The Great Books of the Western world are great because they have stood the test of time and are therefore rightfully recognized as classics. The dictionary defines a "classic" as a work, or even an author, of acknowledged excellence and authority. The term "classic" was originally used of Greek and Latin works or authors, but is now applied to authors and works of a like character in any language. Classics stand the test of time because they tend to address universal issues which transcend the culture and times in which they were written, and because they touch a chord in us today. The World's 100 Greatest Books are divided by category and will take you the list. Use the Research Links to learn more about the authors and great works they produced.
Novels, Epics, and Legends
Science and Civilization
Plays
Philosophy
The Iliad, Homer
The Odyssey, Homer
The Aeneid, Virgil
Beowulf, Unknown
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
The Travels of Marco Polo, Marco Polo
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
Don Quixote, Cervantes
Paradise Lost, John Milton
The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel DeFoe
Mall Flanders, Daniel DeFoe
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
Candide, Voltaire
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Tragedy of Faust, Goethe
The Lady of the Lake, Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Red and the Black, Stendahl
The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas
Carmen, