1 September
Jesse Lee Bennett's What Books Can Do for You [1923], split into two parts, A Sketch Map of the Frontiers of Knowledge and Selected Book Lists, is excluded from this project, but it is definitely worthy of review for those interested in the history of "great books" lists. The first part begins with the topics of reading, books, and literary education generally, not far removed from Adler's How to Read a Book or Baldwin's Book Lover, then quickly proceeds to broad discussions of science, art, life, everything.

Bennett places himself in a continuum begun by Lubbock: "Many of these lists [of the "best" books] are excellent. One which has stood the test of many years and been discussed and praised by many men of many minds is that prepared by Sir John Lubbock." However, he does not seek to follow Lubbock's example. Throughout the first-ninth chapters of the book's first part, he does recommend good introductory works useful for general education. Those works constitute the following list; a few other works are mentioned, but only as examples. The tenth chapter, on literature, gets into the distinction between romances and novels (the latter "seeks to depice life as it really is", while the romance exists for entertainment) among other topics; thus the works mentioned, again, are given as examples, not necessarily recommended readings.

H G Wells - Outline of History
J Arthur Thomson - The Outline of Science
Faure - History of Art
William Orpen - Outline of Art
Hendrik Willem Van Loon - The Story of Mankind
H F Osborn - The Origin and Evolution of Life
C W Saleeby - Evolution--The Master Key
Carl Snyder - The World Machine
N R Campbell - What Is Science?
Frederick Soddy - Science and Life
Sedgwick and Tyler - A Short History of Science
G H Lewes - A Biographical History of Philosophy
A K Rogers - A Student's History of Philosophy
G Lowes Dickinson - A Modern Symposium
Bertrand Russell - The Faith of a Free Man
Henry David Thoreau - Walden
Richard Jefferies - The Story of My Heart
J J Rousseau - Confessions
Edward Carpenter - The Drama of Love and Death
Henri Frederic Amiel - Journal
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
Ludwig Lewisohn - Upstream
Harry Kemp - Tramping on Life

In his Foreword to the book's second section, Bennett gives a "minimum reading course" that includes the Wells, Osborn, Sedgwick/ Tyler, Dickinson, and Russell books, plus the following:

J Arthur Thomson - What Is Man?
M B Synge - A Book of Discoveries
A A Brill - Psycho-analysis--Its Theories and Applications
G S Dow - Society and Its Problems
J K Hart - Democracy in Education

Bennett then provides lists of books by category, namely: Discovery, Exploration and Adventure; History; Biography; Science; Philosophy, Religion and Mysticism; Sociology and the Social Sciences; Current Problems and Affairs; Prose Fiction; Drama and Poetry; Essays and Belles-Lettres; Art; and Books for Children. The lists for each include not only great literary works, but also histories, bibliographies, and directories, as well as many contemporary works obviously not seen by Bennett as works for the ages, but rather as merely timely introductions to the topic at hand.


2 September
The lists, 31-40, that will be posted throughout August (but dated early September, since getting the lists already posted completely annotated, then collated into a master list, will take place during August and September):

John Cowper Powys - One Hundred Best Books - 1922 *Best*

Will Durant - One Hundred Best Books for an Education - 1929 *Durant*

Huntington Cairns, Allen Tate, and Mark Van Doren - The Invitation to Learning/ The New Invitation to Learning - 1941; 1942 *Invitation*

Allan Willard Brown - Classics of the Western World, 3rd ed. - 1943 *Classics*

The Jasper Lee Company - Have You Read 100 Great Books? - 1946 *Hundred*

Robert B Downs - Molders of the Modern Mind; Famous Books Ancient and Medieval - 1961; 1964 *Downs*

Philip Ward - A Lifetime's Reading: The World's 500 Greatest Books - 1982 *Ward*

William Theodore de Bary, Ainslie Embree, Amy Vladeck Heinrich, and the Committee on Oriental Studies, Columbia University - A Guide to Oriental Classics, 3rd ed. - 1989 *Oriental*

Mortimer Alder and Robert Hutchins - The Great Books of the Western World, 2nd ed. - 1990 *Adler*

Ian P McGreal - Great Literature of the Eastern World - 1996 *East*

The lists, 1-30, in chronological order:
John Lubbock - The Pleasures of Life - 1896 (in addition to link in right-hand column, see also 18 January post) *Lubbock*

James Baldwin - The Book Lover - 1910 (see also 1 June post) *Baldwin*

Charles W Eliot - Harvard Classics - 1910; 1917 (see also 3 June post) *Eliot*

Raymond Queneau -  Pour une Bibliotheque Ideal - 1956 *France*

Kenneth Rexroth - Classics Revisited - 1965-69 *Rexroth*

Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren - How to Read a Book - 1972 *Read* 

Charles Van Doren - The Joy of Reading - 1985 *Doren* 

Frank N Magill - Masterpieces of World Literature - 1989 *Magill* 

Arthur Waldhorn, Olga S Weber, and Arthuer Zeiger, eds. - Good Reading: A Guide for Serious Readers, 23rd ed. - 1990 *Good*

The Learning Channel - Great Books - 1993-2002 *Learning*

Harold Bloom - The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages - 1994 *Bloom*

Clifton Fadiman and John S Major - The New Lifetime Reading Plan - 1997 *Fadiman*

The Great Books Foundation - The Great Books: A Reading List - 1998 *Foundation* 

Robert Kanigel - Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury, A Personal Tour of Some of the World's Best Books - 1998 *Kanigel*
  
Martin Seymour-Smith - The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought From Ancient Times to Today - 1998 *Seymour*

Utne Reader - The Loose Canon: 150 Great Works to Set Your Imagination on Fire - 1998 *Utne*  

W John Campbell - The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics - 2000 *Campbell* 
 
The Norwegian Book Club - World Library - 2002 *Norway*
 
Michael Dirda - Classics for Pleasure - 2007 *Dirda*

The Guardian - Books You Can't Live Without: The Top 100 - 2007 *Guardian*

Kevin Hill - The Great Books List - 2007 *Great*

The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Picks - J Peder Zane - 2007 *Zane*

The Globe and Mail - 50 Greatest Books of All Time - 2008 *Globe*

The Daily Telegraph/ The Sunday Telegraph - 110 Best Books: The Perfect Library - 2008 *Telegraph*
 
The Harvard Book Store - Top 100 Books - 2010 *Harvard*

anonymous - World Canonical Texts - 2011 *World*

Anthony O'Hear - The Great Books: A Journey Through 2,500 Years of the West's Classic Literature - 2011 *O'Hear*

Russ Kick - The Graphic Canon: The World's Great Literature as Comics and Visuals - 2012-13 (see also 6 January post) *Graphic*

John Mark Reynolds - The Great Books Reader: Excerpts and Essays on the Most Influential Books of Western Civilization - 2011 *Reynolds*

Sandra Newman - The Western Lit Survival Kit: An Irreverent Guide to the Classics, From Homer to Faulkner - 2012 *Newman*


3 September
Have You Read 100 Great Books?, published in 1946 by the Jasper Lee Company, includes several lists:

Arthur Conan Doyle's goes back to ancient times but appears to exclude theatre; nonetheless, it's a compelling list with several important works that could end up not appearing in any other list; if so, they will be noted in the future;

whereas in Baldwin's The Book Lover, we only got a faint idea (that is, some quotes) of John Ruskin's response to Lubbock's list in the Pall Mall Gazette, here we have the list Ruskin provided; it fits this project's criteria--I could use this book as the source and post this list later in the year, but I worry about including a few of these responses without having access to the Pall Mall original; I'd prefer either to include all the responses, or none;

Robert Louis Stevenson's, also short, also fits our criteria, though there's no indication of where it was originally published--I'll do more research [see 9 September post];

Brander Matthews, yet another Columbia professor and a writer on theatre, has a list of 'A Hundred Best Novels in English';

James Bryce's response to Lubbock, one of those published in the Pall Mall Gazette, fits our criteria but the same problem applies as with Ruskin's;

Wilbur L Cross, a professor at Yale and a governor of Connecticut, offers the 'Twenty-Five Great Prose Fictions';

novelist and dramatist Arnold Bennett has a huge list of English literature;

another Yale professor, William Lyon Phelps, gives his fifteen best novels of all time;

Dr. A S W Rosenbach, a "noted bookseller," provides a list of "the five greatest detectives in the world of fiction, in this order: C Auguste Dupin (Poe), Sherlock Holmes (Doyle), Monsieur Lecoq (Gaborian), Father Brown (Chesterton), Sergeant Cuff (W Collins)," from his book, A Bookhunter's Holiday; 

Hamilton Wright Mabie's list is very short, and fits our criteria, but a quick look at his oeuvre brings forth other potential lists, especially the Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, a 31-volume set he served as an editor of--again, further research is necessary [see 23 September post]; 

the Grolier Club lists the '100 Books Famous in English Literature';

John Erskine, who played a major role in the rise of "great books" education at Columbia, has a short list from his The Delight of Great Books--I'm going to check that book to see about including the list [see 11 September post]; 

'3 Scholars Pick Greatest Books of Half Century'--namely, Charles Beard, John Dewey, and Edward Weeks;

the Newark public library, the workplace of two of the most famous of this nation's librarians (John Cotton Dana and Beatrice Winser) and which, according to this book, "has been publishing book lists for almost half a century," lists One Hundred of the Best Novels; 

A Edward Norton, a famous book collector and "manufacturer in Pennsylvania," has a list of '100 Good Novels'; 

Christopher Morley's list, entitled 'Golden Florins', is certainly compelling, though limited temporally; he was a prolific author and theatre director, and I'd like to do some research [see 8 September post];

Frank Thomas, a bookseller, has a longish list that, again, I'd like to do more research on; 

'The List of St. John's College', with no indication which year the reading course applies to [see 26 February and 27 October posts]; 

and 'The 100 Outstanding Books of 1924-44'--"Prepared for Life Magazine with the advice of Dr. Henry Seidel Canby," another Yale professor.

In addition, the Lubbock, Powys, Durant, and Invitation to Learning lists included in the "great books" project are reprinted, as is the Outline of Readings in Important Books list [see 10 September post] which has been excluded for the time being. They're not all accurately recreated, given the simplicity of the lay-out and type fonts used.

This useful, and rare, book ends its presentation of lists with its own two, the first being a collection of 1,000, "a tabulation of all the books listed previously, with duplications eliminated," then a list of 100 derived from the 1,000, presented here (one-page excerpts from 31 of these works complete the book). The text gives no indication of how these hundred selections were made. While the 1,000 original set was determined by others' lists, including of course those four lists we've already included in this project, the 100 picked out from that 1,000 represents the editorial work of someone or group of persons involved in the publication of this book.

Adams, Henry - The Education of Henry Adams

Anderson, Sherwood - Winesburg, Ohio

Augustine, Saint - Confessions

Aurelius Antoninus, Marcus - Meditations

Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudic

Bacon, Francis - Essays

Balzac, Honore de - Father Goriot

Beard, C A and M R - The Rise of American Civilization

Bellamy, Edward - Looking Backward

Bennett, Arnold - Old Wives' Tale

Bible

Borrow, George Henry - Lavengro

Boswell, George - Life of Samuel Johnson

Bronte, Emily Jane - Wuthering Height

Brooks, Van Wyck - The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865

Bury, John Bagnell - History of Greece (Modern Library Giant Edition)

Butler, Samuel - Way of All Flesh

Cather, Willa Sibert - My Antonia

Cellini, Benvenuto - Autobiography

Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de - Don Quixot

Chaucer, Geoffrey - Canterbury Tales

Conrad, Joseph - The Nigger of the Narcissus

Darwin, Charles Robert - The Origin of Species

Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe

Descartes, Rene - Discourse on Method

Dickens, Charles - Pickwick Papers

Dos Passos, John R - U S A

Dostoyevsky, Fedor M - Brothers Karamazov

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan - Complete Sherlock Holmes

Eliot, George - Adam Bede

Ellis, Havelock - Dance of Life

Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Essays

Epictetus - Discourses

Faure, Elie - History of Art

Federalist - A Commentary on the Constitution of the U S

Fielding, Henry - History of Tom Jones

Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary

France, Anatole - Penguin Island

Franklin, Benjamin - Autobiography

Frazer, Sir James George - The Golden Bough (1 vol. ed.)

Gibbon, Edward - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Gissing, George - Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust

Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Scarlet Letter

Herodotus - History (of the Persian Wars)

Hobbes, Thomas - Leviathan

Homer - Odyssey

Hudson, William Henry - Green Mansions

Hugo, Victor - Les Miserables

James, Henry - Turn of the Screw

James, William - Principles of Psychology

Jeans, Sir James H - Mysterious Univers

Keats, John - Poems

Kipling, Rudyard - Soldiers Three

Lamb, Charles - Essays of Elia

Lardner, Ring - Collected Short Stories

Leonardo - Notebooks

Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt

Lyell, Sir Charles - Antiquity of Man

Machiavelli, Niccolo - The Prince

Malory, Sir Thomas - Morte d'Arthur

Malthus, Thomas - Principles of Population

Marx, Karl - Capital

Maugham, Somerset - Of Human Bondage

Maupassant, Guy de - Short Stories

Melville, Herman - Moby Dick

Meredith, George - Ordeal of Richard Feverel

Mill, John Stuart - Autobiography

Montesquieu, C L de Secondat - The Spirit of Laws

Nietzsche, F W - Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Norris, Frank - McTeague

Oxford Book of Verse

Paine, Thomas - The Rights of Man

Pepys, Samuel - Diary

Plato - Dialogues

Poe, Edgar Allan - Tales

Porter, Katherine A[nne] - Flowering Judas and Other Stories

Rabelais, Francois - Gargantua and Pantagruel

Reade, Charles - Cloister and the Hearth

Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front

Renan, Ernest - Life of Jesus

Rolland, Romain - Jean-Christophe

Rousseau, Jean Jacques - Social Contract

Scott, Sir Walter - Ivanhoe

Shaw, George Bernard - Candida,
Man and Superman

Shakespeare, William (esp.
Macbeth,
Hamlet,
Lear,
As You Like It,
Midsummer Night's Dream)

Sinclair, Upton - The Jungle

Spinoza, Benedict de - Ethics

Stevenson, Robert Louis - Weir of Hermiston

Steinbeck, John - Grapes of Wrath

Swift, Jonathan -Gulliver's Travels

Thackeray, William Makepeace - Henry Esmond

Thomas Acquinas, Saint - On Being and Essence,
Treatise on God,
Treatise on Man [excerpts of Summa Theologica]

Thoreau, Henry - Walden

Tolstoy, Lyof - War and Peace

Twain, Mark - Huckleberry Finn

Voltaire, F M Arouet de - Candide

Wells, Herbert George - Tono-Bungay

Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass


4 September
The aforementioned Have You Read 100 Great Books? [see September 3 post] includes the 1896 version of John Lubbock's list, only a few entries slightly edited. Whereas the Have You Read list includes an unspecified number of Plato's Dialogues, the '96 adds to the entry, "at any rate, the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo" (?the '86 had not included the Crito). Both the '86 and '96 lists specify "part of" for The Wealth of Nations, without telling us which part, and add to the Milton entry, "and the shorter poems"; but neither specified the entries for Shakespeare or Gray like the '46 reprint does (adding Plays and Poems, respectively). Those lists also didn't specify the Homer, Epictetus, Hesiod, Horace, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Livy entries, but those '46 designations are redundant (that is, they refer to authors with one kind of work--Hesiod and Horace--or only two known works--Homer--or only one known work--the others). For the "great books" project, we're ignoring the '46 changes, which were obviously made without Lubbock's input and seemed to have resulted from the Have You Read editors wanting to present a simpler list with a cleaner lay-out on the page. I was going to create a composite of the 1896 and 1946 lists, keeping the Plato specifications but having the whole Wealth of Nations and leaving out those unspecified "shorter poems" of Milton. However, editing the Rexroth lists [see 28 June] introduced a slight revision of the criteria for deciding which version of a certain list to use. I still prefer the final version, but more specifically the final version made by the original listmaker. You can read on the Rexroth page how this change came to be. As for Lubbock's...

As noted previously [see 18 January post], Robert Teeter's site includes a transcription of the 1896 list and makes note of changes made for a final, 1930 version of the list. However, Lubbock passed away in 1913, which makes me wonder. How were those edits made? Were they found in his personal papers after this death? Either way, I cannot get access to a 1930 version of The Pleasures of Life, the book supposedly featuring that list. For now, I'll have to consider the 1896 version to be the final list prepared by Lubbock.

Differences between the original, '86 (from the Contemporary Review) and the '96 ('46) not noted above are mentioned at the end of this post, as are (according to Teeter) the changes made in the final, '30 version. The link at the bottom of the post takes you to a scan of The Choice of Books, which includes the '96 version, with the list of books beginning on p. 21 of the scan (p. 17 of the book itself).

Presented here is Lubbock's list transcribed exactly as it appears in Choice. The dividing lines seem to divide the list into topical sections, but Lubbock does not name them. A few notes in brackets are included to clarify my editorial choices regarding the final list as it appears at Greater Books.

