Great Books of the Western World
Works
Considered part of the collection, though not printed:
  • Holy Bible (it was assumed that nearly all households already have one)
Volumes in the collection (1st edition):
  • Vol. 1 - The Great Conversation
  • Vol. 2 - Syntopicon I
  • Vol. 3 - Syntopicon II
  • Vol. 4 - Homer
  • Vol. 5 - Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes
  • Vol. 6 - Herodotus, Thucydides
  • Vol. 7 - Plato
  • Vols. 8-9 - Aristotle
  • Vol. 10 - Hippocrates, Galen
  • Vol. 11 - Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius of Perga, Nicomachus of Gerasa
  • Vol. 12 - Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius
  • Vol. 13 - Virgil
  • Vol. 14 - Plutarch
  • Vol. 15 - P. Cornelius Tacitus
  • Vol. 16 - Ptolemy, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler
  • Vol. 17 - Plotinus
  • Vol. 18 - Augustine of Hippo
  • Vols. 19-20 - Thomas Aquinas
  • Vol. 21 - Dante Alighieri
  • Vol. 22 - Geoffrey Chaucer
  • Vol. 23 - Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes
  • Vol. 24 - François Rabelais
  • Vol. 25 - Michel de Montaigne
  • Vols. 26-27 - William Shakespeare
  • Vol. 28 - William Gilbert, Galileo Galilei, William Harvey
  • Vol. 29 - Miguel de Cervantes
  • Vol. 30 - Sir Francis Bacon
  • Vol. 31 - René Descartes, Benedict de Spinoza
  • Vol. 32 - John Milton
  • Vol. 33 - Blaise Pascal
  • Vol. 34 - Sir Isaac Newton, Christian Huygens
  • Vol. 35 - John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume
  • Vol. 36 - Jonathan Swift, Laurence Sterne
  • Vol. 37 - Henry Fielding
  • Vol. 38 - Baron de Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • Vol. 39 - Adam Smith
Volumes in the collection (1st edition, cont.):
  • Vols. 40-41 - Edward Gibbon
  • Vol. 42 - Immanuel Kant
  • Vol. 43 - American State Papers, The Federalist, John Stuart Mill
  • Vol. 44 - James Boswell
  • Vol. 45 - Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, Michael Faraday
  • Vol. 46 - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
  • Vol. 47 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • Vol. 48 - Herman Melville
  • Vol. 49 - Charles Darwin
  • Vol. 50 - Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
  • Vol. 51 - Count Leo Tolstoy
  • Vol. 52 - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
  • Vol. 53 - William James
  • Vol. 54 - Sigmund Freud
Added in the second edition:
  • Vol. 20 - John Calvin
  • Vol. 23 - Desiderius Erasmus
  • Vol. 31 - Molière, Jean-Baptiste Racine
  • Vol. 34 - Voltaire, Denis Diderot
  • Vol. 43 - Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Vol. 44 - Alexis de Tocqueville
  • Vol. 45 - Honoré de Balzac
  • Vol. 46 - Jane Austen, George Eliot
  • Vol. 47 - Charles Dickens
  • Vol. 48 - Mark Twain
  • Vol. 52 - Henrik Ibsen
  • Vol. 55 - William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Karl Barth
  • Vol. 56 - Henri Poincaré, Max Planck, Alfred North Whitehead, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Niels Bohr, G. H. Hardy, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Theodosius Dobzhansky, C. H. Waddington
  • Vol. 57 - Thorstein Veblen, R. H. Tawney, John Maynard Keynes
  • Vol. 58 - Sir James George Frazer, Max Weber, Johan Huizinga, Claude Lévi-Strauss
  • Vol. 59 - Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekhov, Luigi Pirandello, Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, James Joyce
  • Vol. 60 - Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Eugene O'Neill, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Bertolt Brecht, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett
[< 1700]  [≥ 1700] 
S
H
O
W

I
N
D
E
X
Links to other Great Books and literature-related sites Feedback, suggestions, criticisms - what did you think of the site? Latest updates to the site Help with site symbols and navigation