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'''Great books''' are written publications that have been accepted by modern day scholars as the essential foundation of literature in Western culture. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines them as certain classics of literature, philosophy, history, and science that are believed to contain the basic ideas of western culture.

An example chronological list, compiled from ''How to Read a Book'' by Mortimer Adler (1940), and ''How to Read a Book'', 2nd ed. by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (1972):

'''Ancient''' (before AD 500) :
# Homer – ''Iliad''; ''Odyssey''
# The Old Testament
# Aeschylus – Tragedies
# Sophocles – Tragedies
# Herodotus – ''Histories''
# Euripides – Tragedies
# Thucydides – ''History of the Peloponnesian War''
# Hippocrates – Medical Writings
# Aristophanes – Comedies
# Plato – Dialogues
# Aristotle – Works
# Epicurus – "Letter to Herodotus"; "Letter to Menoecus"
# Euclid – ''Elements''
# Archimedes – Works
# Apollonius of Perga|Apollonius – ''Conics''
# Cicero – Works (esp. ''Orations''; ''On Friendship''; ''On Old Age''; ''Republic''; ''Laws''; ''Tusculan Disputations''; ''Offices'')
# Lucretius – ''De rerum natura''/''On the Nature of Things''
# Virgil – Works (esp. ''Aeneid'')
# Horace – Works (esp. ''Odes and Epodes/Epodes''; ''Ars Poetica/The Art of Poetry'')
# Livy – ''Ab Urbe Condita''/''History of Rome''
# Ovid – Works (esp. ''Metamorphoses'')
# Quintilian – ''Institutes of Oratory''
# Plutarch – ''Parallel Lives''; ''Moralia''
# Tacitus – ''Histories''; ''Annals''; ''Agricola''; ''Germania''; ''Dialogus de oratoribus'' (''Dialogue on Oratory'')
# Nicomachus of Gerasa – ''Introduction to Arithmetic''
# Epictetus – ''Discourseas''; ''Enchiridion''
# Ptolemy – ''Almagest''
# Lucian – Works (esp. ''The Way to Write History''; ''The True History''; ''The Sale of Creeds''; ''Alexander the Oracle Monger''; ''Charon''; ''The Sale of Lives''; ''The Fisherman''; ''Dialogue of the Gods''; ''Dialogues of the Sea-Gods''; ''Dialogues of the Dead'')
# Marcus Aurelius – ''Meditations''
# Galen – Galenic corpus#I: Physiology and Anatomy: ''On the Natural Faculties''
# The New Testament
# Plotinus – ''The Enneads''
# Augustine of Hippo (aka St. Augustine) – "On the Teacher"; ''Confessions''; ''City of God''; ''De doctrina christiana''/''On Christian Doctrine''

'''Medieval''' (AD 500—1450) :
# ''The Völsunga saga''/''Volsungs Saga'' or ''Nibelungenlied''
# ''The Song of Roland''
# Njáls saga|''The Saga of Burnt Njál''
# Maimonides – ''The Guide for the Perplexed''
# St. Thomas Aquinas – ''Of Being and Essence''; ''Summa Contra Gentiles''; ''Of the Governance of Rulers''; ''Summa Theologica''
# Dante Alighieri – La Vita Nuova|''The New Life'' (''La Vita Nuova''); "On Monarchy"; ''Divine Comedy''
# Giovanni Boccaccio - ''The Decameron''
# Geoffrey Chaucer – ''Troilus and Criseyde''; ''The Canterbury Tales''
# Thomas à Kempis – ''The Imitation of Christ''