The Bible

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

Epictetus [both Discourses and the Enchiridion are being included]

Aristotle's Ethics

Analects of Confucius

St. Hilaire's "Le Bouddha et sa Religion"

Wake's Apostolic Fathers

Thos. ‡ Kempis' Imitation of Christ

Confessions of St. Augustine (Dr. Pusey)

The Koran (Portions of)

Spinoza's Tractatur Theologico-Politicus

Comte's Catechism of Positive Philosophy (Congreve) 

Pascal's PensÈes

Butler's Analogy of Religion

Taylor's Holy Living and Dying

Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

Keble's Christian Year

-- 

Plato's Dialogues; at any rate, the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo

Xenophon's Memorabilia [Apomnemoneumata]

Aristotle's Politics

Demosthenes' De Coron‚

Cicero's De Officiis, De Amiciti‚, and De Senectute

Plutarch's Lives

Berkeley's Human Knowledge

Descartes' Discours sur la MÈthode

Locke's On the Conduct of the Understanding

--

Homer [both The Odyssey and The Iliad are being included]

Hesiod

Virgil

Maha Bharata
Ramayana
Epitomised in Talboys Wheeler's History of India, vols. i and ii. 

The Shahnameh

The Nibelungenlied

Malory's Morte d'Arthur

-- 

The Sheking

Kalidasa's Sakuntala or The Lost Ring

∆schylus' Prometheus
Trilogy of Orestes

Sophocles' ådipus [Antigone, Oidipous epi Kolono, and Oidipous Tyrannos are being included]

Euripides' Medea

Aristophanes' The Knights and Clouds

Horace

-- 

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (perhaps in Morris' edition; or, if expurgated, in C. Clarke's, or Mrs. Haweis')

Shakespeare

Milton's Paradise Lost, Lycidas, Comus, and the shorter poems

Dante's Divina Commedia

Spenser's Faerie Queen

Dryden's Poems

Scott's Poems

Wordsworth (Mr. Arnold's selection)

Pope's Essay on Criticism
Essay on Man
Rape of the Lock

Burns

Byron's Childe Harold

Gray

-- 

Herodotus

Xenophon's Anabasis and Memorabilia [the latter listed earlier; this is an error in the '96 publication; the '86 did not include Memorabilia]

Thucydides

Tacitus' Germania

Livy

Gibbon's Decline and Fall

Hume's History of England 

Grote's History of Greece

Carlyle's French Revolution

Green's Short History of England

Lewes' History of Philosophy

-- 

Arabian Nights 

Swift's Gulliver's Travel 

Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield 

Cervantes' Don Quixote

Boswell's Life of Johnson

MoliËre

Schiller's William Tell 

Sheridan's The Critic, School for Scandal, and The Rivals 

Carlyle's Past and Present

-- 
   
Bacon's Novum Organum

Smith's Wealth of Nations (part of)

Mill's Political Economy

Cook's Voyages

Humboldt's Travels

White's Natural History of Selborne

Darwin's Origin of Species
Naturalist's Voyage

Mill's Logic

-- 

Bacon's Essays

Montaigne's Essays

Hume's Essays

Macaulay's Essays

Addison's Essays

Emerson's Essays

Burke's Select Works

Smiles' Self-Help

--

Voltaire's Zadig and Micromegas

Goethe's Faust, and Autobiography

Thackeray's Vanity Fair
Pendennis

Dickens' Pickwick
David Copperfield

Lytton's Last Days of Pompeii

George Eliot's Adam Bede

Kingsley's Westward Ho!

Scott's Novels

--

The 1886 list includes Heinrich Heine, Lucretius, two works by Jane Austen (Emma and Pride and Prejudice), and two works by Robert Southey (Thalaba the Destroyer and The Curse of Kehama), but does not include Schiller or Kalidasa. 

According to Teeter, the 1930 version excludes Comte, Dryden, and Hume's essays; and adds Seneca, Tennyson's Idylls and "smaller" poems, and two John Ruskin selections: Modern Painters and "Selection from the writings of." 

http://ebook.lib.hku.hk/CADAL/B3144569X/


5 September
Invitation to Learning [1941] and The New Invitation to Learning [1944] consist of transcripts of episodes of the radio program, Invitation to Learning, which featured Huntington Cairns, Allen Tate, and Mark Van Doren discussing great works of literature. Apparently the show continued on well past 1944, but only these two books (the second is extremely rare) offer lists that fit the criteria of this project. Two later books were confined to narrower subjects: Invitation to Learning: English and American Novels [1966] and The Invitation to Learning Reader on War and Peace [1960], both edited by George D Crothers. According to its World Cat entry, at least the Novels book also featured transcripts. For at least a couple years in the early 1950's, Invitation to Learning was a periodical as well, again corresponding to the radio program, though I don't know if it also simply featured transcripts.

Invitation to Learning:
Politics
Aristotle, Politics
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Ethics
Plato, Symposium
Aristotle, Ethics
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays
Blaise Pascal, PensÈes

Autobiography
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Confessions
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adam

Fiction
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Drama
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra [ca. 1606-08]

Criticism
Aristotle, Poetics
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocˆon
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism

Poetry and Philosophy
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Dante, The Divine Comedy
John Milton, Paradise Lost

Religion
The Holy Bible, The Book of Job
John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

Science
Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks

History
Tacitus, History
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of History

The New Invitation to Learning:
Poetry and Drama
The Holy Bible, The Book of Psalms
Aeschylus, The Oresteia
Horace, Poems
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck

Philosophy
Rene Descartes, A Discourse on Method
Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Fiction
Aesop and Jean de la Fontaine, Fables
Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
Cervantes, Don Quixote
Votlaire, Candide
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
A Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

History and Biography
Herodotus, History
Lord Chesterfield, Letters to His Son
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
John James Audubon, American Scenery and Character
William Hickling Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico
Ulysses Simpson Grant, Memoirs

Politics and Society
Demosthenes and Abraham Lincoln, Speeches
Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man
Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract
Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on Population
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward


6 September
Will Durant's 'List of One Hundred Best Books for an Education: The Road to Freedom' was originally included in an article for the American Magazine, Dec. 1929, entitled 'One Hundred Best Books'. Apparently, the next year, the American Library Association published the article as a monograph of some sort (a "broadside" according to one reference book). It was either revised for that version or for its inclusion in Durant's 1933 collection of essays, Adventures in Genius, retitled 'One Hundred Best Books for an Education'. That version added Diogenes LaÎrtius's Lives of the Philosophers and removed Sidney Bradshaw Fay's Origins of the World War, which, having been published in 1929, perhaps had been a rash choice on Durant's part. Yet another version, found in Have You Read 100 Great Books? [see 3 September post] includes LaÎrtius, but excludes Dickens's Pickwick Papers. Yet--yet!--another version, included in Durant's The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, a posthumous collection of essays that came out in 2002, includes both works. So was the '46 omission of Pickwick an error? Who cares? As with the Lubbock and Rexroth lists, we're using the last version made during the author's life as our final version of the list.

Note that the numbering below comes from the original document: chapter III of Adventures in Genius, and does not correspond to the numbering of the list as presented at Greater Books.

Group I. Introductory
1. Thomson, J. A., The Outline of Science. 4v.

2. Clendening, L., The Human Body.

3. Kellogg, J. H., The New Diatetics; pp. 1-531, 975-1011.

4. James, Wm., Principles of Psychology. 2v.

5. Wells, H. G., The Outline of History; chapters 1-14. [combined with other excerpts below, Durant only excludes two chapters from this work, meaning that this entry consists of enough of the full text to count as a monograph instead of an excerpt]

6. Sumner, W. G., Folkways.

7. Frazer, Sir Jas., The Golden Bough. 1-vol. ed. [apparently referring to 1922 abridged version]

Group II. Asia and Africa
8. Breasted and Robinson, The Human Adventure. 2v. Vol. I, chs. 2-7. [combined with other excerpts below, Durant only excludes two chapters from this work, meaning that this entry consists of enough of the full text to count as a monograph instead of an excerpt] [originally published as two distinct works: The Conquest of Civilization by James Henry Breasted; and The Ordeal of Civilization by James Harvey Robinson]

5. Wells, chs. 15-21, 26.

9. Brown, Brian, The Wisdom of China.

10. The Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Ruth, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Amos, Micah, the Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, and Epistles of St. Paul.

11. Faure, Elie, History of Art. 4v. Vol I, chs. 1-3; vol. II, chs. 1-3.

12. Williams, H. S., History of Science. 5v. Bk. I, chs. 1-4.

Group III. Greece
8. Breasted and Robinson, vol. I, chs. 8-19.

5. Wells, chs. 22-25.

13. Bury, J. B., History of Greece. 2v.

14. Herodotus, Histories. (Everyman Library.)

15. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War. (Everyman Library.)

16. Plutarch, Lives of Illustrious Men (esp. Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Pericles, Alcibiades, Demosthenes, Alexander).

17. Murray, G., Greek Literature.

18. Homer, Iliad. Trans. Bryant. Selections.

19. Homer, Odyssey. Trans. Bryant. Selections.

20. ∆schylus, Prometheus Bound. Trans. Eliz. Browning.

21. Sophocles, ?dipus Tyrannus, and Antigone. Trans. Young. (Everyman Library.)

22. Euripides, all plays so far translated by Gilbert Murray.

23. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers.

24. Plato, Dialogues. Trans. Jowett. Esp. The Apology of Socrates, Phadeo, and The Republic (sections 327-32, 336-77, 384-85, 392-426, 433-35, 481-3, 512-20, 572-95). 1-v. ed. by Irwin Edman.

25. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.

26. Aristotle, Politics.

12. Williams, History of Science, bk. I, chs. 5-9.

11. Faure, History of Art, vol. I, chs. 4-7.

Group IV. Rome
8.  Breasted and Robinson, vol. I, chs. 20-30.

5. Wells, chs. 27-29.

16. Plutarch, Lives (esp. Cato Censor, Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, Marius, Sylla, Pompey, Cicero, CÊsar, Brutus, Antony).

27. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Trans. Munro. (Certain passages are admirably paraphrased in W. H. Mallock, Lucretius on Life and Death.)

28. Virgil, ∆neid. Trans. Wm. Morris. Selections.

29. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. (Everyman Library.)

12. Williams, bk. I, chs. 10-11.

11. Faure, vol. I, ch. 8.

30. Gibbon, E., Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 6v. (Everyman Library.) Esp. chs. 1-4, 9-10, 14, 15-24, 26-28, 30-31, 35-6, 44, 71.

Group V. The Age of Christianity
8. Breasted and Robinson, vol. II, chs. 1-11.

5. Wells, chs. 30-34.

30. Gibbon, chs. 37-8, 47-53, 55-9, 64-5, 68-70.

31. Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat. Fitzgerald's paraphrase.

32. Moore, Geo., HÈloÔse and AbÈlard. 2v. 

33. Dante, Divine Comedy. Trans. Longfellow, or C. E. Norton.

34. Taine, H., History of English Literature, bk. I. [combined with other excerpts below, this entry includes enough of the text to warrant inclusion as a monograph, not an excerpt]

35. Chaucer, G., Canterbury Tales. (Everyman Library.) Selections.

36. Adams, H., Mont St.-Michel and Chartres.

12. Williams, bk. II, chs. 1-3.

11. Faure, vol. II, chs. 4-9.

37. Gray, C., History of Music, chs. 1-3, 5.

Group VI. The Italian Renaissance
5. Wells, ch. 35.

38. Symonds, J. A., The Renaissance in Italy. 7v. 

39. Cellini, B., Autobiography. Trans. Symonds.

40. Vasari, G., Lives of the Painters and Sculptors. 4v. Esp. Giotto, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

41. Hˆffding, H., History of Modern Philosophy. 2v. Sections on Bruno and Machiavelli.

42. Machiavelli, N., The Prince.

37. Gray, chs. 6, 8.

Group VII. Europe in the Sixteenth Century 8. Breasted and Robinson, vol. II, chs. 13-14.

43. Smith, P., The Age of the Reformation.

44. Faguet, E., The Literature of France; sections on the 16th century.

45. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel.

46. Montaigne, Essays. 3v. (Everyman Library.) Esp. Of Coaches, Of the Incommodity of Greatness, Of Vanity, and Of Experience.

47. Cervantes, Don Quixote.

48. Shakespeare, Plays. Esp. Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Henry IV, Merchant at Venice, As You Like It, Midsummer Night's Dream, Timon of Athens, and The Tempest.

34. Taine, bk. II, chs. 1-4.

37. Gray, chs. 4,7.

12. Williams, bk. II, chs. 4-8.

11. Faure, vol. III, chs. 4-6.

Group VIII. Europe in the Seventeenth Century
8. Breasted and Robinson, vol II, ch. 15.

44. Faguet, sections on the 17th century.

49. La Rochefoucauld, Reflections.

50. MoliËre, Plays. Esp.Tartuffe, The Miser, The Misanthrope, The Bourgeois Gentleman,
The Feast of the Statue (Don Juan).

51. Bacon, F., Essays. All. (Everyman Library.)

52. Milton, J., Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Sonnets, Areopagitica, and selections from Paradise Lost.

12. Williams, bk. II, chs. 9-13.

41. Hˆffding, sections on Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and Leibnitz.

53. Hobbes, Leviathan. (Everyman Library.)

54. Spinoza, Ethics, On the Improvement of the Understanding. (Everyman Library.)

11. Faure, vol. IV, chs. 1-4.

37. Gray, chs. 9-10.

Group IX. Europe in the Eighteenth Century
8. Breasted and Robinson, vol. II, chs. 16-21.

5. Wells, chs. 26-7.

44. Faguet, sections on the 18th century.

55. Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of the 18th Century.

56. Voltaire, Works. 1-vol. ed. Esp. Candide, Zadig, and essays on Toleration and History

57. Rousseau, J. J., Confessions.

58. Taine, H., Origins of Contemporary France. 6v. Vols. I-IV. [combined with other excerpts below, this entry includes enough of the text to warrant inclusion as a monograph, not an excerpt]

59. Carlyle, The French Revolution. 2v. (Everyman Library.)

34. Taine, History of English Literature, bk. III, chs. 4-7.

60. Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson. 2v. (Everyman Library.)

61.  Fielding, H., Tom Jones. (Everyman Library, 2v.)

62. Sterne, L., Tristram Shandy. (Everyman Library.)

63. Swift, J., Gulliver's Travels. (Everyman Library.)

64. Hume, D., Treatise on Human Nature. 2v. Esp. bks. II and III.

65. Wollstonecraft, Mary, Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

66. Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations. 2v. (Everyman Library.) Selections.

12. Williams, bk. II, chs. 14-15.

41. Hˆffding, sections on the 18th century.

11. Faure, vol. IV, chs. 5-6.

37. Gray, chs. 11-12.

Group X. Europe in the Nineteenth Century
8. Breasted and Robinson, vol. II, chs. 22-28.

5. Wells, chs. 38-9.

58. Taine, Origins of Contemporary France. Vol. V, The Modern RÈgime, pp. 1-90.

67.  Ludwig, E., Napoleon.

68. Brandes, G., Main Currents of 19th Century Literature. 6v.

69. Goethe, Faust.

70. Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe.

71. Heine, Poems. Trans. Louis Untermeyer.

34. Taine, History of English Literature, bks. IV-V.

72. Keats, Poems. 

73. Shelley, Poems.

74. Byron, Poems.

44. Faguet, sections on the 19th century.

75. Balzac, PËre Goriot.

76. Flaubert, Works. 1-vol. ed. Esp. Mme. Bovary and Salammbo. 

77. Hugo, Les MisÈrables.

78. France, Anatole, Penguin Isle.

79. Tennyson, Poems

80. Dickens, Pickwick Papers.

81. Thackeray, Vanity Fair.

82. Turgeniev, Fathers and Children.

83. Dostoievski, The Brothers Karamazov.

84. Tolstoi, War and Peace.

85. Ibsen, Peer Gynt.

86. Darwin, Descent of Man.

87. Buckle, Introduction to the History of Civilization in England. Esp. Part I, chs. 1-5, 15.

88. Schopenhauer, Works. 1-vol. ed.

89. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra.

11. Faure, vol. IV, chs. 7-8.

37. Gray, chs. 13-17.

Group XI. America
90. Beard, C. and M., The Rise of American Civilization. 2v.

91. Poe, Poems and Tales.

92. Emerson, Essays.

93. Thoreau, Walden.

94. Whitman, Leaves of Grass.

95. Lincoln, Letters and Speeches.

Group XII. The Twentieth Century
8. Breasted and Robinson, vol. II, 29-30.

5. Wells, chs. 40-41.

96. Rolland, R., Jean Christophe.

97. Ellis, H., Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vols. I, II, III, VI.

98. Adams, H., The Education of Henry Adams.

99. Bergson, Creative Evolution.

100. Spengler, O., Decline of the West. 2v.


7 September
In the preface to his One Hundred Best Books, John Cowper Powys distances his project from the "the selections [of one hundred best books] already in existence. Those apparently are designed to stuff the minds of young persons with an accumulation of 'standard learning' calculated to alarm and discourage the boldest." He adds that he hopes to meet the "need of kindred minds; minds that read purely for the pleasure of reading, and have no sinister wish to transform themselves by that process into what are called 'cultivated persons'." So, by 1922 at the latest, dissent against the idea of "great books" has appeared—though not for the same reasons academics railed against the supposedly Western-centric [or sexist—or maybe even an American academic mentioned class] reading plans of the second half of the century.

