Western Culture

Literature

 * Selected list of the Great Books in chronological order. (Related Western canon)


 * 1) Homer – Iliad; Odyssey
 * 2) The Old Testament
 * 3) Aeschylus – Tragedies
 * 4) Sophocles – Tragedies
 * 5) Herodotus – Histories
 * 6) Euripides – Tragedies
 * 7) Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
 * 8) Hippocrates – Medical Writings
 * 9) Aristophanes – Comedies
 * 10) Plato – Dialogues
 * 11) Aristotle – Works
 * 12) Epicurus – "Letter to Herodotus"; "Letter to Menoecus"
 * 13) Euclid – Elements
 * 14) Archimedes – Works
 * 15) Apollonius – Conics
 * 16) Cicero – Works (esp. Orations; On Friendship; On Old Age; Republic; Laws; Tusculan Disputations; Offices)
 * 17) Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
 * 18) Virgil – Works (esp. Aeneid)
 * 19) Horace – Works (esp. Odes and Epodes; The Art of Poetry)
 * 20) Livy – History of Rome
 * 21) Ovid – Works (esp. Metamorphoses)
 * 22) Quintilian – Institutes of Oratory
 * 23) Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
 * 24) Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania; Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogue on Oratory)
 * 25) Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
 * 26) Epictetus – Discourses; Enchiridion
 * 27) Ptolemy – Almagest
 * 28) 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)
 * 29) Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
 * 30) Galen – On the Natural Faculties
 * 31) The New Testament
 * 32) Plotinus – The Enneads
 * 33) St. Augustine – "On the Teacher"; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
 * 34) The Volsungs Saga or Nibelungenlied
 * 35) The Song of Roland
 * 36) The Saga of Burnt Njál
 * 37) Maimonides – The Guide for the Perplexed
 * 38) St. Thomas Aquinas – Of Being and Essence; Summa Contra Gentiles; Of the Governance of Rulers; Summa Theologica
 * 39) Dante Alighieri – The New Life (La Vita Nuova); "On Monarchy"; Divine Comedy
 * 40) Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron
 * 41) Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
 * 42) Thomas à Kempis – The Imitation of Christ
 * 43) Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
 * 44) Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
 * 45) Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly; Colloquies
 * 46) Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
 * 47) Thomas More – Utopia
 * 48) Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
 * 49) François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
 * 50) John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
 * 51) Michel de Montaigne – Essays
 * 52) William Gilbert – On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
 * 53) Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
 * 54) Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
 * 55) Francis Bacon – Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis
 * 56) William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
 * 57) Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
 * 58) Johannes Kepler – The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
 * 59) William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; Generation of Animals
 * 60) Grotius – The Law of War and Peace
 * 61) Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan; Elements of Philosophy
 * 62) René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul
 * 63) Corneille – Tragedies (esp. The Cid, Cinna)
 * 64) John Milton – Works (esp. the minor poems; Areopagitica; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes)
 * 65) Molière – Comedies (esp. The Miser; The School for Wives; The Misanthrope; The Doctor in Spite of Himself; Tartuffe; The Tradesman Turned Gentleman; The Imaginary Invalid; The Affected Ladies)
 * 66) Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
 * 67) John Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress
 * 68) Boyle – The Sceptical Chymist
 * 69) Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
 * 70) Benedict de Spinoza – Political Treatises; Ethics
 * 71) John Locke – A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
 * 72) Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies (esp. Andromache; Phaedra; Athalie (Athaliah))
 * 73) Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
 * 74) Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays on Human Understanding; Monadology
 * 75) Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
 * 76) Jonathan Swift – The Battle of the Books; A Tale of a Tub; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
 * 77) William Congreve – The Way of the World
 * 78) George Berkeley – A New Theory of Vision; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
 * 79) Alexander Pope – An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man
 * 80) Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; The Spirit of the Laws
 * 81) Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
 * 82) Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
 * 83) Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; Lives of the Poets
 * 84) David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; History of England
 * 85) Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality; On Political Economy; Emile: or, On Education; The Social Contract; Confessions
 * 86) Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
 * 87) Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
 * 88) William Blackstone – Commentaries on the Laws of England
 * 89) 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
 * 90) Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
 * 91) James Boswell – Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
 * 92) Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
 * 93) Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and United States Declaration of Independence)
 * 94) Jeremy Bentham – Comment on the Commentaries; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
 * 95) Johann Wolfgang Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
 * 96) Thomas Robert Malthus – An Essay on the Principle of Population
 * 97) John Dalton – A New System of Chemical Philosophy
 * 98) Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
 * 99) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – The Phenomenology of Spirit; Science of Logic; Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
 * 100) William Wordsworth – Poems (esp. Lyrical Ballads; Lucy poems; sonnets; The Prelude)
 * 101) Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems (esp. Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ); Biographia Literaria
 * 102) David Ricardo – On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
 * 103) Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
 * 104) Carl von Clausewitz – On War
 * 105) Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
 * 106) François Guizot – History of Civilization in France
 * 107) Lord Byron – Don Juan
 * 108) Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
 * 109) Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
 * 110) Nikolai Lobachevsky – Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels
 * 111) Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
 * 112) Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
 * 113) Honoré Balzac – Works (esp. Le Père Goriot; Le Cousin Pons; Eugénie Grandet; Cousin Bette; César Birotteau)
 * 114) Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
 * 115) Victor Hugo - Les Misérables
 * 116) Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
 * 117) Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
 * 118) John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; Principles of Political Economy; On Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
 * 119) Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
 * 120) William Makepeace Thackeray – Works (esp. Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond; The Virginians; Pendennis)
 * 121) Charles Dickens – Works (esp. Pickwick Papers; Our Mutual Friend; David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Hard Times)
 * 122) Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
 * 123) George Boole – The Laws of Thought
 * 124) Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
 * 125) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Das Kapital (Capital); The Communist Manifesto
 * 126) George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
 * 127) Herman Melville – Typee; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
 * 128) Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
 * 129) Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
 * 130) Henry Thomas Buckle – A History of Civilization in England
 * 131) Francis Galton – Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development
 * 132) Bernhard Riemann – The Hypotheses of Geometry
 * 133) Henrik Ibsen – Plays (esp. Peer Gynt; Brand; Hedda Gabler; Emperor and Galilean; A Doll's House; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder)
 * 134) Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; "What Is Art?"; Twenty-Three Tales
 * 135) Richard Dedekind – Theory of Numbers
 * 136) Wilhelm Wundt – Physiological Psychology; Outline of Psychology
 * 137) Mark Twain – The Innocents Abroad; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; The Mysterious Stranger
 * 138) Henry Adams – History of the United States; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams; Degradation of Democratic Dogma
 * 139) Charles Peirce – Chance, Love, and Logic; Collected Papers
 * 140) William Sumner – Folkways
 * 141) Oliver Wendell Holmes – The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers
 * 142) William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; A Pluralistic Universe; Essays in Radical Empiricism
 * 143) Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
 * 144) 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
 * 145) Georg Cantor – Transfinite Numbers
 * 146) Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method; The Foundations of Science
 * 147) 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
 * 148) George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
 * 149) Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
 * 150) Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
 * 151) John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; The Quest for Certainty; Logic – The Theory of Inquiry
 * 152) 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
 * 153) 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
 * 154) Vladimir Lenin – Imperialism; The State and Revolution
 * 155) Marcel Proust –  In Search of Lost Time (formerly translated as Remembrance of Things Past)
 * 156) 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
 * 157) Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
 * 158) Albert Einstein – The Theory of Relativity; Sidelights on Relativity; The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
 * 159) James Joyce – "The Dead" in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
 * 160) 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
 * 161) Franz Kafka – The Trial; The Castle
 * 162) Arnold J. Toynbee – A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
 * 163) Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
 * 164) Ivan Pavlov – Conditioned Reflexes
 * 165) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle; Cancer Ward