The table below contains three of the lists. Other lists are collected below the table. Maybe someday I'll collate all these lists into a single table -- but you know how Web page work goes -- maybe I won't.
Dr. Mortimer Adler, who edited The Great Books of the Western World at the University of Chicago, believed that by reading his selections you would obtain a thorough liberal arts education.
For more information about books available on the Web and by FTP and gopher, see Carnegie-Mellon's On-Line Books, the service I used to generate many of the links on this page. collections of electronic texts. Project Gutenberg has blazed the path for making classic literature available electronically and they are responsible for many texts referenced here.
| Author | The Great Books of the Western World | The Easton Press | Dr. Eliot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ancient | |||
| God, Moses, Jesus, Paul et alia | The Bible | ||
| Homer (c. 850 B.C.E. ?) | The Iliad and The Odyssey | The Iliad and The Odyssey | |
| Confucius (551-479 B.C.E.) | Analects | ||
| Aeschylus (c. 525- c. 456 B.C.E.) | Plays | Plays | |
| Sophocles (c. 496-c. 405 B.C.E.) | plays, including: | Oedipus Rex | |
| Herodotus (c. 485-425 B.C.E.) | The History | ||
| Euripides (480 or 484-406 B.C.E.) | plays, including: | plays (see list at left) | |
| Thucydides (c. 460-c. 400 B.C.E.) | The History of the Peloponesian War | ||
| Hippocrates (c. 460?-377 or 359 B.C.E.) | works, including Aphorisms | ||
| Aristophanes (c. 448- c. 388 B.C.E.) | plays, including | The Birds and The Frogs | |
| Plato (c. 427-c. 347 B.C.E.) | works, including: | The Republic and Symposium | Apology, Crito, and Phaedo |
| Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) | works, including: | Politics | |
| Euclid (taught c. 300 B.C.E.) | The Elements | ||
| Archimedes (c. 287-212 B.C.E.) | works | ||
| Apollonius of Perga (fl 250-220 B.C.E.) | On Conic Sections | ||
| Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.) | Letters | ||
| Nicomachus of Gerasa | Introduction to Arithmetic | ||
| Lucretius (c. 99-55 B.C.E.) | On the Nature of Things | ||
| Virgil (70-19 B.C.E.) | The Ecologues, The Georgics, and The Aeneid | The Aeneid | The Aeneid |
| Livy (59 B.C.E.-17 C.E.) | History of Early Rome | ||
| First through Fifth Centuries | |||
| Epictetus (c. 50-?) | The Discourses | Golden Sayings | |
| Plutarch (c. 46-c. 120) | The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans | The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans | |
| P. Cornelius Tacitus (c. 55-120) | The Annals and The Histories | ||
| Pliny, the Younger (62-c. 114) | Letters | ||
| Ptolemy (c. 90-168) | The Almagest | ||
| Marcus Aurelius (121-180) | The Meditations | Meditations | |
| Galen (c. 130-201) | On the Natural Faculties | ||
| Plotinus (205-270) | The Six Enneads | ||
| Saint Augustine (354-430) | Confessions, The City of God, and On Christian Doctrine | Confessions | Confessions |
| Sixth through Tenth Centuries | |||
| Eleventh through Fourteenth Centuries | |||
| Omar Khayyam (c. 1050-c. 1123) | The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam | ||
| Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) | Summa Theologica | ||
| Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) | The Divine Comedy | The Divine Comedy | The Divine Comedy |
| Boccaccio (1313-1375) | The Decameron | ||
| Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1345-1400) | The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Cressida | The Canterbury Tales | The Canterbury Tales |
| Thomas à Kempis (1379-1471) | The Imitation of Christ | ||
| Fifteenth Century | |||
| Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) | The Prince | The Prince | |
| Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) | On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres | ||
| Francois Rabelais (1494?-1553?) | Gargantua and Pantagruel | ||
| Sixteenth Century | |||
| Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592) | Essays | ||
| William Gilbert (1540-1603) | On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies | ||
| Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) | The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha | The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha | |
| Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) | Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, and New Atlantis | Essays | New Atlantis and Essays |
| William Shakespeare (1564-1616) | Works | Works | |
| Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) | Doctor Faustus | ||
| Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) | Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences | ||
| Thomas Middleton (c. 1570-1627) | The Changeling (see: The Plays of Thomas Middleton) | ||
| Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) | Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and The Harmonies of the World | ||
| Ben Jonson (1572-1637) | Volpone | ||
| John Donne (1572?-1631) | Poems, including Devotions | ||
| William Harvey (1578-1657) | On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, On the Circulation of the Blood, and On the Generation of Animals | ||
| John Webster (c. 1580-c. 1625) | The Duchess of Malfi | ||
| Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) & John Fletcher (1579-1625) | The Maid's Tragedy | ||
| Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) | Leviathan | ||
| Izaak Walton (1593-1683) | The Compleat Angler, The Life of John Donne, and The Life of George Herbert | ||
| Rene Descartes (1596-1650) | Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Discourse on the Method, Meditations on First Philosophy, Objections Against the Meditations and Replies, and The Geometry | ||
| Seventeenth Century | |||
| Thomas Browne (1605-1682) | Religio Medici | ||
| John Milton (1608-1674) | minor poems, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, and Areopagitica | Paradise Lost | Areopagitica and Tractate on Education |
| Moliere (1622-1673) | Plays | ||
| Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) | works, including: Pensees and Provincial Letters | ||
| John Bunyan (1628-1688) | Pilgrim's Progress | Pilgrim's Progress | |
| Christiaan Huygens (1629-1693) | Treatise on Light | ||
| John Dryden (1631-1700) | All for Love | ||
| John Locke (1632-1704) | essays, including | ||
| Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) | Ethics | ||
| Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) | Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and Optics | ||
| William Penn (1644-1718) | Fruits of Solitude | ||
| Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) | Journal of the Plague Year and Robinson Crusoe | ||
| Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) | Gulliver's Travels | Gulliver's Travels | |
| George Berkeley (1685-1753) | The Principles of Human Knowledge A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge | ||
| Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) | The Spirit of Laws | ||
| Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778) | Candide | ||
| Eighteenth Century | |||
| Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) | The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin | The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin | |
| Henry Fielding (1707-1754) | The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling | The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling | |
| David Hume (1711-1776) | An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding | ||
| Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) | A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, A Discourse on Political Economy, and The Social Contract | Confessions | |
| Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) | The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. | The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. | |
| Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) | Tristam Shandy | ||
| John Woolmann (1720-1772) | Journal of John Woolman | ||
| Adam Smith(1723-1790) | An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations | An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations | |
| Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) | The Critique of Pure Reason, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, and other works | ||
| Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) | She Stoops to Conquer | ||
| Thomas Paine (1737-1809) | Rights of Man | ||
| Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) | The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | ||
| James Boswell (1740-1795) | The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. | ||
| Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) | Elements of Chemistry | ||
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) | Faust | Faust | Faust |
| Alexander Hamilton(1757-1804), James Madison (1751-1836), and John Jay (1745-1829) | The Federalist | The Federalist | |
| Robert Burns (1759-1796) | Tam O'Shanter | ||
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) | The Philosophy of Right and The Philosophy of History [Also: Phenomenology of Mind] | ||
| Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) | Ivanhoe and Talisman | ||
| Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1772-1837) | Analytical Theory of Heat | ||
| Jane Austen (1775-1817) | Pride and Prejudice | ||
| American State Papers | The Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and The Constitution | ||
| Washington Irving (1783-1859) | Alhambra | ||
| Stendhal (1783-1842) | Red and the Black | ||
| The Brothers Grimm (Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm, 1785-1863, and Wilhelm Carl Grimm, 1786-1859) | Grimm's Fairy Tales | ||
| James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) | The Last of the Mohicans | ||
| Michael Faraday (1791-1867) | Experimental Researches in Electricity | ||
| Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) | The Cenci | ||
| John Keats (1795-1821) | Poetical Works | ||
| Nineteenth Century | |||
| Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) | The Three Musketeers [Available on the Web is The Man in the Iron Mask.] | ||
| Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) | Essays | Essays and English Traits | |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) | The Scarlet Letter | ||
| John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) | |||
| Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) | Becket | ||
| Charles Darwin (1809-1882) | The Origin of Species [Also available on the Web is The Voyage of the Beagle.] | The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man | The Origin of Species |
| Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) | Tales of Mystery and Imagination [See Selected Works of Poe.] | ||
| Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) | Uncle Tom's Cabin Uncle Tom's Cabin | ||
| William M. Thackeray (1811-1863) | Vanity Fair | ||
| Charles Dickens (1812-1870) | David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Short Stories, and A Tale of Two Cities [Also available by Dickens on the Web are: A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket on the Hearth.] | ||
| Robert Browning (1812-1889) | poems, several of which are in Dramatic Lyrics [Also see: Introduction to Robert Browning.] | A Blot in the 'Scutcheon | |
| Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) | Jane Eyre | ||
| Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) | Walden | ||
| Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) | Fathers and Sons | ||
| Emily Bronte (1818-1848) | Wuthering Heights | ||
| Karl Marx (1818-1883) | Capital | ||
| Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) | Manifesto of the Communist Party | ||
| Walt Whitman (1819-1891) | Leaves of Grass | ||
| George Eliot (1819-1880) | The Mill on the Floss [Also available on the Web are Middlemarch: a study of provincial life and Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe.] | ||
| Herman Melville (1819-1891) | Moby Dick; or, the Whale | Moby Dick; or, the Whale | |
| Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) | Flowers of Evil | ||
| Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) | Madame Bovary | ||
| Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) | The Brothers Karamzov | The Brothers Karamzov and Crime and Punishment | |
| Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) | War and Peace | Anna Karenina and War and Peace | |
| Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) | plays, including Peer Gynt and The Wild Duck | ||
| Jules Verne (1828-1905) | Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea | ||
| Sir Richard Burton (1829-1890) | Tales from the Arabian Nights | Tales from the Arabian Nights | |
| Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [Also available on the Web are: | ||
| Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) | Little Women | ||
| Mark Twain (1835-1910) | Huckleberry Finn | ||
| Samuel Butler (1835-1902) | The Way of All Flesh | ||
| Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) | Jude the Obscure and Return of the Native | ||
| William James (1842-1910) | The Principles of Psychology | ||
| Henry James (1843-1916) | Portrait of a Lady | ||
| Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Treasure Island | ||
| Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) | Tales | ||
| Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) | Short Stories [Also available on the Web are The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Poems.] | ||
| Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) | The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis, Selected Papers on Hysteria, The Sexual Enlightenment of Children, The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy, and other essays | ||
| George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) | plays | ||
| Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) | Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim [Also available on the Web are: The Secret Agent, The Secret Sharer, and The Shadow Line.] | ||
| Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) | The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes | ||
| Anton Chekkov (1860-1904) | plays | ||
| Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) | The Jungle Book | ||
| William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) | poems | ||
| Stephen Crane (1871-1900) | The Red Badge of Courage | ||
| Jack London (1876-1916) | Sea Wolf | ||
| James Joyce (1882-1941) | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | ||
| Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) | Brave New World | ||
| Twentieth Century | |||
| John Steinbeck (1902-1968) | Of Mice and Men |
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