In turn, the book's introductory essay, 'Books and Reading', explains the author's distaste for reading plans and "the cult [...] of becoming a superior person by reading the best authors" with greater nuance. In short, he presents not a canon, but a list of his personal favorites, hoping that this "shameless subjectivity [...] will fling [... the] reader back upon his own inveterate prejudices." He hopes to achieve the "subtle fusion desirable between one's natural indestructible prejudices, and a certain high authoritative standard; a standard which we may name, for want of a better word, 'classical taste', and which itself is the resulting amalgam of all the finest personal reactions of all the finest critical senses, winnowed out, as it were, and austerely purged, by the washing of the waves of time." Though perhaps this perspective is a tad hackneyed, and his vision of our "natural" and "indestructible" reading habits needs further elucidation, we're not surprised that Powys is the only "great books" listmaker who was principally a writer of creative fiction (Rexroth's contribution was not originally a list, but rather a series of essays). Appropriately, he and Rexroth are also the only listmakers who have works of their own included in others' "great books" lists.

Each selection, exactly transcribed below, is followed by some paragraphs or pages in discussion. The few noted secondary critical/ biographical/ historical works about the authors are not considered part of the list. However, in some instances, I've included other primary literary works. As with the Newman, Dirda, Fadiman, Van Doren, and Ward lists, the works found in the list here that are not formally part of the author's list are included because the author speaks of them as highly as he does the books that he directly or primarily recommends. The most obvious of these is the Lewis Carroll entry, where Powys states, "Lack of space alone prevents us from including 'Through the Looking Glass' too." But... what lack of space? Several books included are not discussed further--or, in the cases of authors with several works listed, each work is not necessarily discussed in particular. So I've included Alice's sequel.

Another example.... Regarding the Arnold Bennett entry, Powys writes, "Clayhanger with its sequels, Hilda Lessways and These Twain, makes up an imposing and convincing trilogy of middle-class life in the English Pottery Towns," but only Clayhanger is included in the section heading. Or, regarding The Importance of Being Earnest, listed in the section heading, he writes, "[it] is perhaps the gayest, least responsible, and most adorably witty of all English comedies; just as Salome [not listed in the section heading] is the most richly colored and smoulderingly sensual of all modern tragedies." So why is the latter not listed? We don't know. I include it.

The Psalms of David

Homer. The Odyssey. Butcher and Long's Prose Translation.

The Bacchanals. The Bacchae of Euripides. Translated by Professor Gilbert Murray.

Horace. Any selection in Latin of The Odes of Horace and complete prose translation published by Macmillan.

Catullus. Any Latin edition and the prose translation published by Macmillan bound up with Tibullus.

Dante's Divine Comedy. Best edition the 'Temple Classics', in three small volumes, with the Italian original and English prose translation on opposite pages.

FranÁois Rabelais. The English translation with the DorÈ illustrations. [Though not listing it, Powys's note about the illustrations indicates that he's referring to Gargantua and Pantagruel.]

Candide. Any French edition or English translation.

Shakespeare. In the Temple edition.

Milton. Any edition.
(incl. Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained, a Poem, in IV Books, to Which Is Added Samson Agonistes)

Sir Thomas Browne. Religio Medici and Urn Burial. In the 'Scott Library' series.

Goethe. Faust, translated in English Poetry by Bayard Taylor. Wilhelm Meister, in Carlyle's translation [presumably referring to both novels: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Oder Die Entsagenden, both translated by Carlyle]. Goethe's Conversations With Eckerman, translation in Bohn's Library. 

Nietzsche. Zarathustra, The Joyful Wisdom, and Ecce Homo are all translated in the English edition of Foulis and published in America by Macmillan. Lichtenberger's exposition of his doctrines is in the same series. The most artistic life of him is by Daniel HalÍvy, translated from the French.

Heine. Heine's Prose works with the 'Confessions', translated in the 'Scott Library'. A good short life of Heine in the 'Great Writers' Series.

Sudermann. Song of Songs. Translation into English published by Huebsch of New York.

Hauptmann. The Fool in Christ.

Ibsen. Any edition of Ibsen containing the Wild Duck.

Strindberg. The Confessions of a Fool.

Emerson. Routledge's complete works of Emerson, or any other edition containing everything in one volume.

Walt Whitman. The complete unexpurgated edition of all of his poems [Leaves of Grass, presumably, plus other works], with his prose works and Mr. Traubel's books about him as a further elucidation.

Edgar Lee Masters. Spoon River Anthology, published by Macmillan.

Theodore Dreiser. The Titan

Cervantes. Don Quixote. In any translation except those vulgarized by eighteenth century taste.

Victor Hugo. The Toilers of the Sea. In any translation.

Balzac. Lost Illusions. Cousin Bette. PÈre Goriot. Human Comedy, in any translation. Saintsbury's is as good as any.

Guy de Maupassant. Le Maison Tellier. Madame Tellier's Establishment. [Though there is an 1881 collection of stories called Le Maison Tellier, Powys is referring only to the story.] Any translation, preferably not one bound in paper or in an 'Edition de Luxe'.
(plus 'A Farm Girl'; 'Love')

Stendhal (Henri Beyle). Le Rouge et le Noir. Either the original French or any translation, if possible with a preface; for the life of Stendhal is of extraordinary interest.

Anatole France. L'Orme de Mail. L'Abbe Jerome Coignard. Le Livre de Mon Ami. Either in French or the authorized English translation.

Remy de Gourmont. Une Nuit au Luxembourg. Translated with a preface by Arthur Ransome, published by Luce, Boston.
[plus Litany of the Rose]

Paul Bourget. Le Disciple.

Romain Rolland. Jean Christophe. Translated by Gilbert Cannon.

Gabriele D'Annunzio. The Flame of Life. The Triumph of Death.

Dostoievsky. Crime and Punishment. The Idiot. The Brothers Karamazov. The Insulted and Injured. The Possessed. Translated by Constance Garnett and published by Macmillan. Other translations in Everyman's Library.

Turgeniev. Virgin Soil. A Sportsman's Sketches. Translated by Constance Garnett. And Lisa in Everyman's Library.

Gorki -- Foma Gordyeff. Translation published by Scribners.

Tchekoff -- Seagull. Tchekoff's plays and short stories are published by Scribners in admirable translations.

Artzibasheff. Sanine, translation published by Huebsch.

Sterne -- Tristram Shandy.
[plus The Sentimental Journey]

Jonathan Swift. Tale of a Tub.

Charles Lamb. The Essays of Elia.

Sir Walter Scott. Guy Mannering. Bride of Lammermoor. Heart of Midlothian.

Thackeray. The History of Henry Esmond.

Charles Dickens. Great Expectations.

Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice.

Emily BrontÎ. Wuthering Heights.

George Meredith. Harry Richmond.

Henry James. The Ambassadors. The Tragic Muse. The Soft Side. The Better Sort [incl. The Beast in the Jungle]. The Wings of the Dove. The Golden Bowl.

Thomas Hardy. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. The Return of the Native. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Far From the Madding Crowd. Wessex Poems.

Joseph Conrad. Chance. Lord Jim. Victory. Youth. Almayer's Folly. Published by Doubleday Page & Co. with a critical monograph, so admirably written (it is given gratis) by Wilson Follet that one longs to see more criticism from such an accomplished hand.

Walter Pater. Marius the Epicurean. Studies in the Renaissance. Imaginary Portraits. Plato and Platonism. Gaston de Latour.

George Bernard Shaw. Man and Superman.
[plus Fanny's First Play, Androcles, Pygmalion]

Gilbert K Chesterton. Orthodoxy.

Oscar Wilde. Intentions. The Importance of Being Earnest. SalomÈ. De Profundis.
[plus The Soul of Man Under Socialism]

Rudyard Kipling. The Jungle Book.

Charles L Dodgson. Alice in Wonderland. The edition with the original illustrations.
[plus Through the Looking Glass]

John Galsworthy. The Country House. The Man of Property. Fraternity.

W Somerset Maugham. Of Human Bondage.

Gilbert Cannan. Round the Corner.

Vincent O'Sullivan. The Good Girl. Published by Dutton & Co.

Oliver Onions. The Story of Louie.
[plus In Accordance With the Evidence; The Debit Account]

Arnold Bennett. Clayhanger.
[plus Hilda Lessways; These Twain; Old Wives' Tale; Anna of the Five Towns]

Oxford Book of English Verse.


8 September
Christopher Morley's 'Golden Florins' doesn't include ancient or medieval literature, so it is excluded from this project. Its genesis is explained in Morley's book Ex Libris Carissimis, a collection of five lectures given at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1931. (The list is featured at the end of the book.) Since Petrarch left Boccaccio fifty florins with which to purchase a warm dressing gown for winter evenings, Morley leaves the reader with some metaphorical currency, explaining, "I did take the trouble to think back over twenty years of mature reading and make up my mind, rightly or wrongly, as to the books and writers which had meant most to me." This quote is from the lecture, 'Wine That Was Spilt in Haste'. You can see the list in the full-text scan at the Internet Archive:

http://archive.org/details/exlibriscarissim00morl


9 September
The list by Robert Louis Stevenson included in Have You Read 100 Great Books? [see 3 September post] comes from a series of articles in the British Weekly, published in 1887, entitled Books Which Have Influenced Me. You can see from the Amazon page below the table of contents, and thus the other famous individuals of the time who contributed. Clearly, this series emerged in response to Lubbock's speech and his accompanying articles in the Pall Mall Gazette and the Contemporary Review, and the responses to his list also published in the Gazette. Though a full-text scan of the book should be floating around somewhere online, and I can get access to an actual copy, for now I'm not going to include these lists. Not only do I not have access to all of the Gazette lists, which are more important historically, but the inclusion of several short lists doesn't seem to be a worthy task at this point in the project. Perhaps in the future. Notice that F W Farrar was one of the participants in the British Weekly series--and, according to Baldwin's The Book Lover, Farrar also contributed to the Pall Mall discussion--but this of course came before his Great Books book (see 27 January post).

http://www.amazon.com/Books-Which-Have-Influenced-Me/dp/111082940X


10 September
Classics of the Western World, published in three editions, 1927, 1934, and 1943, is based upon the reading lists from Columbia University's "great books" courses: the General Honors course, which turned into the Colloquium on Important Books; and the courses, Contemporary Civilization and Humanities. However, being a successful project published by the American Library Association, it warrants status as an separate list. An earlier version, Outline of Readings in Important Books, also based on Columbia classes, was published in 1924. For the most part, the Classics and Outline lists overlap, but the differences between them are significant enough that Outline conceivably could count as a separate list. It has a similar set-up, with both "required" and "recommended" entries, and is presented more clearly and includes fewer excerpts of works. Overall, it is a shorter, simpler list--alas, it was apparently supplanted by the Classics book, so I'm not including it, at least for now. The following link takes you to a full-text scan of Outline: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/1370682.html.

According to the book's Introduction, the faculty members who contributed are those "who taught Colloquium from 1940 to 1942, most of whom have been involved in the course since it succeeded General Honors in 1932: Professor Jacques Barzun, of the Department of History; Dr. Mason Gross and Professor James Gutmann, of the Department of Philosophy; Professor Moses Hadas of the Department of Classics; and Professor Lionel Trilling, Professor Raymond Weaver, Dr. Andrew Chiappe, and myself [Alan Willard Brown], of the Department of English." Of these eight, four of them (Barzun, Gross, Hadas, and Trilling) were major intellectual figures of the second half of the Twentieth Century; you can read about them in many encyclopedias or biographical directories.

Each section, usually defined by author ("Homer" and so on), is split into two sets of readings; the list used for this project only features the first, the "primary documents," not the second, which consists of literary criticism, biographies, and so on. The first sub-section also includes several recommended translations and versions; these are rarely noted, unlike with some other lists in the project, such as Harold Bloom's, wherein the list creators wanted to give especial attention to certain translations. 

The primary readings in these sub-sections are further split in two: the first set being the most significant, in alphabetical order; the second set, not as important, is arranged in order of "readability or importance, depending on the author," but the reader is given no indication throughout the text which authors have their secondary readings listed by which of those two factors. 

If an author's works are split into genres, each entry has two sets of sub-sections (the works themselves, and the works as split into genres), without us knowing which is higher in the organizational hierarchy. The reader also does not know if the order in which the different genres are listed has any meaning. In most cases, the readings under a genre tag seem to have been placed within the second set of readings, or the primary readings come from one genre while the secondary readings are of multiple genres. Or the editors could have intended the genre tag to indicate a new sub-section, instead of it being entirely subsumed into the sub-section of secondary readings. In other cases, a page break comes where we can assume a split between two sets of readings, but that assumption isn't safe. Overall, given the complexity of the arrangement of the works under each author, and the ineffective way in which the editors arranged them, we sometimes don't know if certain works are considered to be primary or secondary. These distinctions of course are not relevant to this project, but might be to those making use of this particular list.

We begin with the selections of the ancient era, leading to Saint Augustine.

Homer
1) Iliad
2) Odyssey

The Bible--Old Testament
Genesis, Amos, Isaiah 41-56, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Psalms: 1, 8, 19, 23, 29, 51, 90, 91, 104, 121, 128, 137, 139, 148, 150.

Aeschylus [525-456 B C]
3) [Oresteia] Agamemnon, ChoÎphoroe (Libation-Bearers), Eumenides, 4) Prometheus
5) The Persians, 6) Seven Against Thebes, 7) The Suppliants

Sophocles [496-406 B C]
8) Antigone, 9) Electra, 10) Oedipus Rex, 11) Philoctetes
12) Ajax, 13) Trachiniae, 14) Oedipus at Colonus

Euripides [480-406 B C]
15) Medea, 16) Electra, 17) Hippolytus, 18) Trojan Woman, 19) Bacchae
20) Alcestis, 21) Ion, 22) Iphigenia in Tauris, 23) Cyclops

Herodotus [c. 480-c. 425 B C]
24) Books I, II, VI, and VII of the History
The remaining books of the History

Thucydides [c. 460-c. 400 B C]
25) Books I, II, VI, and VII of The History of the Peloponnesian War
The remaining books of the History

Aristophanes [c. 448-c. 380 B C]
26) Frogs, 27) Clouds, 28) Birds, 29) Lysistrata
30) Thesmophoriazusae, 31) Acharnians, 32) Peace

Plato [c. 427-347 B C]
33) Apology, 34) Crito, 35) Euthyphro, 36) Protagoras
37) Symposium, 38) Phaedo, 39) Republic, 40) Phaedrus
41) Theaetetus, 42) Sophist, 43) Timaeus
(These readings in Plato are arranged in three groups of equal importance, but increasing difficulty.)

Aristotle [384-322 B C]
44) Nicomachean Ethics, especially books 1-3, 6, and 10
45) Poetics

De Anima, books I and II

Demosthenes [383-322 B C]
46) Philippic I; 47) Olynthiacs 1, 2, 3; 48) On the Crown
Aeschines - 49) On the Crown [Against Ctesiphon]

Plautus [c. 254-184 B C]
50) Amphitryo, 51) Menaechmi
52) Miles Gloriosus, 53) Mostellaria, 54) Rudens

Terence [185-159 B C]
55) Phormio, 56) Andria
57) Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law), 58) Heautontimorumenos (The Self-Punisher), 59) Eunuchus, and 60) Adelphi

Hellenistic Poetry
61) Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica
Theocritus, Bion, Moschus
62) The Greek Anthology

Cicero [100-43 B C]
Orations: 63) In Catilinam, 64) Pro Archia, 65) Pro Cluentio, 66) Pro Milone, Second Philippic
67) De Amicitia (On Friendship)
68) De Senectute (On Old Age)

De Officiis (The Offices), book I
Tusculan Disputations, book I
De Finibus (On the Ends of Good and Evil), book V
Selected Letters

Caesar [100-44 B C]
69) The Gallic War
70) The Civil War

Lucretius [c. 99-c. 55 B C]
71) The complete De Rerum Natura (Of the Nature of Things)

Catullus [87-c. 54 B C]
72) The collected Poems

Vergil [70-19 B C]
73) Aeneid
The fourth Eclogue

74) The Georgics
75) The Eclogues

Horace [65-8 B C]
76) Odes and 77) Epodes

78) Satires, 79) Epistles
80) Ars Poetica

Livy [59 B C-17 A D]
Ab Urbe Condita (The Roman History or The History of Rome) Books 1, 2, 5, 21, 22

Ovid [43 B C-17 A D]
81) The Metamorphoses

82) Ars Amatoria

Seneca [4 B C-65 A D]
Tragedies: 83) Hippolytus, 84) Thyestes
Dialogues: 85) On Constancy, 86) On the Shortness of Life, 87) Consolation to Marcia
Letters: 1-28, 47, 77, 107, 108

The Bible--New Testament
Although a reading of the whole is recommended, certain books are more important than others and may be read profitably in the following order:
the synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke
the gospel of John
Romans
I Corinthians
Revelation

The Acts of the Apostles
Hebrews
James
The remaining books

Petronius [?-66 A D]
88) Satyricon, especially that part of it which is devoted to the account of Trimalchio's dinner

Quintilian [c. 35-95 A D]
Institutio Oratoria, Book 10

Plutarch [50-125 A D]
Pericles, Alcibiades, Alexander, Agis and Cleomences, Cato the Elder, The Gracchi,
Coriolanus, Caesar, and (from the Moralia) On the Delay of Divine Providence (De Sera Numinis Vindicta)

Tacitus [55?-117? A D]
90) The Annals and 91) Germany
92) Dialogue on Oratory

Lucian [c. 120-190 A D]
93) The Vision
94) Dialogues of the Gods
95) Dialogues of the Dead
96) Sale of Creeds
97) The Way to Write History
98) The True History

99) Alexander the Oracle Monger
100) The Cock
101) Icaromenippus
102) The Liar
103) The Death of Peregrine
104) A Literary Prometheus

Marcus Aurelius [121-180 A D] -- Epictetus [c. 60-c. 120 A D]
105) Marcus Aurelius, To Himself (Meditations)

Epictetus, 106) Discourses and 107) Enchiridion

Plotinus [c. 204-c. 270]
Fifth Ennead, Books 1
Fourth Ennead, Book 8
Sixth Ennead, Book 4
Third Ennead, Book 8
Third Ennead, Book 5
First Ennead, Book 6
Fifth Ennead, Book 8
Porphyry's Life of Plotinus
(There is no "first" reading recommended here.)

