Let’s face it: we all have holes in our education.
In part, this is because we can only fit so much into the years of our formal education.
But the holes in our education are also due to the fact that we no longer have a standard canon of sources that we are expected to study in school.
In the past, this canon served a unifying function among those in the Western world: it gave us a common lens through which to view the world, common terms for discourse, and a means to understand a common past.
Now, however, many are lucky to have any exposure to classical sources beyond selections from the Iliad, a Shakespeare play or two, and Huckleberry Finn. Most books that students read differ from school to school, which leaves people with very few literary experiences that they share in common. (No wonder we’re becoming more divided as a country!)
Faced with this situation, what are we to do? Well, if you want to learn the classical sources, you’re most likely going to have to do a lot on your own. You simply cannot depend upon today’s education system to put these books in front of you. You’re going to have to self-educate.
Fortunately, there’s a book to help you with this! It’s called The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, by Susan Wise Bauer. In Part I, she provides advice on how to more maturely study (vs. simply “reading”) classical texts on one’s own. In Part II, she provides a list/program of books (both past and present) that can make one part of the “Great Conversation” that has been taking place for over two thousand years.
Below I have provided her list, in which the books and authors are put in chronological order. There’s plenty to quibble with in it – both in terms of its exclusions and inclusions. However, I think the inspirational point behind the list remains: there’s a human and social value to reading the classics, and tapping into that value requires much in the way of personal sacrifice and effort.
Novel List
- Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
- Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
- Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
- Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
- The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Moby Dick, Herman Melville
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
- Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
- Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
- Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
- Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
- Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
- The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
- The Trial, Franz Kafka
- Native Son, Richard Wright
- The Stranger, Albert Camus
- 1984, George Orwell
- Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
- Seize the Day, Saul Bellow
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
- If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino
- Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
- White Noise, Don Delillo
- Possession, A.S. Byatt
Autobiography List
- The Confessions, Augustine
- The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery Kempe
- Essays, Michel de Montaigne
- The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, Teresa of Avila
- Meditations, Rene Descartes
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, John Bunyan
- The Narrative of Captivity and Restoration, Mary Rowlandson
- Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
- Walden, Henry David Thoreau
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself
- Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
- Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
- Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche
- Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
- An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mohandas Gandhi
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
- The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
- Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C.S. Lewis
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X
- Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton
- The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
- Born Again, Charles W. Colson
- Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Richard Rodriguez
- The Road from Coorain, Jill Ker Conway
- All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Elie Wiesel
History List
- The Histories, Herodotus
- The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
- The Republic, Plato
- Lives, Plutarch
- The City of God, Augustine
- The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede
- The Prince, Niccolò Macchiavelli
- Utopia, Sir Thomas More
- The True End of Civil Government, John Locke
- The History of England, Volume V, David Hume
- The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Common Sense, Thomas Paine
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
- Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
- The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt
- The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
- Queen Victoria, Lytton Strachey
- The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
- The New England Mind, Perry Miller
- The Great Crash 1929, John Kenneth Galbraith
- The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan
- The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
- Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Eugene D. Genovese
- A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman
- All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, James McPherson
- A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
- The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama
Drama List
- Agamemnon, Aeschylus
- Oedipus the King, Sophocles
- Medea, Euripides
- The Birds, Aristophanes
- Poetics, Aristotle
- Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays
- Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe
- Richard III, William Shakespeare
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
- Hamlet, William Shakespeare
- Tartuffe, Molière
- The Way of the World, William Congreve
- She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith
- The School for Scandal, Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen
- The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
- The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
- Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw
- Murder in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot
- Our Town, Thornton Wilder
- Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill
- No Exit, Jean Paul Sartre
- A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
- Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
- Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
- A Man For All Seasons, Robert Bolt
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
- Equus, Peter Shaffer
Poetry List (I’ve mainly included her recommended authors rather than her specific poem recommendations)
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer
- Greek Lyricists
- Odes, Horace
- Beowulf
- Inferno, Dante Alighieri
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
- Sonnets, William Shakespeare
- John Donne
- Psalms, King James Bible
- Paradise Lost, John Milton
- Songs of Innocence and of Experience, William Blake
- William Wordsworth
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- John Keats
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Alfred Lord Tennyson
- Walt Whitman
- Emily Dickinson
- Christina Rossetti
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- William Butler Yeats
- Paul Laurence Dunbar
- Robert Frost
- Carl Sandburg
- William Carlos Williams
- Ezra Pound
- T.S. Eliot
- Langston Hughes
- W.H. Auden
- Philip Larkin
- Allen Ginsberg
- Sylvia Plath
- Mark Strand
- Adrienne Rich
- Seamus Heaney
- Robert Pinsky
- Jane Kenyon
- Rita Dove
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