Great Books of the Western World

Way back in 1952 the fist edition of The Great Books of the Western World was published. Then, during the heyday of the Great Books debate in America, in 1990, they published a revised edition. This edition had some improvements, namely 1) it went past 1900, and 2) had female authors - four - since the original publication had none. All of the authors in the revised edition were still white, however.

The 1990 edition also removed some older material, but included some newer material, which, thirty years later, seems just as obsolete and unlikely to be read today. It was very uneven: For example, even at the time of publication, the editors regretted the lack of Islamic inclusion. 

So I've decided to rectify the errors, and present a hopefully coherent, and most importantly, accessible to lay audience, edition of The Great Books of the Western World - punched up from 60 to 100 volumes.

Disclaimer: This list has a few works I've not read on it, but which I still feel relatively confident in including, given their near-universal acclaim. I've marked them with an underline. (If multiple works are listed, in the cases of Feynman and King, I've read at least one work - just not all listed.)

Without further ado, here, then, is my updated Great Books of the Western World:

1.       Epic of Gilgamesh

2.       Bible (Selections)

3.       Homer: The Iliad and The Odyssey

4.       Greek Drama: Aeschylus (Oresteia), Sophocles (Theban Trilogy), Euripides (Medea and Bacchae), and Aristophanes (Lysistrata and Clouds)

5.       Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War

6.       Plato: The Apology, Sympossium, and The Republic

7.       Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics and Prior Analytics

8.       Greek Mathematics: Nicomachus (Arithmetic), Euclid (Elements), and Archimedes (Sand Reckoner, On Floating Bodies, and The Method)

9.       Roman Philosophy: Lucretius (On the Nature of Things), Marcus Aurelius (Meditations), Seneca (On the Shortness of Life), and Cicero (Philippics)

10.   Virgil: The Aeneid

11.   Tacitus: The Annals

12.   Church Writings: Augustine (The Confessions) and Benedict (The Rule)

13.   Quran (Selections)

14.   Medieval Literature: Beowulf, Njal’s Saga, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

15.   One Thousand-and-One Nights

16.   Arabic Poetry: Rumi (Selections), Saadi (The Orchard), and Hafez (Divan)

17.   Crusades: Comnena (Alexiad – Selections) and Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Selections)

18.   Dante: The Inferno

19.   Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

20.   Renaissance Thought: Machiavelli (The Prince) and Castiglione (The Book of the Courtier)

21.   Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel

22.   Humanism and Reformation: Erasmus (The Praise of Folly) and Luther (On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church and On the Freedom of a Christian)

23.   Montaigne: Essays

24.   Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Henry IV, Henry V, and Sonnets

25.   Astronomy: Copernicus (On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres) and Kepler (Epitome – Selections)

26.   Scientific Revolution: Galileo (Dialogue Concerning Two World Systems), Bacon (Novum Organum), and Harvey (On the Motion of the Heart and Blood)

27.   Spanish Golden Age: Cervantes (Don Quixote) and Calderon de la Barca (Life is a Dream)

28.   New World: Las Casas (Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies) and Ines de la Cruz (Loa of the Divine Narcissus)

29.   Early Modern Reasoning: Descartes (Meditations, Discourse on Method, and The Geometry), Viete (Introduction to the Analytical Art), Pascal (Essay on Conics), and Huygens (Treatise on Light and On the Movement of Bodies by Impact)

30.   Milton: Paradise Lost

31.   Locke: Second Treatise of Government and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

32.   Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

33.   Swift: Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal

34.   Enlightenment Philosophy: Rousseau (The Social Contract) and Lahontan (New Voyages to North America)

35.   Enlightenment Politics: Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws) and Beccaria (On Crimes and Punishments)

36.   French Literature: La Rochefoucauld (Maxims), Racine (Phedre), Moliere (Misanthrope), Voltaire (Candide), and Diderot (Jacques the Fatalist)

37.   Smith: The Wealth of Nations

38.   American Revolution: Paine (Common Sense) and The Federalist Papers

39.   English Philosophy: Mill (Utilitarianism and On the Subjugation of Women) and Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Women)

40.   Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Pure Reason

41.   Early Modern Science: Lavoisier (The Elements of Chemistry) and Faraday (The Chemical History of the Candle and The Various Forces of Matter)

42.   German Philosophy: Hegel (Reason in History) and Schopenhauer (On Suffering and The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion)

43.   American Politics: Tocqueville (Democracy in America) and Lincoln (A House Divided, Cooper Union, Gettysburg Address, Second Inaugural Address)

44.   German Literature: Grimm (Fairy Tales) and Goethe (Faust)

45.   Early Existentialism: Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling) and Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

46.   Mackay: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

47.   Italian Literature: Leopardi (Canti and Operetta Morali) and Carducci (Barbarian Odes)

48.   Darwin: Origin of Species

49.   French Literature: Flaubert (Madame Bovary) and Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du Mal)

50.   English Literature: Austen (Pride and Prejudice) and Eliot (Middlemarch)

51.   Transcendentalism: Whitman (Leaves of Grass), Emerson (Divinity School Address and Nature), and Thoreau (Walden and Civil Disobedience)