--

continued at 12 September and 13 September


11 September
John Erskine developed the General Honors course at Columbia out of which grew the Classics of Western Literature book, not to mention the entire "great books" movement. Van Doren and Adler both taught the course. Adler and Erskine both left for the University of Chicago around 1930, establishing that school as a second home for the "great books" movement. Erskine's book, The Delight of Great Books, published in 1928, is more of a selection of essays on literary works (or, in one case, an author and, in another, a genre) that I'm making into a list here. Unfortunately, like Farrar's Great Books, it does not include any ancient texts, and thus is not included in the final master list. It is transcribed here because of Erskine's significance.

Canterbury Tales

Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur

The Faerie Queen

Romeo and Juliet

The Tempest

Paradise Lost

Walter Scott (incl. Woodstock; Waverley; The Pirate; The Heart of Midlothian; Quentin Durward; The Bride of Lammermoor)

Don Juan

Moby Dick

The Ordeal of Richard Feverel

Huckleberry Finn

Candida

Modern Irish Poetry (incl. W B Yeats - 'The Wanderings of Oisin'; 'The Sad Shepherd'; 'Stolen Child'; 'He Remembers Forgotten Beauty'; 'The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water';

John Millington Synge;

Douglas Hyde;

Lady Gregory;

A E (George W Russell) - 'Destiny';

Lord Dunsany;

Padraic Colum;

James Stephens - Collected Poems; 'Barbarians')

Despite this last chapter's title, many of the works discussed are not poetry: W B Yeats - 'Dust Hath Closed Helen's Eye', included in The Celtic Twilight; The Land of Heart's Desire; Cathleen Ni Houlihan;

Douglas Hyde - The Well at the End of the World translation;

Lady Gregory - Cuchulain of Muirthemne;

John Millington Synge - Aran Islands; Riders to the Sea; The Playboy of the Western World;

James Stephens - Crock of Gold; The Charwoman's Daughter [published in the U S as Mary, Mary]; Here Are Ladies; Irish fairy tales.

Apropos the September 3 post, the Have You Read 100 Great Books? collection includes this list, sans the 'modern Irish poetry' entry. Also, that later version includes "Waverley Novels" for Walter Scott instead of the specific novels noted in Delight.


12 September
The Classics of the Western World, cont.

Saint Augustine [354-430]
108) The Confessions

The City of God, books I, V, VIII, XI, XIX

109) On Christian Doctrine (Enchiridion de Doctrina Christiana)
110) On the Free Will (De Libero Arbitrio)
111) On the Trinity (De Trinitate)

Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius) [470-526]
112) The Consolation of Philosophy

Commentaries on the Isagoge of Porphyry, book I

113) Beowulf

114) The Song of Roland (Le Chanson de Roland)

Abelard [1079-1142] and Heloise [c. 1101-1164]
115) The Letters of Abelard and Heloise

116) The Volsunga Saga

Saint Bonaventure [1221-1274]
117) Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Itinerary of the Mind Toward God)

118) The Life of Saint Francis
119) De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam (Concerning the Reduction of the Arts to Theology)
The Four Books of Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, selections by Richard McKeon in Selections From Medieval Philosophers [1930], vol. II, pp. 111-148

Saint Thomas Aquinas [c. 1225-1274]
Summa Contra Gentiles: book I, chs. 1-8, 10-14, 28, 37, 40, 41; book II, chs. 46-56, 59, 70, 76, 79-81; book III, chs. 1, 25-37, 39, 40, 51, 60-63.

120) Summa Theologica

Dante Alighieri [1265-1321]
121) The Comedy

122) The New Life
123) The Convivio (Convito)
124) De Vulgari Eloquentia
125) De Monarchia

Geoffrey Chaucer [c. 1340-1400]
The Canterbury Tales: The Prologue, The Knight's Tale, The Miller's Tale, The Prioress' Tale, Sir Thopas, The Monk's Tale, The Nun's Priest's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Prologue, The Wife of Bath's Tale, The Clerk's Tale, The Squire's Tale, The Epilogue

126) Troilus and Criseyde

Francois Villon [1431- ?]
127) Le Grant Testament
Le Petit Testament
Ballades

Desiderius Erasmus [1466?-1536]
Selected Colloquies
128) The Praise of Folly

Niccolo Machiavelli [1469-1527]
129) Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius
130) The Prince

131) Belfagor
132) Mandragola

Sir Thomas More [1478-1535]
133) Utopia

Martin Luther [1483-1546]
134) Address to the German Nobility
135) Concerning Christian Liberty
136) The Ninety-Five Theses
137) The Babylonian Captivity of the Church

Francois Rabelais [c. 1495-c. 1553]
The Lives, Heroick Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Sonne Pantagruel, translated by Sir Thomas Urquhart and Pierre Motteux, books I and II

John Calvin [1509-1564]
138) Institutes of the Christian Religion
Recommended selections: Book I, chs. 1-7, (10, 11), 15, 16, (17, 18); Book II, chs. 1-6; Book III, chs. 9-19, 21, 23, 24; Book IV, ch. 20. Chapters in parentheses are not indispensable.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne [1533-1592]
The Essays
Selections: 'To the Reader'
Book I: 'That the Intention Is the Judge of Our Actions'; 'Of Idleness'; 'That the Taste of Good and Evil Depends, for a Good Part, Upon the Opinion That We Have of Them'; 'To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die'; 'Of Custom'; 'Of the Power of the Imagination'; 'Of the Education of Boys'; 'Of Friendship'; 'Of Cannibals'; 'Of Solitude'; 'Of the Inequality That Is Amongst Us'; 'Of Democritus and Heraclitus'; 'Of Vain Subtleties'.
Book II: 'Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions'; 'Of Books'; 'Apology for Raimond Sebonde'.
Book III: 'On Some Lines of Virgil'; 'Of Experience'

Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra) [1547-1616]
139) Don Quixote

Exemplary Novels: Rinconete and Cortadillo (Rinconete y Cortadillo); The Dogs' Colloquy (Coloquio de los Perros); The Little Gipsy (La Gitanilla); The Licentiate of Glass (El Licenciado Vidriera)

Richard Hooker [c. 1544-1600]
Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity: Preface, books I-IV

Francis Bacon [1561-1626]
The Great Instauration, especially the 140) Novum Organum

141) The New Atlantis
142) Essays
143) The Advancement of Learning

Lope de Vega (Lope FÈlix de Vega Carpio) [1562-1635]
144) Fuente Ovejuna (The Sheep Well)
145) El Mejor Alcalde el Rey (The King the Greatest Alcalde)
146) Lo Cierto por lo Dudoso (A Certainty for a Doubt)
147) El Perro del Hortelano (The Gardener's Dog)
148) Castelvines y Monteses
149) The New Art of Writing Plays

Christopher Marlowe [1564-1593]
150) Doctor Faustus, 151) Tamburlaine, 152 Edward II, 153) The Jew of Malta

William Shakespeare [1564-1616]
Tragedies: 154) Hamlet, 155) King Lear, 156) Antony and Cleopatra, 157) Macbeth, 158) Coriolanus, 159) Romeo and Juliet
Histories: 160-161) Henry IV (Parts I and II), 162) Richard II
Comedies: 163) Twelfth Night, 164) Measure for Measure, 165) The Winter's Tale, 1665) The Tempest
167) Sonnets

Galileo (Galileo Galilei) [1564-1642]
168) Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences

169) The Sidereal Messenger

John Donne [1573-1631]
Songs and Sonnets
Elegies
170-171) First and Second Anniversaries
Selected Sermons
172) Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
Izaak Walton, The Life of Dr. John Donne, in Walton's Lives, with an introduction by George Saintsbury

Ben Jonson [1573?-1637]
Comedies: 173) The Alchemist, 174) Volpone, or the Fox; 175) Epicoene, or the Silent Woman
176) Every Man in His Humour, 177) Bartholomew Fair
Tragedy: 178) Sejanus
Criticism: 179) Timber, or Discoveries

Thomas Hobbes [1588-1679]
180) Leviathan. Especially Hobbes' Introduction; chs. 1-18, 21, 24, 26, 29-33, 38, 39, 42, 43, 46; Review and Conclusion

181) Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body

Rene Descartes [1596-1650]
182) Discourse on Method
183) Meditations
Rules for the Direction of the Mind, nos. 1-12
184) Principles of Philosophy
Objections and Replies

Calderon (Pedro Calderon de la Barca) [1600-1681]
185) La Vida Es SueÒo (Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made Of)
186) El M·gico Prodigioso (The Mighty Magician)
187) El Alcalde de Zalamea (The Mayor of Zalamea)

188) El Pintor de su Deshonra (The Painter of His Own Dishonour)
189) Gu·rdate al Agua Mansa (Beware of Smooth Water)

Sir Thomas Browne [1605-1682]
190) Religion Medici

191) Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial
192) The Garden of Cyrus

Pierre Corneille [1606-1684]
193) Le Cid, 194) Cinna, 195) Horace

196) Polyeucte, 197) MÈdÈe, 198) Oedipe

John Milton [1608-1674]
Poems: 199) Paradise Lost,

200) Paradise Regained; Samson Agonistes
Minor Poems: Especially Lycidas, Comus, On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, and Sonnets
Prose Works: 201) Areopagitica
202) Of Education,
203) The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
204) The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty
Defensio Secunda pro Populo Anglicano (selections)

Moliere (Jean Baptiste Poquelin) [1622-1673]
205) The Cit[izen] Turned Gentleman (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme)
206) Tartuffe, or The Imposter (Tartuffe, ou l'Imposteur)
207) The Man Hater (Le Misanthrope)
208) The School for Wives (L'Ecole des Femmes)

209) The Miser (L'Avare)
210) Don Juan, or The Feast of the Statue (Don Juan, ou le Festin de Pierre)
211) The Impromptu of Versailles (L'Impromptu de Versailles)
212) The Cheats of Spain (Les Fourberies de Scapin)
213) The Mock Doctor (Le MÈdecin MalgrÈ Lui)
214) The Hypochondriack (Le Malade Imaginaire)
215) The Romantic Ladies (Les PrÈcieuses Ridicules)

Blaise Pascal [1623-1662]
216) Thoughts (PensÈes)

217) Provincial Letters
Thoughts, Letters and Minor Works [this anthology is from Charles W Eliot's Harvard Classics]
The Physical Treatises of Pascal

John Dryden [1631-1700]
218) Aureng-Zebe [1676]
219) An Essay of Dramatic Poesy [1668]
Poems: 220) MacFlecknoe [or a Satyr Upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T S] [1682], 
To[ the Pious Memory of the Accomplisht Young Lady ]Mrs. [Anne ]Killigrew,[ Excellent in the Two Sister-Arts of PoÎsie, and Painting. An Ode] [published in Anne Killigrew's Poems [1696]], 221) [An Ode, ]On the Death of Mr. [Henry ]Purcell [1696], 221) Alexander's Feast[: or The Power of Musique. An Ode in Honour of St. Cecilia's Day] [1697]

223) The State of Innocence[, and Fall of Man] [1677]
'Defence of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy' [preface to second edition of The Indian Emperor or the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards Being a Sequel of the Indian Queen] [1667]
224) All for Love[; or, The World Well Lost] [1677]

Baruch Spinoza (Benedict de Spinoza) [1632-1677]
225) Ethics

226) Tractatus Thelogica-Politicus
227) Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being

John Locke [1632-1704]
228) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Especially: the Epistle to the Reader; book I, ch. 1; book II, chs. 1, 2, 6-8, 12, 23, 25, 33; book III, chs. 1-3, 10, 11; book IV, chs. 1-3, 14, 18, 21

229) Some Thoughts Concerning Education
Of Civil Government. Especially: book II, chs. 1, 2, 5, 7, 8,11.

Jean Racine [1639-1699]
230) PhËdre, 231) Andromaque, 232) Athalie

233) Britannicus, 234) BÈrÈnice, 235) Esther

236) Les Plaideurs (The Pleaders, The Litigants, The Suitors)

--

continued at the 13 September post


13 September
Classics of the Western World, cont.--works from the Eighteenth Century onward:

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [1646-1716]
237) New Essays on Human Understanding
238) The Monadology

Correspondence (selections)

Daniel Defoe [1660-1731]
239) The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

240) A Journal of the Plague Year
241) The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
242) The Life, Adventures and Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton

Jonathan Swift [1667-1745]
243) Gulliver's Travels

Journal to Stella, Letters I-III, VIII-X, XVI-XX, LXV

Poems: 244) On the Death of Dr. Swift, 'Phyllis[; or, The Progress of Love]', 'Strephon and Chloe', 'Furniture of a Woman's Mind', Grub Street Elegy ['A Grub-Street Elegy On the Supposed Death of Partridge, the Almanac-Maker'], 'The Problem[, That My Lord Berkeley Stinks When He Is in Love]'

Tale of a Tub: 'Digression on Critics'; 'Digression on Madness'
245) A Modest Proposal
An Essay on Modern Education [originally published as the ninth issue of the Intelligencer; subsequently included in Swift and Pope's Miscellanies]
On the Education of Ladies ['Of the Education of Ladies', originally published in his collected works of 1765]

George Berkeley [1685-1753]
246) A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge

247) Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous
248) Commonplace Book [written 1705-08; originally published in The Works of George Berkeley, 1781]

Montesquieu [1689-1755]
Persian Letters, Introduction, Letters 1-14, 23-26, 28-34, 36-41, 44-61, 68-73, 112-118, 122, 131, 136, 141
The Spirit of the Laws, Preface, Author's Note, bks. I-IV, bks. VIII-IX, bk. X, chs. 6-8, bk. XI, ch. 6, bk. XIV, bk. XV, ch. 5, bk. XIX, chs. 1-10, bk. XXV, bk. XXX, chs. 23-25

Samuel Richardson [1689-1781]
249) Clarissa Harlowe

250) Pamela

Voltaire [1694-1778]
251) Candide
252) Philosophical Dictionary

253) Zadig
254) The Age of Louis XIV

Henry Fielding [1707-1754]
255) The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

256) The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend, Mr. Abraham Andrews
257) The Life of Jonathan Wild
258) The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon
259) The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great

Samuel Johnson [1709-1784]
260) The Lives of the Poets (especially the lives on Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift and Savage)
Johnson's Preface to his edition of Shakespeare

261) Rasselas 

David Hume [1711-1776]
262) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
263) The brief autobiography (My Own Life)

264) An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
265) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1712-1778]
266) The Social Contract
267) Discourse on Inequality
268) Confessions
Emile, or An Education, bks. I, II, and IV
269) Discourse on the Arts and Sciences

Denis Diderot [1713-1784]
270) Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot, D'Alembert's Dream, and the Conclusion of the Conversation
271) Rameau's Nephew

Tobias George Smollett [1721-1771]
272) The Adventures of Roderick Random

273) The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker
274) The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle

Adam Smith [1723-1790]
275) An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Especially: book I; book II, Introduction, chs. 1, 2, 5; book III; book IV, Introduction, chs. 7, 8, 9; book V, ch. 2.

276) The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Sir Joshua Reynolds [1723-1794]
277) Fifteen Discourses Delivered in the Royal Academy

Immanuel Kant [1724-1804]
278) Critique of Pure Reason

279) Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics; also 280) Lectures on Ethics, translated by Louis Infield [1930]
281) Critique of Judgment
282) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
283) Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing [1729-1781]
284) Laocoon, An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry

285) Nathan the Wise
286) Minna von Barnhelm
287) The Education of the Human Race

Edmund Burke [1729-1797]
288) Reflections on the Revolution in France
289) A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

Edward Gibbon [1737-1794]
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Empire, J B Bury, ed., 7 vols.: chs. 1, 2, 16, 17, 20, 23, 24, 31, 34, 40, 50, 58, 68, 71; or selections from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Rawlinson and Dunlop

290) The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon

James Boswell [1740-1795]
291) The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

292) A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides With Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe [1749-1832]
293) Faust (especially Part I)
294-295) Wilhelm Meister
296) Poetry and Truth (Dichtung und Wahrheit)
297) Conversations With Eckermann

William Blake [1757-1827]
298) Songs of Innocence and Experience
299) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
300) The Everlasting Gospel
301) There Is No Natural Religion
302) All Religions Are One
303) The Book of Thel

The Annotations to Reynolds' Discourse
Readings in the Letters are also recommended

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller [1759-1805]
304) Wallenstein's Camp, The Piccolomini, The Death of Wallenstein, 305) Wilhelm Tell

306) Don Carlos, 307) Mary Stuart, 308) The Maid of Orleans, 309) The Robbers, 310) Love and Intrigue
Essays, Aesthetical and Philosophical [incl. 311) ‹ber die ‰sthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen [On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters] [1794]]
Selections From the Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe, edited by J G Robertson [1898] 

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel [1770-1831]
312) he Philosophy of History (especially Hegel's Introduction and Part IV)

313) The Phenomenology of Mind (especially Hegel's Preface)
314) The Philosophy of Right (especially Hegel's Preface)
315) The Philosophy of Fine Art
316) The Science of Logic

William Wordsworth [1770-1850]
317) The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind; an Autobiographical Poem

Lyrical Ballads
Advertisement of the Lyrical Ballads, 1798; Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1800; Appendix on Poetic Diction, 1802; Preface of 1815

318) The Excursion

Samuel Taylor Coleridge [1772-1834]
319) Biographia Literaria

320) On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each
Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare and Some Other Old Poets and Dramatists

Stendhal (Henri Beyle) [1783-1842]
321) The Red and the Black

322) The Life of Henri Brulard
323) The Charterhouse of Parma
324) Racine et Shakespeare

George Gordon, Lord Byron [1788-1824]
325) Don Juan

326) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
327) Manfred
328) Cain
329) Beppo
'The Vision of Judgment' [originally published in the Liberal, 15 Oct. 1822]
330) The Giaour
331) The Bride of Abydos
332) The Corsair
Letters

Arthur Schopenhauer [1798-1860]
333) The World as Will and Idea. Especially volume I

Essays: Especially 'The Sufferings of the World', 'The Vanity of Existence', 'Suicide', 'Education', 'Women', and 'Noise'

Giacomo Leopardi [1798-1837]
Canti (Songs, Poems)

Essays, Dialogues, and Thoughts [translated by James Thomson and edited by Bertram Dobell, 1905]

Alexander Pushkin [1799-1837]
334) Eugene Onegin

['Skazka o Zolotom Petu?ke'] 'The Tale of the Golden Cockerel' [originally published in Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya, 1835]
335) Boris Godunov
336) Mozart and Salieri
337) The Captain's Daughter

Honore de Balzac [1799-1850]
338) Cousin Betty
339) The Wild Ass's Skin
340) Greatness and Fall of CÈsar Birotteau
341) The Girl With the Golden Eyes
342) Lost Illusions

John Henry (Cardinal) Newman [1801-1890]
343) Apologia pro Vita Sua, Being a History of His Religious Opinions
344) The Idea of a University, Defined and Illustrated

345) An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent
Essays Critical and Historical
346) An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine
347) The Via Media of the Anglican Church

Victor Hugo [1802-1885]
Novels: 348) Les MisÈrables

349) Toilers of the Sea
350) Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)
Poems: Read selections from: Les Feuilles d'Automne, Les Chants du CrÈpuscule, and especially Les Ch‚timents
Plays: 351) Hernani, 352) Ruy Blas
Criticism: 353) William Shakespeare

Hector Berlioz [1803-1869]
354) Memoirs (Chapters 52, 53, 55-56, 59-61, 64-66 of the Memoirs may be omitted by those not especially interested in the condition of music in the nineteenth century.)

355) Evenings in the Orchestra
Letters
[A Critical Study of ]Beethoven's Nine Symphonies [essays originally published in A Travers Chants, Etudes Musicales, Adorations, Boutades et Critiques]
356) Treatise on Instrumentation and Orchestration

Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-1882]
357) The American Scholar
Essays: 'History', 'Self-Reliance', 'Nature'

Representative Men: 'Montaigne'
Poems: 'To J W', 'The Rhodora', 'Monadnoc', 'Fable', 'Ode' (to W H Channing), 'Give All to Love', 'Threnody', 'Concord Hymn', 'Brahma'
A reading of selections from the Journals is recommended. The Heart of Emerson's Journals [1926]; Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson [1909-14]

Nathaniel Hawthorne [1804-1864]
358) The Scarlet Letter

Twice-Told Tales
359) The Marble Faun
360) The House of the Seven Gables
361) The Blithedale Romance
Readings in the Notebooks and Journals are also recommended: Hawthorne's American Notebooks [1932]; The Heart of Hawthorne's Journals [1929]

John Stuart Mill [1806-1873]
362) Autobiography

363) On Liberty, 364) Utilitarianism, 365) Nature

Principles of Political Economy: book II, ch. 16; book IV, chs. 6 and 7; book V, ch. 11
'Thornton on Labor and Its Chains', in Dissertations and Discussions, vol. V
A System of Logic, book VI
'Writings of Alfred de Vigny', in Dissertations and Discussions, vol. I

Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol [1809-1852]
366) Dead Souls

Charles Darwin [1809-1882]
367) On the Origin of Species

Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. Vol. I: ch. II (autobiographical chapter); ch. V (1831); ch. IX (1842-1854); ch. XII (May 1856-June 1858). Vol. II: chs. I-III (Oct. 1859-1862)
More Letters. Vol. II, ch. VIII (1860-1862)
368) Journal of the Voyage of the H M S Beagle

William Makepeace Thackeray [1811-1863]
369) Vanity Fair

370) The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., and its sequel, 371) The Virginians
372) The History of Pendennis
373) The Newcomes
374) The Book of Snobs

375) The Four Georges: Sketches of Manners, Morals, Court, and Town Life
'An Essay on the Genius of George Cruikshank' [originally published in the Westminster Review, Jun. 1840]

Charles Dickens [1812-1870]
376) Our Mutual Friend
377) Pickwick Papers

378) David Copperfield
379) Great Expectations
380) Bleak House
381) A Tale of Two Cities
382) Oliver Twist
383) Nicholas Nickleby

Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862]
384) Walden
Miscellanies: 'The Service', 'Paradise (to be) Regained', 'Herald of Freedom', 'Wendell Phillips', 'Thomas Carlyle and His Works', 'Civil Disobedience', 'Slavery in Massachusetts', 'John Brown' (three essays), 'Life Without Principle'

385) Cape Cod
Familiar Letters of Thoreau [1894]

Karl Marx [1818-1883]
386) The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels)
387) The Civil War in France
The Critique of Political Economy, Introduction
Capital, vol I, ch. I, sec. 1-3, chs. IV-VII, ch. XIII; vol. II, ch. XVII, chs. XXIV and XXV, appendices

Ivan Sergieevich Turgenev [1818-1883]
388) Fathers and Sons (sometimes called Fathers and Children)

389) Virgin Soil
390) A Sportsman's Sketches
Plays

Herman Melville [1819-1891]
391) Moby Dick

392) Journal Up the Straits
393) Clarel

Walt Whitman [1819-1892]
394) Leaves of Grass

395) Specimen Days in America

Gustave Flaubert [1821-1880]
396) Madame Bovary

397) Sentimental Education
398) SalammbÙ
399) The Temptation of Saint Anthony
400) Three Tales: 'A Simple Heart', 'Herodias', 'The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller'

Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky [1821-1881]
401) The Brothers Karamazov

402) The Idiot
403) Crime and Punishment
404) The Possessed

Matthew Arnold [1822-1888]
Literary Criticism: Essays in Criticism: First Series: 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time'; 'The Literary Influence of Academies'; 'Heinrich Heine'

Discourses in America: 'Literature and Science'
Essays in Criticism: Second Series: 'The Study of Poetry'; 'Milton'; 'Thomas Gray'; 'John Keats'; 'Wordsworth'; 'Byron'; 'Shelley'
405) On Translating Homer
Mixed Essays: 'A French Critic on Milton'; 'A French Critic on Goethe'; 'George Sand'
Politics: 406) Culture and Anarchy
Mixed Essays: 'Democracy'; 'Equality'
Religion: 407) Literature and Dogma
Poems: The student of Arnold will wish to read most of the poetry, but the following poems are especially important: Sonnet: 'One Lesson, Nature, Let Me Learn of Thee'; 'To a Republican Friend' (two sonnets); 'The Strayed Reveller'; 'Shakespeare'; 'To a Gipsy Child by the Sea-Shore'; 'The Forsaken Merman'; 'Empedocles on Etna'; 'The Scholar Gipsy'; 'Stanzas From the Grande Chartreuse'; 'Thyrsis'; 'Dover Beach'; 'Rugby Chapel'

Henrik Ibsen [1828-1906]
408) A Doll's House, 409) Ghosts, 410) Hedda Gabler, 411) John Gabriel Borkman, 412) Peer Gynt

413) Pillars of Society, 414) The Wild Duck, 415) The Master Builder, 416) Rosmersholm, 417) An Enemy of the People, 418) The Lady From the Sea, 419) When We Dead Awaken

George Meredith [1828-1909]
420) The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
421) The Egoist

422) Beauchamp's Career
423) Diana of the Crossways
424) The Tragic Comedians
425) Evan Harrington

Poetry: 426) Modern Love
427) A Reading of Earth
428) Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History
429) Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth especially 'The Woods of Westermain', 'Melampus', 'Love in the Valley'
'[On ]The Idea of Comedy and [of ]the Uses of the Comic Spirit', edited by Lane Cooper [1918] [originally published in the New Quarterly Magazine, Apr. 1877]

Samuel Butler [1835-1902]
430) Life and Habit
'The Humour of Homer' and 'Quis Desiderio...?' in The Humour of Homer and Other Essays
Erewhon

431) The Way of All Flesh
432) Evolution Old and New
Poems

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) [1835-1910]
433) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

434) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
435) Life on the Mississippi
436) The Innocents Abroad
437) A Tramp Abroad
'The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County'

Henry George [1839-1897]
Progress and Poverty, bks. I-III, bk. IV, chs. I and II, bks. V-VII, bk. VIII, ch. IV, bk. X

438) The Land Question
439) The Science of Political Economy

Thomas Hardy [1840-1928]
440) Under the Greenwood Tree
441) The Woodlanders

442) The Return of the Native
443) Late Lyrics and Earlier
444) The Dynasts

William James [1842-1910]
The Principles of Psychology, chs. 1, 4, 7, 9, 11, 21, 26, 28
445) Some Problems of Philosophy

446) The Varieties of Religious Experience
Selected Papers on Philosophy
Letters, edited by Henry James

Henry James [1843-1910]
447) The Portrait of a Lady
448) The Lady Casamassima

449) The Ambassadors
450) The Other House
451) The Turn of the Screw, in The Two Magics
'The Pupil', in What Maisie Knew

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche [1844-1900]
'The Use and Abuse of History' and 'Schopenhauer as Educator', in Thoughts Out of Season
452) Beyond Good and Evil
453) Ecce Homo

454) The Genealogy of Morals
The Will to Power, Part II

Sigmund Freud [1856-1939]
455) A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
456) Beyond the Pleasure Principle

457) The Interpretation of Dreams
458) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
459) The Problem of Anxiety
460) Civilization and Its Discontents
461) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis

George Bernard Shaw [1856- ]
462) You Can Never Tell, 463) Man and Superman, 464) Heartbreak House

465) The Sanity of Art
466) London Music in 1888-1889
467) The Future of Political Science in America
'On Going to Church' [originally published in the Savoy, Jan. 1896]

Henri Bergson [1859-1941]
468) An Introduction to Metaphysics
469) Creative Evolution

470) The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov [1860-1904]
Plays: 471) The Cherry Orchard, 472) The Sea Gull

473) Uncle Vanya, 474) Three Sisters
Stories: It is difficult to choose among the many (more than a hundred) tales by Chekhov, but some of the most interesting are: 'The Darling', 'The Privy Councillor', 'Vanka', 'The Wife', 'The Ravine', 'The Horse Stealers', and 'Love'

Marcel Proust [1871-1922]
475) Swann's Way (Du CÙtÈ de Chez Swann)

Within a Budding Grove (A l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs)
The Guermantes Way (Le CÙtÈ de Guermantes)
Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe)
The Captive (La PrisonniËre)
The Sweet Cheat Gone (Albertine Disparue)
The Past Recaptured (Le Temps RetrouvÈ)

James Joyce [1882-1941]
476) Ulysses

477) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
478) Dubliners
479) Finnegans Wake
480) Exiles: A Play in Three Acts
Collected Poems [1937]


14 September
Robert B Downs's Famous Books Ancient and Medieval: Outlines of 108 Great Works That Have Shaped Modern Civilization [1964] and Molders of the Modern Mind: 111 Books That Shaped Western Civilization [1961] together form a single list that covers all of literary history: the latter begins chronologically where the former left off. However, these two books overlap with a third, Books That Changed the World (published in two significantly-different editions, 1956 and 1978) in a jumbled way. Simply put, essays from the '56 book appeared in Molders, but the latter overall has a larger number of essays. Meanwhile, Downs wrote Famous Books, Ancient and Medieval, since the first edition of Books That Changed the World included only post-medieval works (that is, it could be considered a first version of Molders). So, the '78 second edition of Books adds to the first: several essays from Famous, a few of the essays unique to Molders, and an essay on Rachel Carson originally published in another Downs work, Books That Changed America. In short, Books That Changed the World is almost irrelevant to this project, because nearly all of its selections are also found in Famous and Molders. The Carson essay is not in either of those, and the selections for two authors, Marx and Freud, are different in Books than they are in Molders. The Carson, Marx, and Freud selections not found in Molders are thus being included in the master list here.

Famous Books, Ancient and Medieval:
The Book of the Dead (c. 4000-1500 B C)

Hammurabi (c. 2125-2080 B C), The Code of Hammurabi

The Bible (c. 1000 B C-A D 150)

Homer (c. 850 B C): The Iliad; The Odyssey

Hesiod (c. 776 B C), Works and Days

Solon (c. 640-560 B C), Poems

Aesop (c. 620-560 B C), Fables

Gautama, the Buddha (563-483 B C), Tripitakas

Kung Fu-Tse (Confucius) (c. 551-479 B C), Analects

Aeschylus (525-456 B C): Prometheus Bound; Oresteia

Pindar (c. 522-442 B C), Odes

Sophocles (495-406 B C): Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone

Herodotus (484?-425 B C), History of the Persian Wars

Euripides (c. 480-406 B C): Medea; Hippolytus; The Trojan Women; The Bacchae

Hippocrates (c. 460-377 B C), Aphorisms

Thucydides (c. 455-399 B C), History of the Peloponnesian War

Aristophanes (c. 448-380 B C): The Clouds; The Birds; Lysistrata; The Frogs

Xenophon (c. 430-350 B C), Anabasis

Plato (c. 427-347 B C): Symposium; Apology; Crito; Phaedo; Republic; Statesman; Laws; Timaeus

Demosthenes (384-322 B C), Philippics [Downs only refers to the first-third Philippics]

Aristotle (384-322 B C): Organon; History of Animals; Physics; On the Heavens; Meteorologics; Mechanics; Nicomachean Ethics; Politics; Rhetoric; 45) Poetics

Theophrastus (c. 370-287 B C), 46) On the History of Plants; 47) On the Causes of Plants

Menander (c. 342-292 B C), 48) The Girl From Samos; 49) The Dour Man; 50) The Shearing of Glycera; 51) The Arbitration

Euclid (c. 330-275 B C), Elements of Geometry

Archimedes (287?-212 B C), On the Sphere and Cylinder

Titus Maccius Platus (c. 255-184 B C), Plays

Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B C), On Agriculture

Polybius (c. 204-122 B C), The Histories

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B C): Orations; Letters; Philosophical Essays; Republic; Laws

Caius Julius Caesar (102-44 B C), Commentarii de Bello Gallico ("Commentaries on the Gallic War")

Titus Lucretius Carus (c. 96-55 B C), De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things")

Gaius Sallustius Crispus (86-34 B C), The War With Catiline; The War With Jugurtha

Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84-54 B C), Poems

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 B C), Aeneid

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 B C), Satires; Odes; Epistles

Strabo (c. 64 B C-A D 21), Geography

Titus Livius (59 B C-A D 17), History of Rome

Aulus Cornelius Celsus (c. 25 B C-A D 50), De Medicina

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 B C-A D 65), Moral Essays; Tragedies

Marcus Virtruvius Pollio (First century B C), On Architecture

Pliny the Elder (23-79), Natural History

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (c. 35-95), Institutio Oratoria

Pedacius Dioscorides (c. 40-80), Materia Medica

Marcus Valerius Matrialis [Martial] (c. 40-104), Epigrams

Plutarch (c. 45-120), Parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans

Cornelius Tacitus (c. 55-120), Annals

Decimus Junius Juvenalis (c. 60-140), Satires

Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c. 70-140), Lives of the Caesars

Claudius Ptolemaeus (c. 100-70), Geography

Lucian (c. 120-190): Dialogues; 80) True History

Claudius Galen (c. 130-200), On the Natural Faculties

The Talmud (c. 200-500)

Diogenes LaÎrtius (c. 225-275), Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

St. Augustine (354-430): Confessions; City of God

Flavius Anicius Justinianus [Justinian I], Corpus Juris Civilis

The Koran (c. 610-632)

The Venerable Bede (673-735), Ecclesiasticae Historiae Gentis Anglorum ("Ecclesiastical History of the English People")

The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night (c. 900-1500)

Avicenna (Abu Ali a-Husain ibn Abdallah ibn Sina) (980-1037), Canon of Medicine

Geoffrey of Monmouth (c. 1100-1154), History of the Kings of England

John of Salisbury (c. 1115-1180), The Statesman's Book (Policraticus)

Magna Carta (1215)

Roger Bacon (1214?-1294), Opus Majus ("Major Work")

St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), Summa Theologica

Marco Polo (c. 1254-1324), The Travels of Marco Polo the Ventian

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), The Decameron

John Wycliffe (c. 1320-1384), Wycliffite Bible

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1440), The Canterbury Tales

Molders of the Modern Mind:
Christopher Columbus' Letter of Christopher Columbus Concerning Newly Discovered Islands (1493)

Desiderius Erasmus' The Praise of Folly (1511)

Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1516)

Martin Luther's An Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520)

NiccolÚ Machiavelli's The Prince (1532)

John Calvin's Institute of the Christian Religion (1536)

Nicolaus Copernicus' Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543)