'''Modern''' (after AD 1450) :
# Leonardo da Vinci – ''Notebooks''
# Niccolò Machiavelli – ''The Prince''; ''Discourses on Livy''/''Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy''
# Desiderius Erasmus – ''The Praise of Folly''; ''Colloquies''
# Nicolaus Copernicus – ''De revolutionibus orbium coelestium''/''On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres''
# Thomas More – ''Utopia''
# Martin Luther – ''Table Talk''; ''Three Treatises''
# François Rabelais – ''Gargantua and Pantagruel''
# John Calvin – ''Institutes of the Christian Religion''
# Michel de Montaigne – ''Essays''
# William Gilbert – ''De Magnete/On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies''
# Miguel de Cervantes – ''Don Quixote''
# Edmund Spenser – ''Prothalamion''; ''The Faerie Queene''
# Francis Bacon – ''Essays''; ''The Advancement of Learning''; ''Novum Organum''; ''New Atlantis''
# William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
# Galileo Galilei – ''Sidereus Nuncius''/''Starry Messenger''; ''Two New Sciences''
# Johannes Kepler – ''The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy''; ''Harmonices Mundi''
# William Harvey – Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus|''On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals''; ''On the Circulation of the Blood''; ''Generation of Animals''
# Grotius – ''De jure belli ac pacis''/''The Law of War and Peace''
# Thomas Hobbes – ''Leviathan''; ''Elements of Philosophy''
# René Descartes – ''Rules for the Direction of the Mind''; ''Discourse on the Method''; ''La Géométrie''/''Geometry''; ''Meditations on First Philosophy''; ''Principles of Philosophy''; ''The Passions of the Soul''
# Pierre Corneille|Corneille – Tragedies (esp. ''The Cid, Cinna'')
# John Milton – Works (esp. the minor poems; ''Areopagitica''; ''Paradise Lost''; ''Samson Agonistes'')
# Molière – Comedies (esp. ''The Miser''; ''The School for Wives''; ''The Misanthrope''; ''Le Médecin malgré lui''/''The Doctor in Spite of Himself''; ''Tartuffe''; ''Le Bourgeois gentilhomme''/''The Tradesman Turned Gentleman''; ''The Imaginary Invalid''; Les Précieuses ridicules|''The Affected Ladies'')
# Blaise Pascal – ''Lettres provinciales''/''The Provincial Letters''; ''Pensées''; Scientific Treatises
# John Bunyan - ''The Pilgrim's Progress''
# Robert Boyle|Boyle – ''The Sceptical Chymist''
# Christiaan Huygens – ''Treatise on Light''
# Benedict de Spinoza – ''Political Treatises''; ''Ethics''
# John Locke – ''A Letter Concerning Toleration''; ''Two Treatises of Government''/''Of Civil Government''; ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding''; ''Some Thoughts Concerning Education''
# Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies (esp. ''Andromaque''/''Andromache''; ''Phèdre''/''Phaedra''; ''Athalie'' (''Athaliah''))
# Isaac Newton – ''Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica''/''Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy''; ''Opticks''
# Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – ''Discourse on Metaphysics''; ''New Essays on Human Understanding''; ''Monadology''
# Daniel Defoe – ''Robinson Crusoe''; ''Moll Flanders''
# Jonathan Swift – ''The Battle of the Books''; ''A Tale of a Tub''; ''A Journal to Stella''; ''Gulliver's Travels''; ''A Modest Proposal''
# William Congreve – ''The Way of the World''
# George Berkeley – ''A New Theory of Vision''; ''A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge''
# Alexander Pope – ''An Essay on Criticism''; ''The Rape of the Lock''; ''An Essay on Man''
# Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – ''Persian Letters''; ''The Spirit of the Laws''
# Voltaire – ''Letters on the English''; ''Candide''; ''Dictionnaire philosophique''/''Philosophical Dictionary''
# Henry Fielding – ''Joseph Andrews''; ''The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling''
# Samuel Johnson – ''The Vanity of Human Wishes''; ''A Dictionary of the English Language''; The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia|''Rasselas''; ''Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets''
# David Hume – ''A Treatise of Human Nature''; ''Essays Moral and Political''; ''An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding''; ''History of England''
# Jean-Jacques Rousseau – ''Discourse on Inequality''; ''On Political Economy''; ''Emile: or, On Education''; ''The Social Contract''; ''Confessions''
# Laurence Sterne – ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman''; ''A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy''
# Adam Smith – ''The Theory of Moral Sentiments''; ''The Wealth of Nations''
# William Blackstone – ''Commentaries on the Laws of England''
# Immanuel Kant – ''Critique of Pure Reason''; ''Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals''; ''Critique of Practical Reason''; ''Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics''; The Science of Right; ''Critique of Judgment''; ''Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch''
# Edward Gibbon – ''The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire''; ''Autobiography''
# James Boswell – ''Journal''; ''The Life of Samuel Johnson''
# Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – ''Traité Élémentaire de Chimie'' (''Elements of Chemistry'')
# Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and United States Declaration of Independence)
# Jeremy Bentham – ''Comment on the Commentaries''; ''Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation''; ''Theory of Fictions''
# Johann Wolfgang Goethe – ''Faust''; ''Dichtung und Wahrheit''/''Poetry and Truth''
# Thomas Robert Malthus – ''An Essay on the Principle of Population''
# John Dalton – ''A New System of Chemical Philosophy''
# Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – ''Analytical Theory of Heat''
# Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – ''The Phenomenology of Spirit''; ''Science of Logic''; ''Elements of the Philosophy of Right''; ''Lectures on the Philosophy of History''
# William Wordsworth – Poems (esp. ''Lyrical Ballads''; Lucy poems; sonnets; ''The Prelude'')
# Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems (esp. ''Kubla Khan''; ''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'' ); ''Biographia Literaria''
# David Ricardo – ''On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation''
# Jane Austen – ''Pride and Prejudice''; ''Emma''
# Carl von Clausewitz – ''On War''
# Stendhal – ''The Red and the Black''; ''The Charterhouse of Parma''; ''On Love''
# François Guizot – ''History of Civilization in France''
# George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron – ''Don Juan''
# Arthur Schopenhauer – ''Studies in Pessimism''
# Michael Faraday – ''The Chemical History of a Candle''; ''Experimental Researches in Electricity''
# Nikolai Lobachevsky – ''Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels''
# Charles Lyell – ''Principles of Geology''
# Auguste Comte – ''The Positive Philosophy''
# Honoré Balzac – Works (esp. ''Le Père Goriot''; ''Le Cousin Pons''; ''Eugénie Grandet''; ''Cousin Bette''; ''César Birotteau'')
# Ralph Waldo Emerson – ''Representative Men''; ''Essays''; Journal
# Victor Hugo - ''Les Misérables''
# Nathaniel Hawthorne – ''The Scarlet Letter''
# Alexis de Tocqueville – ''Democracy in America''
# John Stuart Mill – ''A System of Logic''; ''Principles of Political Economy''; ''On Liberty''; ''Considerations on Representative Government''; ''Utilitarianism''; ''The Subjection of Women''; ''Autobiography''
# Charles Darwin – ''On the Origin of Species''; ''The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex''; ''The Autobiography of Charles Darwin''
# William Makepeace Thackeray – Works (esp. ''Vanity Fair''; ''The History of Henry Esmond''; ''The Virginians''; ''Pendennis'')
# Charles Dickens – Works (esp. ''Pickwick Papers''; ''Our Mutual Friend''; ''David Copperfield''; ''Dombey and Son''; ''Oliver Twist''; ''A Tale of Two Cities''; ''Hard Times'')
# Claude Bernard – ''Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine''
# George Boole – ''The Laws of Thought''
# Henry David Thoreau – ''Civil Disobedience''; ''Walden''
# Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – ''Das Kapital'' (''Capital''); ''The Communist Manifesto''
# George Eliot – ''Adam Bede''; ''Middlemarch''
# Herman Melville – ''Typee''; ''Moby-Dick''; ''Billy Budd''
# Fyodor Dostoyevsky – ''Crime and Punishment''; ''The Idiot''; ''The Brothers Karamazov''
# Gustave Flaubert – ''Madame Bovary''; ''Three Tales''/''Three Stories''
# Henry Thomas Buckle – ''A History of Civilization in England''
# Francis Galton – ''Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development''
# Bernhard Riemann – ''The Hypotheses of Geometry''
# Henrik Ibsen – Plays (esp. ''Peer Gynt''; ''Brand''; ''Hedda Gabler''; ''Emperor and Galilean''; ''A Doll's House''; ''The Wild Duck''; ''The Master Builder'')
# Leo Tolstoy – ''War and Peace''; ''Anna Karenina''; "What Is Art?"; ''Twenty-Three Tales''
# Richard Dedekind – ''Theory of Numbers''
# Wilhelm Wundt – ''Physiological Psychology''; ''Outline of Psychology''
# Mark Twain – ''The Innocents Abroad''; ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn''; ''A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court''; ''The Mysterious Stranger''
# Henry Adams – ''History of the United States''; ''Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres''; ''The Education of Henry Adams''; ''Degradation of Democratic Dogma''
# Charles Sanders Peirce – ''Chance, Love, and Logic''; ''Collected Papers''
# William Graham Sumner|William Sumner – ''Folkways''
# Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. – ''The Common Law''; ''Collected Legal Papers''
# William James – ''The Principles of Psychology''; ''The Varieties of Religious Experience''; ''Pragmatism''; ''A Pluralistic Universe''; ''Essays in Radical Empiricism''
# Henry James – ''The American''; ''The Ambassadors''
# Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – ''Thus Spoke Zarathustra''; ''Beyond Good and Evil''; ''On the Genealogy of Morality''; ''The Will to Power''; ''Twilight of the Idols''; ''The Antichrist''
# Georg Cantor – ''Transfinite Numbers''
# Jules Henri Poincaré – ''Science and Hypothesis''; ''Science and Method''; ''The Foundations of Science''
# Sigmund Freud – ''The Interpretation of Dreams''; ''Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality''; ''Introduction to Psychoanalysis''; ''Beyond the Pleasure Principle''; ''Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego''; ''The Ego and the Id''; ''Civilization and Its Discontents''; ''New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis''
# George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
# Max Planck – ''Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory''; ''Where Is Science Going?''; ''Scientific Autobiography''
# Henri Bergson – ''Time and Free Will''; ''Matter and Memory''; ''Creative Evolution''; ''The Two Sources of Morality and Religion''
# John Dewey – ''How We Think''; ''Democracy and Education''; ''Experience and Nature''; ''The Quest for Certainty''; ''Logic – The Theory of Inquiry''
# Alfred North Whitehead – ''A Treatise on Universal Algebra''; ''An Introduction to Mathematics''; ''Science and the Modern World''; ''Process and Reality''; ''The Aims of Education and Other Essays''; ''Adventures of Ideas''
# George Santayana – ''The Life of Reason''; ''Scepticism and Animal Faith''; ''The Realms of Being'' (which discusses the Realms of Essence, Matter and Truth); ''Persons and Places''
# Vladimir Lenin – ''Imperialism''; ''The State and Revolution''
# Marcel Proust – ''In Search of Lost Time'' (formerly translated as ''Remembrance of Things Past'')
# Bertrand Russell – ''Principles of Mathematics''; ''The Problems of Philosophy''; ''Principia Mathematica''; ''The Analysis of Mind''; ''An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth''; ''Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits''
# Thomas Mann – ''The Magic Mountain''; ''Joseph and His Brothers''
# Albert Einstein – ''The Theory of Relativity''; ''Sidelights on Relativity''; ''The Meaning of Relativity''; ''On the Method of Theoretical Physics''; ''The Evolution of Physics''
# James Joyce – "The Dead" in ''Dubliners''; ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man''; ''Ulysses''
# Jacques Maritain – ''Art and Scholasticism''; ''The Degrees of Knowledge''; ''Freedom and the Modern World''; ''A Preface to Metaphysics''; ''The Rights of Man and Natural Law''; ''True Humanism''
# Franz Kafka – ''The Trial''; ''The Castle''
# Arnold J. Toynbee – ''A Study of History''; ''Civilization on Trial''
# Jean-Paul Sartre – ''Nausea''; ''No Exit''; ''Being and Nothingness''
# Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – ''The First Circle''; ''Cancer Ward''

The original edition of ''How to Read a Book'' contained a separate "contemporary list" because "Here one's judgment must be tentative". All but the following authors were incorporated into the single list of the revised edition:
# Ivan Pavlov – ''Conditioned Reflexes''
# Thorstein Veblen – ''The Theory of the Leisure Class''; ''The Higher Learning in America''; ''The Place of Science in Modern Civilization''; ''Vested Interests and the State of Industrial Arts''; ''Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times''
# Franz Boas – ''The Mind of Primitive Man''; ''Anthropology and Modern Life''
# Leon Trotsky – ''The History of the Russian Revolution''

[[Category:Books]]

Great books - Revision history

Christoph: Created page with "'''Great books''' are written publications that have been accepted by modern day scholars as the essential foundation of literature in Western culture. The Merriam-Webster Dic..."