 |
THE GREAT BOOKS FOUNDATION'S
SHAKESPEARE GOETHE
|
 |
|
|
THE GREAT BOOKS FOUNDATION'S
SHAKESPEARE GOETHE
|
|
These books and writings about our civilization are recommended reading
by The Great Books Reading Foundation.
The list is derived from The New York Public Library Desk Reference,
3rd ed., 1998.
| Henry Adams | The Education of Henry Adams. 1907 |
| Aeschylus | Agamemnon. 458 B.C. |
| Aristotle | Politics. "On Happiness" (excerpt from Nicomachean Ethics). "On Tragedy" 4th Century B.C. |
| Saint Augustine | The City of God. 413-26 |
| Bible | Genesis. Exodus. Job. Ecclesiastes. The Gospel of Mark |
| Edmund Burke | Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790 |
| Geoffrey Chaucer | The Canterbury Tales. c. 1387 |
| Anton Chekhov | Rothschild's Fiddle. 1894. Uncle Vanya. 1896 |
| Karl von Clausewitz | "What Is War?" (excerpt from On War). 1833 |
| Joseph Conrad | "Heart of Darkness" (story in Typhoon and Youth). 1902 |
| Alighieri Dante | "The Inferno" (canticle in the Divine Comedy) c. 1310-1320 |
| Charles Darwin | "The Moral Sense of Man and The Lower Animals" (excerpts from On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man(1871) |
| John Dewey | "The Virtues" (excerpt from Ethics) 1908. "Habits and Will" (excerpt from Human Nature and Conduct) 1922 |
| Denis Diderot | Rameau's Nephew. 1805 |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | Notes from the Underground. 1864 |
| Euripides | Medea. Iphigenia at Aulis. 5th century B.C. |
| Gustave Flaubert | "A Simple Heart" (short story) c. 1850 |
| Sigmund Freud | "On Dreams" (excerpt from The Interpretation of Dreams) 1900 |
| Edward Gibbon | The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1776, 1781, 1787-88 |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Faust, Part I. 1808 |
| Nikolai Gogol | "The Overcoat" (first part of novel Dead Souls) 1842 |
| Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison | The Federalist. 1787-88 |
| Herodotus | "The Persian War" (excerpt from History) 5th century B.C. |
| Thomas Hobbes | Origin of Government. c. 1690 |
| Homer | The Iliad. 8th or 7th century B.C. |
| David Hume | "Of Personal Identity" (excerpt from A Treatise on Human Nature) 1739-40. "Of Justice and Injustice" (excerpt from Essays, Moral and Political) 1739-40 |
| Henry James | The Beast in the Jungle. 1903 |
| Franz Kafka | The Metamorphosis. 1915 |
| Immanuel Kant | Conscience. c. 1781. "First Principles of Morals" (excerpt from Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Ethics). 1785 |
| Soren Kierkegaard | "The Knight of Faith" (excerpt from Fear and Trembling). 1843 |
| John Locke | "Of Civil Government" (excerpt from the Second of his Two Treatises of Government). 1690 |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | The Prince. 1513 |
| Maimonides | "On Evil" (excerpt from Guide for the Perplexed) 12th century |
| Karl Marx | "Alienated Labour" (excerpt from Das Kapital). 1867 |
| Herman Melville | Billy Budd, Sailor. 1924 |
| John Stuart Mill | On Liberty. 1859 Utilitarianism. 1863 |
| Moliere | The Misanthrope. 1666 |
| Michel Montaigne | "Of Experience" 1578 (Book III, Chapter 13 of Essays. |
| Baron de Montesquieu | "Principles of Government" (excerpt from The Spirit of the Laws) 1748 |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1883-92 |
| Plato | The Republic. Symposium. The Crito. The Apology. 4th century B.C. |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | The Social Contract. 1762 |
| Arthur Schopenhauer | "The Indestructability of Our Inner Nature" (excerpt from The World as Will and Representation) 1818 |
| William Shakespeare | Hamlet. 1600-01. Othello. 1604. King Lear. 1606. Anthony and Cleopatra. 1607-08. The Tempest. 1611 |
| George Bernard Shaw | Caesar and Cleopatra. 1899 |
| Georg Simmel | "Individual Freedom" (excerpt from The Philosophy of Money) 1900 |
| Adam Smith | Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776 |
| Sophocles | Antigone. Oedipus the King. 5th century B.C. |
| Jonathan Swift | Gulliver's Travels. 1726 |
| Henry David Thoreau | Civil Disobedience. 1849 |
| Thuycidides | History of the Peloponnesian War. 5th century B.C. |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | "The Power of the Majority" (excerpt from Democracy in America). 1835, 1840 |
| Leo Tolstoy | The Death of Ivan Ilych. 1886 |
| Max Weber | The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1920 |
| HOME |