Andreas Vesalius' On the Structure of the Human Body (1543)

Jean Bodin's The Six Books on the State (1576)

Michel de Montaigne's Essays (1580-1595)

William Gilbert's On the Loadstone, Magnetic Bodies and On the Great Magnet of the Earth (1600)

William Shakespeare's Hamlet (1603)

Francis Bacon's Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Human (1605)

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605-1615)

Johannes Kepler's The New Astronomy (1609) and Harmony of the World (1619)

Hugo Grotius' On the Law of War and Peace (1625)

William Harvey's Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (1628)

Galileo Galilei's Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican (1632)

RenÈ Descartes' A Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637)

John Milton's Areopagitica: a Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, in the Parliament of England (1644)

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (1651)

Robert Boyle's The Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts & Paradoxes (1661)

Robert Hooke's Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (1665)

John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)

Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)

John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690)

Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697)

Anton von Leeuwenhoek's Letters to the Royal Society of England (1710)

Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719)

Giambattista Vico's The New Science (1725)

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Carolus Linneaus' System of Nature (1758-59)

Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws (1748)

Denis Diderot's Encyclopedia, or Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts (1751-72)

Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

Jean Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (1762)

FranÁois Marie Arouet de Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary (1794)

Cesare Bonesana Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments (1764)

William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Law of England (1765-69)

Thomas Jefferson's A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)

Adam Smith's An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)

Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (1776)

Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88)

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay's The Federalist: A Collection of Essays Written in Favor of the New Constituion (1788)

James Hutton's Theory of the Earth; or An Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land Upon the Globe (1788)

Antoine Laurent Lavoisier's Elementary Treatise of Chemistry (1789)

Jeremy Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)

Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution (1790)

Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (1791)

Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

William Godwin's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793)

Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795)

Immanuel Kant's Eternal Peace; a Philosophical Proposal (1795)

Edward Jenner's An Inquiry Into the Causes and Effects of the VariolÊ VaccincÊ, a Disease Discovered in Some of the Western Counties of England, Particularly Gloucestershire, and Known by the Name of the Cow Pox (1798)

Thomas Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

Pierre Simon Laplace's Celestial Mechanics (1799-1825)

Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi's How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801)

Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation (1807-08)

John Dalton's A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808-27)

Robert Owen's A New View of Society, or, Essays on the Formation of the Human Character  (1813-14)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's The Philosophy of Right (1821)

Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)

Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation (1830-33)

Auguste Comte's Course of Positive Philosophy (1830-42)

Karl von Clausewitz's On War (1832-34)

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835-40)

William Holmes McGuffey's Eclectic Readers (1836-37)

Michael Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity (1839-55)

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz's Studies on Glaciers (1840)

Pierre Joseph Proudhon's What Is Property? or an Inquiry Into the Principle of Right and of Government (1840)

Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841)

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Essays (1841-44) [because the two dates of the given period are also the publication dates of Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, we are interpreting Downs's listing not as an unspecified selection of Emerson's essays--since Emerson did write essays other than those in the two collections--but as a selection of those two books]

Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos (1845-62)

Hermann von Helmholtz's On the Conservation of Force (1847)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Henry David Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government (1849)

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854)

Louis Pasteur's Treatise on the Fermentation Known as Lactic (1857)

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859)

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A Douglas' Political Debates...in the Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois (1860)

John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859)

Victor Marie Hugo's Les MisÈrables (1862)

Gregor Johann Mendel's 'Experiments in Plant Hybridization' (1866)

Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon (1865)

Joseph Lister's 'On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery' (1867)

Horatio Alger, Jr.'s Ragged Dick (1867)

Walt Whiman's Democratic Vistas (1871)

Josiah Willard Gibbs' On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances (1876-78)

Henry George's Progress and Property: An Inquiry Into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth; the Remedy (1879)

Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879)

Robert Koch's 'The Etiology of Tuberculosis' (1882)

Herbert Spencer's The Man Versus the State (1884)

Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)

George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and Others, Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889)

Alfred T Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 (1890)

Sir James G Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890; 1911-15)

Frederick Jackson Turner's 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History' (1893)

Havelock Ellis' Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897-1928)

Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)

John Dewey's School and Society (1899)

Halford Mackinder's 'The Geographical Pivot of History' (1904)

Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1911)

Woodrow Wilson's The New Freedom (1913)

Albert Einstein's Relativity, the Special and General Theory (1917)

Nikolai Lenin's The State and Revolution (1918)

John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919)

Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925-27)

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov's Conditioned Reflexes: an Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex (1927)

Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Books That Changed the World, 2nd ed.:
Karl Marx: Das Kapital

Sigmund Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams

Rachel Carson: Silent Spring


15 September
<a href="http://www.thegreatbookslist.com/">The Great Books List</a>, as noted previously [24 April post], is a web site presenting a list of the classics created by Kevin Hill. 'The Great Books of Science' will be kept separate, as it is presented on the site, but included in the project.


16 September
The World's Best Books: A Key to the Treasures of Literature [1889] by Frank Parsons is not, at least in the short term, included in this project. It's an intriguing work, featuring elaborate tables, as well as lists, of recommended readings. His Preface and Introdcutory Remarks do not note Lubbock's list and its responses, so we can only assume that it was written and published with those lists in mind. The first table lists works in the following categories: Religion & Morals; Poetry & the Drama; Science; Biography; History; Philosophy; Essays; Fiction; Oratory; Wit & Humor; Fables & Fairy Tales; Travel Guides; and Miscellaneous. Those categories are ranked in order of importance, according to Parsons. The second table is in fact not a table, it's just a list: "a short special course, to gather ideas of practical importance to every life, and to make a beginning in the gaining of that breadth of mind which is of such vital value by reason of its influence on morals and the aid it gives in the attainment of truth" [original italics]. Similar to the "minimum reading course" in Jesse Lee Bennett's What Books Can Do for You [see 1 September post], this list is not one of the great, or best, books, but rather a vague set of basic texts for (American) readers, consisting mostly of works from table I.

More confusing still, while the third table is indeed a table, Parsons's claim that it is "a short course of the choicest literature from the whole field of general literature" is contradicted by the content of the table. Instead, it is split into Poetry, Short Poetical Selections, Short Prose Selections, and Wit and Humor.

Table IV is, again, a supplemental list, to the second and third (though it doesn't overlap entirely with the first table, so it could be considered supplemental to all three).

Finally, there's the fifth table, "showing the distribution of the best literature in time and space, with a parallel reference to some of the world's great events." The works included here do not always correspond to those in table I or III.

While the list of table V, and perhaps those of I and III, meets the requirements of this project, it consists mostly of authors' names. So does table I. Table III, on the other hand, goes to the other extreme, focusing on individual poems, or speeches, and excerpts of works, or even particular sections. Whether just transcribing table V, or combining all three (or five, to the extent tables II and IV don't overlap with the others), this list would take up an excessive amount of time, and offer a surfeit of authors' names.


17 September
The Great Books of the Western World's first edition, 1952, is more common and well-known than the 1990 second. However, the rules I've set up for this project mandate the latest/ last version of a list, so I use the second. Note that Hutchins had passed away in 1977, so was not directly involved in any changes made for the second edition.

The first and second volumes of the '90 set are Adler's Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas. This is not considered part of the list, though Van Doren includes it in his Joy of Reading. The '52 set had Robert Hutchins's The Great Conversation as the first volume, followed by the two volumes of the Syntopicon; apparently it is included in the '90 set, just not numbered.

The Comparison of Two Editions of the Great Books of the Western World found at the (defunct) web site, Great Books of the Western World (by Alan Nicoll, meant to accompany the discussion group, Great Conversation (and its accompanying site) which does seem to be alive and well) does not include Racine's PhËdre. Other tables of contents, such as at Wikipedia, do include it. I have personally checked a copy of the 1990 set held by the Emory University libraries, and indeed that play is included.

A few other sites to visit while perusing this selection of classics: The Great Conversation (Confessions of an Eavesdropper), where an English teacher documents his reading of the entire Great Books set; a New Yorker article by the none-too-pleased Dwight Macdonald, 'The Book-of-the-Millennium Club'; and an article from the the University of Chicago Chronicle about an archival collection pertaining to the Great Books project, 'Special Collections Tells the Story of a Cornerstone of American Education'.

Volume 3:
Homer - Iliad
Odyssey


Volume 4:
Aeschylus - The Suppliant Maidens
The Persians
Seven Against Thebes
Prometheus Bound
The Oresteia

Sophocles - The Oedipus Cycle: Oedipus the King 
Oedipus at Colonus 
Antigone 
Ajax 
Electra 
The Trachiniae 
Philoctetes 

Euripides - Rhesus
Medea
Hippolytus
Alcestis
Heracleidae
The Suppliants
Trojan Women
Ion
Helen
Andromache
Electra
Bacchantes
Hecuba
Heracles 
Mad Phoenician Women
Orestes
Iphigeneia in Tauris
Iphigeneia at Aulis
Cyclops

Aristophanes - The Acharnians
The Knights
The Clouds
The Wasps
Peace
The Birds
The Frogs
Lysistrata
Thesmophoriazusae
Ecclesiazousae
Plutus 


Volume 5:
Herodotus - The History

Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War


Volume 6:
Plato - Dialogues: 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


Volume 7:
Aristotle - [Organon] Categories
- On Interpretation
- Prior Analytics
- Posterior Analytics
- Topics
- Sophistical Refutations
Physics
On the Heavens
On Generation and Corruption
Meteorology
Metaphysics
On the Soul
[Parva Naturalia] On Sense and the Sensible
- On Memory and Reminiscence
- 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 8:
Aristotle - History of Animals
On the 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 9:
Hippocrates - Works

Galen - On the Natural Faculties


Volume 10: 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
Quadrature of the Parabola
On Floating Bodies
Book of Lemmas
The Method Treating of Mechanical Problems

Nicomachus of Gerasa - Introduction to Arithmetic


Volume 11: Lucretius - On the Nature of Things

Epictetus - The Discourses

Marcus Aurelius - The Meditations

Plotinus - The Six Enneads


Volume 12: Virgil - Eclogues
Georgics
Aeneid


Volume 13: Plutarch - The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans


Volume 14: Tacitus - The Annals
The Histories


Volume 15: Ptolemy - Almagest

Nicolaus Copernicus - On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres

Johannes Kepler - Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (Books IV?V)
The Harmonies of the World (Book V)


Volume 16:  Augustine of Hippo - The Confessions
The City of God
On Christian Doctrine


Volume 17:  Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica (First part complete, selections from second part)


Volume 18: Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica (Selections from second and third parts and supplement)


Volume 19: Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy

Geoffrey Chaucer - Troilus and Criseyde
The Canterbury Tales


Volume 20: John Calvin - Institutes of the Christian Religion (Selections)


Volume 21: NiccolÚ Machiavelli - The Prince

Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan


Volume 22: FranÁois Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel


Volume 23: Erasmus - The Praise of Folly

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne - Essays


Volume 24:  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 25: 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 26: 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 27: Miguel de Cervantes - The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha


Volume 28: Sir Francis Bacon - The Advancement of Learning
Novum Organum
New Atlantis

RenÈ 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 29: John Milton - English Minor Poems: 
[the following selections constitute nearly all of Poems of Mr. John Milton, Both English and Latin [1645] so that book is being listed instead of the individual poems:]
On the Morning of Christs Nativity and The Hymn;
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 of May Morning; 
On the University Carrier; 
Another on the Same; 
L'Allegro; 
Il Penseroso; 
Arcades; 
Lycidas; 
Comus;
Sonnets I, VII-X;
'On Shakespear'; 
[the following selections constitute nearly all of Poems, &c. Upon Several Occasions [1673] so that book is being listed instead of the individual poems:]
'On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough';
'At a Vacation Exercise'; 
'The Fifth Ode of Horace';
Sonnets XI-XIV, XVIII, XIX;
'On the New Forcers of Conscience';
Psalms I-VIII, LXXX-LXXXVIII;
'Sonnet 15'; 
'Sonnet 16'; 
'Sonnet 17';
'Sonnet 22';
Paradise Lost
'Samson Agonistes'
Areopagitica


Volume 30: Blaise Pascal - The Provincial Letters
PensÈes
Preface to the Treatise on the Vacuum
New Experiments Concerning the Vacuum
Account of the Great Experiment Concerning the Equilibrium of Fluids
Treatises on the Equilibrium of Liquids and on the Weight of the Mass of the Air
On Geometrical Demonstration
Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle
Correspondence With Fermat on the Theory of Probabilities


Volume 31: MoliËre - 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 - BÈrÈnice
PhËdre


Volume 32: Sir Isaac Newton - Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy 
Optics

Christian Huygens - Treatise on Light


Volume 33: 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 34: Voltaire - Candide

Denis Diderot - Rameau's Nephew


Volume 35: Baron de Montesquieu de Secondat - The Spirit of the Laws

Jean Jacques Rousseau - A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality
A Discourse on Political Economy
The Social Contract


Volume 36: Adam Smith -  An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations


Volume 37: Edward Gibbon - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 1)


Volume 38: Edward Gibbon - The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Part 2)


Volume 39:  Immanuel Kant - The Critique of Pure Reason
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
The Critique of Practical Reason
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 40: American State Papers: The 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
Representative Government
Utilitarianism


Volume 41: James Boswell - The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.


Volume 42: Antoine Laurent Lavoisier - Elements of Chemistry

Michael Faraday - Experimental Researches in Electricity


Volume 43: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - The Philosophy of Right
The Philosophy of History

S¯ren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling

Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil


Volume 44: Alexis de Tocqueville -  Democracy in America


Volume 45: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Faust

HonorÈ de Balzac - Cousin Bette


Volume 46: Jane Austen -  Emma

George Eliot - Middlemarch


Volume 47: Charles Dickens - Little Dorrit


Volume 48: Herman Melville - Moby Dick; or, The Whale

Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn


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

Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House
The Wild Duck
Hedda Gabler
The Master Builder


Volume 53: William James - The Principles of Psychology


Volume 54: Sigmund Freud - The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis
Selected Papers on Hysteria [Chapters 1-10]
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


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 PoincarÈ - 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 Schrˆdinger - 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 LÈvi-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


18 September
The third volume of The Graphic Canon has been published [see 6 January post], allowing for a complete transcription of the most recent of all "great books" lists.

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

The Epic of Gilgamesh - Babylonian tablets

'Coyote and the Pebbles' - Native American folktale

The Iliad - Homer

The Odyssey - Homer

Poem Fragments - Sappho

Medea - Euripides

Lysistrata - Aristophanes

The Book of Hester - from the Hebrew Bible

Symposium - Plato

Tao te Ching - Lao Tzu

Mahabharata - Vyasa

Analects and Other Writings - Confucius

The Book of Daniel - from the Hebrew Bible

On the Nature of Things - Lucretius

Aeneid - Virgil 

The Book of Revelation - from the New Testament

Three Tang Poems - Wang Han, Cui Hu, and Li Bai

Beowulf - Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem

The Tale of Genji - Murasaki Shikib

The Letters of Heloise and Abelard

'O Nobilissima Viriditas' - Hildegard of Bingen

'The Fisherman and the Genie' - from The Arabian Nights

'The Woman With Two Coyntes' - from The Arabian Nights

Poems - Rumi

The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri

The Inferno - Dante Alighieri

The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) - Padmasambhava and Karma Lingpa 

'The Last Ballad' - Francois Villon

The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer

Le Morte d'Arthur - Sir Thomas Malory

Apu Ollantay - an Incan play

Outlaws of the Water Margin - Shi Nai'an

Hagoromo (Celestial Feather Robe) - a Japanese Noh play

Popul Vuh - sacred book of the Quiche Maya

The Visions of St. Teresa of Avila - from her autobiography

'Hot Sun, Cool Fire' - George Peele

Journey to the West - Wu Cheng'en

The Faerie Queene - Edmund Spenser

A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare

King Lear - William Shakespeare

Don Quixote - Miguel Cervantes

Sonnet 18 - William Shakespeare
 
Sonnet 20 - William Shakespeare

'The Flea' - John Donne

'To His Coy Mistress' - Andrew Marvell

'Forgive Us Our Trespasses' - Aphra Behn

Paradise Lost - John Milton

Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift

Candide - Voltaire

A Modest Proposal - Jonathan Swift

'Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress' - Benjamin Franklin

London Journal - James Bowswell

'Letter to the Royal Academy of Brussels' (a k a 'Fart Proudly') - Benjamin Franklin

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft

Dangerous Liaisons - Choderios de Lacios

A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

'Kubla Khan' - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

'Auguries of Inocence' - William Blake

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

'She Walks in Beauty' - George Gordon, Lord Byron

'Ozymandias' - Percy Bysshe Shelley

'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' - William Wordsworth

'O Solitude' - John Keats

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

Fairy Tales - The Brothers Grimm

'How Six Made Good in the World' - The Brothers Grimm

'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' - John Keats

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Gian Albion - William Blake

The Confessions of Nat Turner - Nat Turner and Thomas R. Gray

'The Mortal Immortal' - Mary Shelley

Fairy Tales - Hans Christian Andersen

'Rondeau' ('Jenny Kiss'd Me') - Leigh Hunt

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

'The Jumblies' - Edward Lear

Der Struwwelpeter - Heinrich Hoffmann

Poe montage - Edgar Allan Poe

'The Raven' - Edgar Allan Poe

Works - Edgar Allan Poe

Jane Eyre - Charlotte BrontÎ

Wuthering Heights - Emily BrontÎ

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Moby-Dick - Herman Melville

Walden - Henry David Thoreau

Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman

The Hasheesh Eater [1857] - Fitz Hugh Ludlow

On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin

'The Message From Mount Misery' - Frederick Douglass

Les MisÈrables - Victor Hugo

'Because I Could Not Stop for Death' - Emily Dickinson

'I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed' - Emily Dickinson

Letter to George Sand - Gustave Flaubert

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll

'Jabberwocky' - Lewis Carroll

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Venus in Furs - Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