52.   American Literature: Poe (The Tell-Tale Heart, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Raven) Melville (Moby Dick), Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), and Dickinson (Selections)

53.   African American Writing: Douglass (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass), Washington (Up from Slavery), and Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folks)

54.   Marx: with Engels Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital (Selections)

55.   Russian Literature: Gogol (The Nose and The Overcoat), Turgenev (Fathers and Sons), and Chekhov (The Lady with the Dog, Ward No. 6, and A Dreary Story)

56.   Tolstoy: Death of Ivan Ilyich, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina

57.   Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov

58.   English Literature: Wordsworth (Two-Part Prelude and Tintern Abbey), Keats (Selections), Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), Tennyson (Selections), and Hopkins (Selections)

59.   Psychology: Freud (Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, The Future of an Illusion, and Civilization and Its Discontents) and Jung (Answer to Job)

60.   Modern Drama: Ibsen (A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabbler), Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest), Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), and Shaw (Saint Joan)

61.   Science Fiction: Shelley (Frankenstein), Wells (The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds), and Stoker (Dracula)

62.   European Literature: Rimbaud (A Season in Hell), Conrad (Heart of Darkness), Kafka (Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and The Trial), and Rilke (The Duino Elegies)

63.   Mann: Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain

64.   Mathematics: Lobachevsky (The Theory of Parallels), Minkowski (Space and Time), Dedekind (Essays on the Theory of Numbers), and Hardy (A Mathematician’s Apology)

65.   Science: Planck (On the Theory of the Energy Distribution Law of the Normal Spectrum), Millikan (The Electron), Einstein (Relativity), Heisenberg (The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory), and Schrodinger (What Is Life)

66.   Economics: Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class), Lenin (Imperialism), and Keynes (The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money)

67.   Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses

68.   Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own) and Eliot (The Wasteland and Ash Wednesday)

69.   English Politics: Pankhurst (Freedom or Death and Speech from the Dock) and Churchill (Blood, Toil, Tears, and Sweat, Finest Hour, We Shall Fight on the Beaches)

70.   English Literature: Huxley (Brave New World) and Orwell (Animal Farm, Why I Write, Books vs. Cigarettes, and 1984)

71.   Spanish Literature: Lorca (Gypsy Ballads and Poet in New York), Jimenez (Platero and I), and Cela (The Family of Pascual Duarte)

72.   American Literature: Cather (Death Comes for the Archbishop), Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury), and Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea)

73.   Scandinavian Literature: Hamsun (Hunger) and Lagerkvist (Barabbas)

74.   Holocaust: Herzl (The Jewish State), Celan (Poems), Wiesel (Night), Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem), and Levi (The Periodic Table)

75.   Theology: Niebuhr (The Nature and Destiny of Man), Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning), and Tillich (The Courage to Be and The Dynamics of Faith)

76.   Existentialism: Heidegger (What is Metaphysics?), Sartre (No Exit and Portrait of an Anti-Semite), Camus (The Plague and The Rebel), and Beckett (Waiting for Godot)

77.   Education: Dewey (Experience and Education), Piaget (The Language and Thought of the Child), and Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed)

78.   De Beauvoir: The Second Sex

79.   Russell (On Denoting and Why I Am Not a Christian) and Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations)

80.   Yourcenar: The Memoirs of Hadrian

81.   Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings

82.   Grass: The Tin Drum

83.   Post-Colonialism and North Africa: Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth), Salih (Season of Migration to the North), Mahfouz (Children of Gebelawi), and Achebe (An Image of Africa)

84.   Genetics: Mendel (Experiments in Plant Hybridization), Watson (The Double Helix), Dawkins (The Selfish Gene), and Carroll (Endless Forms Most Beautiful)

85.   Astronomy: Hubble (A Relation Between Distance and Radial Velocity Among Extra-Galactic Nebulae), Sagan (Cosmos), and Hawking (A Brief History of Time)

86.   Feynman: Six Easy Pieces, Six Not-So Easy Pieces, and QED

87.   Italian Literature: Montale (Cuttlefish Bones and The Occasions) and Calvino (Invisible Cities)

88.   Portuguese Literature: Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet), Rosa (Grande Sertao: Veredas), and Saramago (Blindness)

89.   Soviet Literature: Pasternak (My Sister, Life), Solzhenitsyn (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), and Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl)

90.   Latin American Literature: Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), Borges (Ficciones), Rulfo (Pedro Paramo), Paz (Eagle or Sun?), and Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

91.   Cultural Criticism: Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), Sontag (Against Interpretation and Notes on Camp), Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem), and Berger (Ways of Seeing)

92.   Cultural Philosophy: Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces), Foucault (Discipline and Punish), and Said (Orientalism)

93.   Carson: The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring

94.   Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

95.   Rawls: A Theory of Justice

96.   Civil Rights: King (Why We Can’t Wait and Letter from Birmingham Jail), X (The Autobiography of Malcom X), Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), Lorde (Sister Outsider), and Coates (Between the World and Me)

97.   African American Literature: Wright (Native Son), Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain), Ellison (Invisible Man), and Morrison (Beloved)

98.   Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

99.   Economics: Van Neumann and Morgenstern (The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior) and Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)

100. History: Burke (Connections), Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel) and Graeber and Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything)