy
Almagest, (translated by R. Catesby Taliaferro)
Nicolaus Copernicus
On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
Johannes Kepler (translated by Charles Glenn Wallis)
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV–V)
The Harmonies of the World (Book V)
Volume 17
Plotinus
The Six Enneads (translated by Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page)
Volume 18
Augustine of Hippo
The Confessions
The City of God
On Christian Doctrine
Volume 19
Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologica (First part complete, selections from second part, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
Volume 20
Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologica (Selections from second and third parts and supplement, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province and revised by Daniel J. Sullivan)
Volume 21
Dante Alighieri
Divine Comedy (Translated by Charles Eliot Norton)
Volume 22
Geoffrey Chaucer
Troilus and Criseyde
The Canterbury Tales
Volume 23
Niccolò Machiavelli
The Prince
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan
Volume 24
François Rabelais
Gargantua and Pantagruel, but only up to book 4.
Volume 25
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
Essays
Volume 26
William Shakespeare
The First Part of King Henry the Sixth
The Second Part of King Henry the Sixth
The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth
The Tragedy of Richard the Third
The Comedy of Errors
Titus Andronicus
The Taming of the Shrew
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo and Juliet
The Tragedy of King Richard the Second
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Life and Death of King John
The Merchant of Venice
The First Part of King Henry the Fourth
The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth
Much Ado About Nothing
The Life of King Henry the Fifth
Julius Caesar
As You Like It
Volume 27
William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night; or, What You Will
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Troilus and Cressida
All’s Well That Ends Well
Measure for Measure
Othello, the Moor of Venice
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Timon of Athens
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Cymbeline
The Winter’s Tale
The Tempest
The Famous History of the Life of King Henry the Eighth
Sonnets
Volume 28
William Gilbert
On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies
Galileo Galilei
Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences
William Harvey
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
On the Circulation of Blood
On the Generation of Animals
Volume 29
Miguel de Cervantes
The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha (translated by John Ormsby)
Volume 30
Sir Francis Bacon
The Advancement of Learning
Novum Organum
New Atlantis
Volume 31
René Descartes
Rules for the Direction of the Mind
Discourse on the Method
Meditations on First Philosophy
Objections Against the Meditations and Replies
The Geometry
Benedict de Spinoza
Ethics
Volume 32
John Milton
English Minor Poems
On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity
A Paraphrase on Psalm 114
Psalm 136
The Passion
On Time
Upon the Circumcision
At a Solemn Musick
An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester
Song on May Morning
On Shakespeare
On the University Carrier
Another on the same
L’Allegro
Il Penseroso
Arcades
Lycida
Comus
On the Death of a Fair Infant
At a Vacation Exercise
The Fifth Ode of Horace
Sonnets (I, and VII—XIX)
On the New Forcers of Conscience
On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester
To the Lord General Cromwell
To Sir Henry Vane the Younger
To Mister Cyriack the Skinner upon his Blindness
Psalms (I—VIII & LXXX—LXXXVIII)
Paradise Lost
Samson Agonistes
Areopagitica
Volume 33
Blaise Pascal
The Provincial Letters
Pensées
Scientific and mathematical essays
Volume 34
Sir Isaac Newton
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
Optics
Christiaan Huygens
Treatise on Light
Volume 35
John Locke
A Letter Concerning Toleration
Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
George Berkeley
The Principles of Human Knowledge
David Hume
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Volume 36
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels
Laurence Sterne
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Volume 37
Henry Fielding
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Volume 38
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
The Spirit of the Laws
Jean Jacques Rousseau
A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
A Discourse on Political Economy
The Social Contract
Volume 39
Adam Smith
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Volume 40
Edward Gibbon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 1)
Volume 41
Edward Gibbon
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 2)
Volume 42
Immanuel Kant
Critique of Pure Reason
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Critique of Practical Reason
Excerpts from The Metaphysics of Morals
Preface and Introduction to the Metaphysical Elements of Ethics with a note on Conscience
General Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals
The Science of Right
The Critique of Judgement
Volume 43
American State Papers
Declaration of Independence
Articles of Confederation
The Constitution of the United States of America
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
The Federalist
John Stuart Mill
On Liberty
Considerations on Representative Government
Utilitarianism
Volume 44
James Boswell
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
Volume 45
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
Elements of Chemistry
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier
Analytical Theory of Heat
Michael Faraday
Experimental Researches in Electricity
Volume 46
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Philosophy of Right
The Philosophy of History
Volume 47
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Faust
Volume 48
Herman Melville
Moby Dick; or, The Whale
Volume 49
Charles Darwin
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
Volume 50
Karl Marx
Capital
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Manifesto of the Communist Party
Volume 51
Count Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
Volume 52
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov
Volume 53
William James
The Principles of Psychology
Volume 54
Sigmund Freud
The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis
Selected Papers on Hysteria
The Sexual Enlightenment of Children
The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy
Observations on “Wild” Psycho-Analysis
The Interpretation of Dreams
On Narcissism
Instincts and Their Vicissitudes
Repression
The Unconscious
A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
The Ego and the Id
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
Civilization and Its Discontents
New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
Second edition
The second edition of Great Books of the Western World, 1990, saw an increase from 54 to 60 volumes, with updated translations. The six new volumes concerned the 20th century, an era of which the first edition’s sole representative was Freud. Some of the other volumes were re-arranged, with even more pre-20th century material added but with four texts deleted: Apollonius’ On Conic Sections, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Joseph Fourier’s Analytical Theory of Heat. Adler later expressed regret about dropping On Conic Sections and Tom Jones. Adler also voiced disagreement with the addition of Voltaire’s Candide, and said that the Syntopicon should have included references to the Koran. He addressed criticisms that the set was too heavily Western European and did not adequately represent women and minority authors.[11] Four women authors were included, where previously there were none.[12]
The added pre-20th century texts appear in these volumes (some of the accompanying content of these volumes differs from the first edition volume of that number):
Volume 20
John Calvin
Institutes of the Christian Religion (Selections)
Volume 23
Erasmus
The Praise of Folly
Volume 31
Molière
The School for Wives
The Critique of the School for Wives
Tartuffe
Don Juan
The Miser
The Would-Be Gentleman
The Imaginary Invalid
Jean Racine
Bérénice
Phèdre
Volume 34
Voltaire
Candide
Denis Diderot
Rameau’s Nephew
Volume 43
Søren Kierkegaard
Fear and Trembling
Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
Volume 44
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America
Volume 45
Honoré de Balzac
Cousin Bette
Volume 46
Jane Austen
Emma
George Eliot
Middlemarch
Volume 47
Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit
Volume 48
Mark Twain
Huckleberry Finn
Volume 52
Henrik Ibsen
A Doll’s House
The Wild Duck
Hedda Gabler
The Master Builder
The contents of the six volumes of added 20th-century material:
Volume 55
William James
Pragmatism
Henri Bergson
“An Introduction to Metaphysics”
John Dewey
Experience and Education
Alfred North Whitehead
Science and the Modern World
Bertrand Russell
The Problems of Philosophy
Martin Heidegger
What Is Metaphysics?
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations
Karl Barth
The Word of God and the Word of Man
Volume 56
Henri Poincaré
Science and Hypothesis
Max Planck
Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
Alfred North Whitehead
An Introduction to Mathematics
Albert Einstein
Relativity: The Special and the General Theory
Arthur Eddington
The Expanding Universe
Niels Bohr
Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (selections)
Discussion with Einstein on Epistemology
G. H. Hardy
A Mathematician’s Apology
Werner Heisenberg
Physics and Philosophy
Erwin Schrödinger
What Is Life?
Theodosius Dobzhansky
Genetics and the Origin of Species
C. H. Waddington
The Nature of Life
Volume 57
Thorstein Veblen
The Theory of the Leisure Class
R. H. Tawney
The Acquisitive Society
John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Volume 58
Sir James George Frazer
The Golden Bough (selections)
Max Weber
Essays in Sociology (selections)
Johan Huizinga
The Autumn of the Middle Ages
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Structural Anthropology (selections)
Volume 59
Henry James
The Beast in the Jungle
George Bernard Shaw
Saint Joan
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
Anton Chekhov
Uncle Vanya
Luigi Pirandello
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Marcel Proust
Remembrance of Things Past: “Swann in Love”
Willa Cather
A Lost Lady
Thomas Mann
Death in Venice
James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Volume 60
Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis
D. H. Lawrence
The Prussian Officer
T. S. Eliot
The Waste Land
Eugene O’Neill
Mourning Becomes Electra
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
William Faulkner
A Rose for Emily
Bertolt Brecht
Mother Courage and Her Children
Ernest Hemingway
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
George Orwell
Animal Farm
Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot
Torch of Liberty 