'The Drunken Boat' - Arthur Rimbaud

Middlemarch - George Eliot

The Hunting of the Snaark - Lewis Carroll

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

Thus Spake Zarathustra - Friedrich Nietzsche

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' - Ambrose Bierce

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

The Awakening - Kate Chopin

The Interpretation of Dreams - Sigmund Freud

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - L Frank Baum

'The New Accelerator' - H G Wells

'Reginald' - Saki

A Room With a View - E M Forster

Mother - Maxim Gorky

'If--' - Rudyard Kipling

John Barleycorn - Jack London

'Araby' (From Dubliners) - James Joyce

The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

The Voyage Out - Virginia Woolf

'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' - T S Eliot

'The Mowers' - D H Lawrence

'Sea Iris' - H D

'A Matter of Colour' - Ernest Hemingway

The Madman [1918] - Kahlil Gibran

The Cather in the Rye - J D Salinger

'Hands' (From Winesburg, Ohio) - Sherwood Anderson

The Dreaming of the Bones - W B Yeats

Cheri - Colette

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

'Dulce et Decorum Est' - Wilfred Owen

'The Second Coming' - W B Yeats

'The Petinent' and 'The Singing-Woman From the Wood's Edge' - Edna St. Vincent Millay

'The Top' and 'Give It Up!' - Franz Kafka

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

'The Negro Dreams of Rivers' - Langston Hughes

'Rain' - W Somerset Maughm

Ulysss - James Joyce

'Living on $1,000 a Year in Paris' - Ernest Hemingway

'The Emperor of Ice-Cream' - Wallace Stevens

'The Hill' - William Faulkner

Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse

'The Waste Land' - T S Eliot

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse

Lady Chatterley's Lover - D H Lawrence

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

Letters to a Young Poet - Rainer Maria Rilke

The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Poker! - Zora Neale Hurston

Black Elk Speaks - Black Elk and John G Neihardt

'Strange Fruit' (a k a 'Bitter Fruit') - Lewis Allan

Nausea - Jean-Paul Sartre

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Three stories - Jorge Luis Borges

The Stranger - Albert Camus

Animal Farm - George Orwell

'The Heart of the Park' - Flannery O'Connor

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

The Man With the Golden Arm - Nelson Algren

'The Voice of the Hamster' - Thomas Pynchon

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett

'The Dancer' - Gabriela Mistral

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley

Lolita - Vladimir Nabakov

Four Beats

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

Naked Lunch - William S Burroughs

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

Last Exit to Brooklyn - Hubert Selby, Jr.

Diaries - Anais Nin

The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In Watermelon Sugar - Richard Brautigan

Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon

Crash - J G Ballard

'I Bought a Little City' - Donald Barthelme

'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' - Raymond Carver

Blood and Guts in High School - Kathy Acker

Blood Merdian - Cormac McCarthy

Foucault's Pendulum - Umberto Eco

Wild at Heart - Barry Gifford

The Famished Road - Ben Okri

Einstein's Dreams - Alan Lightman

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Death in Venice - Thomas Mann


19 September
In the 27 January post, which features F W Farrar's short selection of works, I was confused regarding W B Carnochan's claim that John Lubbock's 1886 list, and those who directly responded to it, including Farrar, began a major trend in publishing: that of scholars developing lists, generally with a title like "100 Best Books". Besides Charles W Eliot's Harvard Classics series, most of the "great books" lists available online are from the second half of the twentieth century, and have often been responses to Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins's Great Books set, or more recently Modern Library's lists of the greatest U S fiction and non-fiction works. Alas, having delved into the literature--and engaged in some old-fashion shelf-reading at the University of Georgia library--I've found the lists Carnochan was referring to, and, with the Have You Read 100 Great Books? collection, found what seems to be the culmination of the first phrase of the post-Lubbock phase of the "great books" trend (distinguished from what many call the "great books" movement, with its basis in college courses at Columbia, Chicago, and St. John's). The early-Twentieth-Century lists have been posted, leaving only the relatively-recent Philip Ward and two selections of "Eastern" classics. Those will be done later this year.


20 September
The number of lists I'll use in the creation of a single master list has been determined, totaling 40. Given the origin of some of the lists I discovered recently, the importance of what I call the Columbia Crowd to the entire concept of "great books" should be noted. Only with the large number of lists published from 1998 has their influence begun to wane. The last Columbia-related list comes from the final edition of Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan, in 1997. The first Columbia-related list used in this project comes from Will Durant, in 1930; but an earlier version of Classics of the Western World was published in 1927. So, for sixty years, scholars associated with the original "great books" program fashioned their own lists, distinct from the classroom syllabi. A list of these men, and their connections to Columbia:

John Erskine, professor, 1909-37, established the "great books" courses;

Will Durant, student, early 1910s-1917--unclear what connection he maintained with the university or the "great books" courses;

Mark Van Doren, student and professor, 1914-59;

Clifton Fadiman, student, 1920-25;

Mortimer J Adler, student and professor, early 1920s-1930;

Robert B Downs, student, 1926-29; while the influence of the "great books" movement on his own list is obvious enough, Downs was a student at Columbia's once-renown, now-defunct library-science program; so, as with Durant, his connection with the "great books" courses is unclear;

[Robert Hutchins brought Adler to the University of Chicago in '30; Adler stayed there for decades, perhaps one of the most controversial of all professors, even by Chicago's standards;]

Allan Willard Brown, student and administrator, 1940s;

Mark Van Doren, student, 1946-1955, and professor, 1955-59; he left Columbia during the "quiz show" scandal, and eventually was hired by Adler to work on the Encyclopædia Britannica; Adler's work at the Britannica was no less controversial than his academic career.



21 September
Through the rest of the year, as I edit and expand all of the lists--including the three that have not yet been posted--the links in the right-hand column will have numbers placed besides them indicating how many entries the list includes (that is, all literary works, however they were originally published, plus relatively-undefined entries such as "poems" or "complete works") followed by the number of monograph works (that is, those being numbered in the lists) in parenthesis. Until the project's done, these totals should be considered works in progress; several bibliographically-complex entries have not been entirely worked-out yet--that is, the numbers could change. I've also considered having a third total for each list: counting those items that were not published as monographs, but stand as distinct works (usually poems, essays, and stories published in periodicals and anthologies), with the undefined entries counted separately. With such a set-up, the distinct works could be included in the major master list with the monographs, while a minor master list would have the remainder.

The non-monograph works will be also be color-coded. Red indicates that the entry is an excerpt of a singular work, such as books of the Bible; yellow, that it is an undefined selection; green, that it is an essay, diary entry, piece of correspondence, or any other prose work originally published in a periodical or anthology; blue, that it is a short story originally published in a periodical or anthology; and purple, that it is a poem originally published in a periodical or anthology. Notice that the first and second categories (excerpts and undefined selections), not being defined by genre, could include prose or poetry, fiction or not.

Progress on creation of the major master list and editing of the 40 disparate lists continues.


22 September
Having studied lists of books and lists of music albums, the inevitable study of lists of movies: to begin, a few of the major lists of the greatest. As one goes through the post, the films already listed are crossed-out, so that a master list is created.

Sight and Sound (7th poll, 2012):
Vertigo (1958)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Tokyo Story (1953)
The Rules of the Game (1939)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
The Searchers (1956)
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
8½ (1963)
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
L'Atalante (1934)
Breathless (1960)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Late Spring (1949)
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
Seven Samurai (1954)
Persona (1966)
Mirror (1975)
Singin' in the Rain (1952)
L'Avventura (1960)
Contempt (1963)
The Godfather (1972)
Ordet (1955)
In the Mood for Love (2000)
Rashomon (1950)
Andrei Rublev (1966)
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
Stalker (1979)
Shoah (1985)
The Godfather Part II (1974)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Bicycle Thieves (1948)
The General (1926)
Metropolis (1927)
Psycho (1960)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
Sátántangó (1994)
The 400 Blows (1959)
La Dolce Vita (1960)
Journey to Italy (1954)
Pather Panchali (1955)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Gertrud (1964)
Pierrot le Fou (1965)
Playtime (1967)
Close-Up (1990)
The Battle of Algiers (1966)
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998)
City Lights (1931)
Ugetsu Monogatari (1953)
La Jetée (1962)

Time, All-Time 100 Movies:
Aguirre: The Wrath of God
The Apu Trilogy
The Awful Truth
Baby Face
Bande à part
Barry Lyndon
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Blade Runner
Bonnie and Clyde
Brazil
Bride of Frankenstein
Camille
Casablanca
Charade
Children of Paradise
Chinatown
Chungking Express
Citizen Kane
City Lights
City of God
Closely Watched Trains
The Crime of Monsieur Lange
The Crowd
The Godfather, Parts I and II
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
Goodfellas
A Hard Day’s Night
His Girl Friday
Ikiru
In A Lonely Place
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
It's a Gift
It's a Wonderful Life
Kandahar
Kind Hearts and Coronets
King Kong
The Lady Eve
The Last Command
Lawrence of Arabia
Léolo
The Lord of the Rings
The Man with a Movie Camera
The Manchurian Candidate
Meet Me in St. Louis
Metropolis
Miller's Crossing
Mon Oncle d’Amérique
Mouchette
Nayakan
Ninotchka
Notorious
Olympia, Parts 1 and 2
On the Waterfront
Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Persona
Pinocchio
Psycho
Pulp Fiction
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Pyaasa
Raging Bull
Schindler’s List
The Searchers
Sherlock, Jr.
The Shop Around the Corner
Singin’ in the Rain
The Singing Detective
Smiles of a Summer Night
Some Like It Hot
Star Wars
A Streetcar Named Desire
Sunrise
Sweet Smell of Success
Swing Time
Taxi Driver
Tokyo Story
A Touch of Zen
Ugetsu
Talk to Her
Ulysses’ Gaze
Umberto D
Unforgiven
White Heat
Wings of Desire
Yojimbo

American Film Institute: 100 Years... 100 Movies (2nd version, 2007):
1 CITIZEN KANE 1941
2 THE GODFATHER 1972
3 CASABLANCA 1942
4 RAGING BULL 1980
5 SINGIN' IN THE RAIN 1952
6 GONE WITH THE WIND 1939
7 LAWRENCE OF ARABIA 1962
8 SCHINDLER'S LIST 1993
9 VERTIGO 1958
10 THE WIZARD OF OZ 1939
11 CITY LIGHTS 1931
12 THE SEARCHERS 1956
13 STAR WARS 1977
14 PSYCHO 1960
15 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY 1968
16 SUNSET BLVD. 1950
17 THE GRADUATE 1967
18 THE GENERAL 1927
19 ON THE WATERFRONT 1954
20 IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE 1946
21 CHINATOWN 1974
22 SOME LIKE IT HOT 1959
23 THE GRAPES OF WRATH 1940
24 E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL 1982
25 TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD 1962
26 MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON 1939
27 HIGH NOON 1952
28 ALL ABOUT EVE 1950
29 DOUBLE INDEMNITY 1944
30 APOCALYPSE NOW 1979
31 THE MALTESE FALCON 1941
32 THE GODFATHER PART II 1974
33 ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST 1975
34 SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS 1937
35 ANNIE HALL 1977
36 THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI 1957
37 THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES 1946
38 THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE 1948
39 DR. STRANGELOVE 1964
40 THE SOUND OF MUSIC 1965
41 KING KONG 1933
42 BONNIE AND CLYDE 1967
43 MIDNIGHT COWBOY 1969
44 THE PHILADELPHIA STORY 1940
45 SHANE 1953
46 IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT 1934
47 A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE 1951
48 REAR WINDOW 1954
49 INTOLERANCE 1916
50 THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING 2001
51 WEST SIDE STORY 1961
52 TAXI DRIVER 1976
53 THE DEER HUNTER 1978
54 M*A*S*H 1970
55 NORTH BY NORTHWEST 1959
56 JAWS 1975
57 ROCKY 1976
58 THE GOLD RUSH 1925
59 NASHVILLE 1975
60 DUCK SOUP 1933
61 SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS 1941
62 AMERICAN GRAFFITI 1973
63 CABARET 1972
64 NETWORK 1976
65 THE AFRICAN QUEEN 1951
66 RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK 1981
67 WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? 1966
68 UNFORGIVEN 1992
69 TOOTSIE 1982
70 A CLOCKWORK ORANGE 1971
71 SAVING PRIVATE RYAN 1998
72 THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION 1994
73 BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID 1969
74 THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS 1991
75 IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT 1967
76 FORREST GUMP 1994
77 ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN 1976
78 MODERN TIMES 1936
79 THE WILD BUNCH 1969
80 THE APARTMENT 1960
81 SPARTACUS 1960
82 SUNRISE 1927
83 TITANIC 1997
84 EASY RIDER 1969
85 A NIGHT AT THE OPERA 1935
86 PLATOON 1986
87 12 ANGRY MEN 1957
88 BRINGING UP BABY 1938
89 THE SIXTH SENSE 1999
90 SWING TIME 1936
91 SOPHIE'S CHOICE 1982
92 GOODFELLAS 1990
93 THE FRENCH CONNECTION 1971
94 PULP FICTION 1994
95 THE LAST PICTURE SHOW 1971
96 DO THE RIGHT THING 1989
97 BLADE RUNNER 1982
98 YANKEE DOODLE DANDY 1942
99 TOY STORY 1995
100 BEN-HUR 1959

Films on the first version (1998) excluded from the second:
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
From Here to Eternity (1953)
Amadeus (1984)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
The Third Man (1949)
Fantasia (1940)
Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Stagecoach (1939)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
An American in Paris (1951)
Wuthering Heights (1939)
Dances with Wolves (1990)
Giant (1956)
Fargo (1996)
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
Frankenstein (1931)
Patton (1970)
The Jazz Singer (1927)
My Fair Lady (1964)
A Place in the Sun (1951)
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)

Village Voice, 100 Best Films of the 20th Century:
Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)
The Rules of the Game (1939, Jean Renoir)
Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
The Searchers (1956, John Ford)
The Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov)
Sunrise (1927, F.W. Murnau)
L'Atalante (1934, Jean Vigo)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966, Robert Bresson)
Rashomon (1950, Akira Kurosawa)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick)
The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola)
Pather Panchali (1955, Satyajit Ray)
The Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W. Griffith)
The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946, Frank Capra)
Ordet (1955, Carl Theodor Dreyer)
Intolerance (1916, D.W. Griffith)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975, Chantal Akerman)
Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock)
Chinatown (1974, Roman Polanski)
M (1931, Fritz Lang)
The Seven Samurai (1954, Akira Kurosawa)
The Earrings of Madame de... (1953, Max Ophuls)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Orson Welles)
A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson)
Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith)
Greed (1924, Erich von Stroheim)
Ugetsu (1953, Kenji Mizoguchi)
The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed)
The Godfather Part II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)
The General (1927, Buster Keaton)
The Seventh Seal (1956, Ingmar Bergman)
Taxi Driver (1976, Martin Scorsese)
The Night of the Hunter (1955, Charles Laughton)
Tokyo Story (1953, Yasujiro Ozu)
The Bicycle Thief (1949, Vittorio DeSica)
City Lights (1931, Charles Chaplin)
King Kong (1933, Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack)
Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang)
My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie) (1962, Jean-Luc Godard)
Sherlock Jr. (1924, Buster Keaton)
Aguirre: the Wrath of God (1972, Werner Herzog)
Duck Soup (1933, Leo McCarey)
Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder)
Barry Lyndon (1975, Stanley Kubrick)
The 400 Blows (1959, Francois Truffaut)
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928, Buster Keaton)
Contempt (1963, Jean-Luc Godard)
The Gold Rush (1925, Charles Chaplin)
North by Northwest (1959, Alfred Hitchcock)
Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966, George Kuchar)
The Rise of Louis XIV (1966, Roberto Rossellini)
The Apu Trilogy (1955-59, Satyajit Ray)
Touch of Evil (1958, Orson Welles)
A Woman Under the Influence (1974, John Cassavetes)
The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges)
The Conformist (1970, Bernardo Bertolucci)
The Palm Beach Story (1942, Preston Sturges)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford)
Pickpocket (1959, Robert Bresson)
An Actor's Revenge (1963, Kon Ichikawa)
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
Close-Up (1990, Abbas Kiarostami)
The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1965, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
La Jetee (1961, Chris Marker)
Modern Times (1936, Charles Chaplin)
October (1927, Sergei Eisenstein)
Los Olvidados (1950, Luis Bunuel)
Paisan (1946, Roberto Rossellini)
Performance (1970, Nicolas Roeg & Donald Cammell)
Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann)
Singin' in the Rain (1952, Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly)
Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1966, Jean-Luc Godard)
Umberto D (1952, Vittorio De Sica)
Les Vampires (1915-16, Louis Feuillade)
All About Eve (1950, Joseph H. Lewis)
All That Heaven Allows (1955, Douglas Sirk)
Battleship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisenstein)
Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock)
Pierrot le Fou (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)
Fox and His Friends (1975, Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper)
A Trip to the Moon (1902, Georges Melies)
Wavelength (1967, Michael Snow)
Ashes and Diamonds (1958, Andrzej Wajda)
Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970, Russ Meyer)
The Golden Coach (1952, Jean Renoir)
Salo (1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini)
Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974, Jacques Rivette)
Masculine-Feminine (1966, Jean-Luc Godard)
Nosferatu (1922, F.W. Murnau)
Star Wars (1977, George Lucas)
Blade Runner (1982, Ridley Scott)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935, James Whale)
Jules and Jim (1962, Francois Truffaut)
Landscape in the Mist (1988, Theo Angelopoulos)
Mean Streets (1973, Martin Scorsese)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943, Alfred Hitchcock)
Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento)

Moving Arts Film Journal, 100 Greatest Movies of All Time:
#1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Kubrick)
#2. Citizen Kane (1941, Welles)
#3. The Godfather (1972, Coppola)
#4. Andrei Rublev (1966, Tarkovsky)
#5. The Rules of the Game (1939, Renoir)
#6. Casablanca (1942, Curtiz)
#7. Vertigo (1958, Hitchcock)
#8. La Dolce Vita (1960, Fellini)
#9. Seven Samurai (1954, Kurosawa)
#10. The Godfather Pt. II (1974, Coppola)
#11. The Third Man (1949, Reed)
#12. The Wizard of Oz (1939, Fleming)
#13. Dr. Strangelove (1964, Kubrick)
#14. Goodfellas (1990, Scorsese)
#15. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972, Herzog)
#16. 8½ (1963, Fellini)
#17. Singin’ In The Rain (1952, Donen, Kelly)
#18. Raging Bull (1980, Scorsese)
#19. Lawrence of Arabia (1962, Lean)
#20. Solaris (1972, Tarkovsky)
#21. The Night of the Hunter (1955, Laughton)
#22. On the Waterfront (1954, Kazan)
#23. Intolerance (1916, Griffith)
#24. L’Atalante (1934, Vigo)
#25. Apocalypse Now (1979, Coppola)
#26. Birth of a Nation (1915, Griffith)
#27. Battleship Potemkin (1925, Eisenstein)
#28. Taxi Driver (1976, Scorsese)
#29. Chinatown (1974, Polanski)
#30. Rashomon (1950, Kurosawa)
#31. The Searchers (1956, Ford)
#32. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966, Leone)
#33. Yojimbo (1961, Kurosawa)
#34. Nights of Cabiria (1957, Fellini)
#35. The Curse of the Cat People (1944, Fritsch, Wise)
#36. Annie Hall (1977, Allen)
#37. Tokyo Story (1953, Ozu)
#38. M (1931, Lang)
#39. Brief Encounter (1945, Lean)
#40. Rear Window (1954, Hitchcock)
#41. Barry Lyndon (1975, Kubrick)
#42. Ikiru (1952, Kirosawa)
#43. A Clockwork Orange (1971, Kubrick)
#44. Metropolis (1927, Lang)
#45. City Lights (1931, Chaplin)
#46. Bashu, The Little Stranger (1986, Beizai)
#47. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, Kazan)
#48. Badlands (1973, Malick)
#49. The Asphalt Jungle (1950, Huston)
#50. Pather Panchali (Ray, 1955)
#51. Touch of Evil (1958, Welles, Keller)
#52. The 400 Blows (1959, Truffaut)
#53. The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Dreyer)
#54. King Kong (1933, Shoedsack, Cooper)
#55. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927, Murnau)
#56. L’Avventura (1960, Antonioni)
#57. The Empire Strikes Back (1980, Kirshner)
#58. The Apartment (1960, Wilder)
#59. The General (1927, Keaton, Bruckman)
#60. Pierrot le Fou (1965, Godard)
#61. The Seventh Seal (1957, Bergman)
#62. Talk to Her (2002, Almodóvar)
#63. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971, Altman)
#64. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, Ford)
#65. Do the Right Thing (1989, Lee)
#66. Pulp Fiction (1994, Tarantino)
#67. Ugetsu (1953, Mizoguchi)
#68. Manhattan (1979, Allen)
#69. Star Wars (1977, Lucas)
#70. F for Fake (1973, Welles)
#71. Blue Velvet (1986, Lynch)
#72. The Leopard (1963, Visconti)
#73. Modern Times (1936, Chaplin)
#74. Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Mackendrick)
#75. Yi Yi (2000, Yang)
#76. Grand Illusion (1937, Renoir)
#77. Out of the Past (1947, Tourneur)
#78. Mulholland Dr. (2001, Lynch)
#79. Wild Strawberries (1957, Bergman)
#80. Synecdoche, New York (2008, Kaufman)
#81. Psycho (1960, Hitchcock)
#82. Nayakan (1987, Ratnam)
#83. Wings of Desire (1987, Wenders)
#84. The Big Sleep (1946, Hawks)
#85. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Gondry)
#86. Ulysses’ Gaze (1995, Angelopoulos)
#87. Notorious (1946, Hitchcock)
#88. Nashville (1975, Altman)
#89. Days of Heaven (1978, Mallick)
#90. The Maltese Falcon (1941, Huston)
#91. The Bicycle Thief (1948, de Sica)
#92. A Touch of Zen (1971, Hu)
#93. Fargo (1996, Coen, Coen)
#94. Breathless (1960, Godard)
#95. Children of Paradise (1945, Carné)
#96. The Wind Will Carry Us (1999, Kiarostami)
#97. Rio Bravo (1959, Hawks)
#98. Jaws (1975, Spielberg)
#99. There Will Be Blood (2007, P.T. Anderson)
#100. Japón (2002, Carlos Reygadas)


23 September
As noted at the 3 September post, Hamilton Wright Mabie was involved in the Library of the World's Best Literature [1896], a 30-volume set for which he served as a co-associate editor (with Lucia Gilbert Runkle and George Henry Warner); Charles Dudley Warner was the editor. The line separating this kind of project from Adler and Hutchins's Great Books of the Western World or Eliot's Harvard Classics is thin and blurry, some would say non-existent. For the purposes of this project, however, it's closer to literature anthologies commonly used in the classroom than to the "great books" sets. Still, it's only closer. I'd like to include it, but for the time being it's too large, with too many short readings and excerpts of works.

The creators of the set present it in much the same way Eliot and Adler/ Hutchins would their own projects. In the 'Publishers' Preface' to the final volume, the Guide to Systematic Readings and General Index, the set is said to provide "an incalculable service to home-study and self-culture" of those at any educational level. "Year after year for any course of years, the eager student or the ordinary reader may take courses of acquisition or enjoyment, as in some vast university whose doors never close and whose resources of spiritual ministry are never exhausted."

Of especial notice in that indexing volume are the Chronological Conspectuses of National Literatures. Once you see the myriad of names listed even under smaller nations, or languages/ ethnicities, you get a clear idea of how intricate this collection is. Besides a standard index, this book features a massive section called 'Outline Survey of the Principal Topics and Chief Lines of Interest', these topics being defined geographically, by subject, or by varied sorts of genres ('Sacred Books of the World', 'Medical Interest', etc.).


24 September
Another anthology that could fit into this project is The World's Great Classics [1902], created by a Library Committee (you don't say!) consisting of Timothy Dwight, Justin McCarthy, Richard Henry Stoddard, Paul Van Dyke, and Albert Ellery Bergh, with the assistance of Julian Hawthorne, the literary editor (they're not all literary editors?), and Clarence Book, the art editor. Bergh's apparently the managing editor, and writes a 'Special Introduction' to the set's index. Besides general, subject, and chronological indexes, the index features a handy Summary of the Series in table form.

Though this sixty-volume [sixty-one if you count the index] series features fewer excerpts and shorter works, it includes a few histories, such as Leopold Von Ranke's History of the Popes, Edward Shepherd Creasy's Decisive Battles of the World, and Henry Hallam's History of Europe During the Middle Ages, that serve less as great works of literature and more as historical background to the other readings. The set is sure to impress even twenty-first-century readers with its inclusion of a large number of non-Western works, with several Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, and Malayan selections. Because of this, I'd like to include this set to a greater extent than the Library of the World's Best Literature, but simply don't have the time for now. 

Bergh's Introduction to the Series, found in the first volume (which otherwise consists of George Rawlinson's Ancient History: From the Earliest Times to the Fall of the Western Empire) laments the glut of books found at the turn of the (Twentieth) century, much like we already heard from Farrar, and pointedly contrasts this set from encyclopedias of literature that feature few readings, and many excerpts of readings, of the literature being discussed. As Bergh argues, such works "are in the nature of anthologoies, and, while they may be very useful as literary scrap-books, they fail to satisfy those who wish to possess the classics in their entirety." Thus, The World's Great Classics, "a carefully selected library of the world's great classics."  


25 September
David Byrne's How Music Works is certainly a bold work, not afraid to proceed from basic information and assumptions about how humans make and experience music. He covers a great deal of the history of modern music, and sound recording in particular. Sure, at times I'm annoyed by the McSweeney's-approved elementary-school reading-level style of writing, but generally it's a charming read, melding Bryne's personal observations with important insights from recent scholarship. Hopefully, this book will make its readers aware of crucial historical facets that don't seem to be common knowledge (for example, the central role Bing Crosby played in the development of tape recording or how different periods of European Classical music were effected by the spaces--gothic cathedrals, large concert halls--where the music was performed).

Unfortunately, though, in the chapter, 'Technology Shapes Music: Digital', Byrne spouts frequently-heard, and contradictory and misleading, complaints about the limitations of digital sound recording. He states, "The spectrum of sound on analog mediums [sic] has an infinite number of gradations, whereas in the digital world everything is sliced into a finite number of slivers. Slivers and bits might fool the ear into believing that they represent a continuous audio spectrum (psychoacoustics at work), but by nature they are still ones and zeros; steps rather than a smooth slope. [...] I can't help thinking that the psychoacoustic trickery used to develop [C D's and M P 3's]--the ability to cause the mind to think and feel that all the musical information is there when in reality a huge percentage has been removed--is a continuation of this trend where we are seduced by convenience."

First of all, in the pages leading to this concluding piss-off, Byrne speaks with enthusiasm about Bell Labs developing that "psychoacoustic trickery"; his tone has changed. Is this where non-electronic musicians become little more than your typical anti-science American numbskull? More importantly, precisely because digital sound never was an analog of the recorded sound, "a huge percentage of sound" was removed not in the original recording (analog or digital, or perhaps a mix). Rather, the listener loses sound due to insufficient playback mechanisms (digital or analog, since so many of our "vinyl sounds betters" hipsters listen to digital recordings on L P, arguably a pointless endeavor) or weak loudspeakers. M P 3's, or bad optical-disk players, do not give the listener all the information found in the original recording. If we say that the original recording removed sound, we're setting up an impossibility: perfect reproduction of sound, which of course everyone knows does not exist. Without that digital recording, all of the sound would have been "removed"--because it would have disappeared into air. 

Moreover, Byrne acknowledges elsewhere that digital sound might capture a wider range of sound frequency. In other words, apparently analog's "infinite graduations" aren't so infinite after all. Nonetheless, despite the vague, unqualified statements he makes about the analog-digital divide, such as how with digital sound "something ineffable was missing," plus some selective quotations of others' observations, Byrne does indirectly make the primary argument in favor of analog sound. That is, that it does a better job of presenting to the human ear the narrower range of frequency it does capture; that the human ear doesn't need to hear digital's high-end and low-end extremes, they'll just annoy him. Byrne also arrives at this argument by way of his discussion of the "ambiguity of low-quality signals and reproductions," which invites the listener to "fill in the blanks," so to speak, becoming a part of the process (which of course could also bring in philosophical arguments about "reception history" and deconstruction of texts). Just don't expect Byrne to acknowledge that analog sound, relative to digital, would ever be the lower-quality option.

Even more unfortunate is that Byrne seemingly fails to recognize the similarity of his argument regarding the "smooth slope" and "infinite gradations" of analog sound to Thomas Edison's argument, discussed in the previous chapter 'Technology Shapes Music: Analog', regarding the superiority of mechanical recording over electrical recording. As Byrne explains, Edison claimed his recordings, wherein the sound traveled through a large horn to the needle via a diaphragm, concentrating the waves, vibrating the diaphragm, and moving the needle, which in turn cut the groove into the cylinder or disk, were recreations, and thus superior to recordings made via microphones, wherein the sound, often amplified, traveled through wires. Edison seems logical here. So do Byrne and other analog partisans when they suggest that analog sound is closer to the original, that digital recording merely takes a bunch of pictures of the sound, the resulting gaps--that crucial jaggedness--agitating poor listeners accustomed to analog's soothing hiss by a sort of magical or metaphysical process, since they cannot actually hear those gaps. In adjudicating the claims of electrical and mechanical recording, Byrne rightly concludes, "both technologies color the sound, but in different ways. 'Neutral' technology does not exist." Unless of course it's vinyl, which current received wisdom stupidly holds up as a godsend.

We could instead ask some logical, revealing follow-up questions. If, as Byrne notes, some have argued [he doesn't say who] Edison might have been correct about the superiority of mechanical recording, but only with regard to the human voice, not musical instruments, perhaps analog recording is superior for certain kinds of music, such as those with steady rhythms, while digital works best with other kinds, especially modern Jazz and Classical genres that lack steady rhythms and often makes use of a wider range of frequency. My preference with Rock music is Neil Young's approach: record with high-quality analog tape and mixers, then accurately transfer the sound to digital for playback, whether via Blu-Ray or high-definition computer files. 

As noted above, in much contemporary Rock and other song-oriented genres, the approach taken is exactly the opposite. Byrne makes the crucial connection between digital recording and the "loudness" war that has decimated the sound of contemporary mass-marketed Rock. More important, though, is that the convenience of digital sound, supposedly driving us away from analog playback, more importantly is pushing artists toward digital recording even when they claim to love analog. In turn--and I repeat this point only to try to convey how absurd the current situation is--they make fools of themselves by claiming that the listener should hear those digital recordings on vinyl. 


26 September
Looking for bibliographic information about various works in these "great books" lists has lead me to some excellent web sites about authors, national literatures, genres, etc., including:

<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130126225216/http://www.internetculturale.it/opencms/directories/ViaggiNelTesto/index-en.html">Pathways Through Literature</a>, covering nine key Italian writers, from Dante to Giacomo Leopardi;

<a href="http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~ccarpen/index.htm">Modern British, Irish, and American Drama: A Descriptive Chronology, 1865-1965</a>;

<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090901000000*/http://henryjames.org.uk/">The Ladder: A Henry James Website</a>;

<a href="https://davidhume.org/">David Hume</a>;

and the official site for the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150510094407/http://www.augustinianinstitute-malta.com/">Augustinian Institute</a>, based in Malta.


27 September
Richard Rhodes came up with the idea of using the word, verity, as an alternate term to non-fiction, or more precisely "factual narratives." At first, I'd presume that only journalism and New Journalism (what now tends to be called creative non-fiction) would constitute this category. But, the brief essay found at the link below suggests that Rhodes includes Francis Bacon and Michel de Montaigne, both so crucial to our understanding of the term, essay. Wouldn't memoirs be included then, given how much essay and memoir overlap? History and biography are also certainly factual narratives. But if we include those within the verity category, why exclude philosophy, science, and other (mostly "social science") academic works? All this is to say that, on the web site that develops out of the "great books" project documented here, the texts, in addition to being split up chronologically and by language, will also be divided into four genre categories: poetry, theatre, verity, and fiction.

http://www.richardrhodes.com/album.html


28 September
<a href="https://www.filmsite.org/">Filmsite</a>, in addition to its own lists, transcribes several other movie lists, available at the following page, '<a href="https://www.filmsite.org/greatlists2.html">Other "Great Films" Lists</a>'. Only a few cover all of film history, notably those from <a href="https://www.filmsite.org/ew100.html">Entertainment Weekly</a>, <a href="https://www.filmsite.org/maltin.html">Leonard Maltin</a>, and <a href="https://www.filmsite.org/alist.html">the National Society of Film Critics</a>.


30 September
Looking through those additional movie lists, namely Leonard Maltin, The National Society of Film Critics, and Entertainmet Weekly, the following films not yet on our master list were found:

from the National Society's 100 Essential Films:
42nd Street
The Bank Dick
Blow-Up
The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith
Dance, Girl, Dance
The Decalogue
The Dance of a Country Priest
Enter the Dragon
The Entertainer
The Exorcist
Faces
Happy Together
Jailhouse Rock
Ju Dou
Raise the Red Lantern
Red Sorghum
Killer of Sheep
L A Confidential
The Marriage of Eva Braun
Rome Open City
Pandora's Box
The Piano
The Public Enemy
La Strada
The Thief of Baghdad
Top Hat
Trouble in Paradise
Winchester '73
Written on the Wind

from Maltin's 100 Must-See Films of the 20th Century:
Our Hospitality
The Big Parade
The Freshman
Dracula
Sons of the Desert
The 39 Steps
Dodsworth
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
The Adventures of Robin Hood
The Lady Vanishes
The Ox-Bow Incident
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek
My Darling Clementine
Great Expectations
Gun Crazy
Strangers on a Train
Seven Brides for Seven Brothes
Paths of Glory
Mary Poppins
The Conversation
Blazing Saddles

from E W's The 100 Greatest Movies of All Time:
Aliens
Henry V
Airplane!
Beauty and the Beast
To Be or Not to Be
Funny Face
Diabolique
L'Age d'Or
The Producers
Pickup on South Street
Mildred Pierce
The Road Warrior
The Last of the Mohicans
Swept Away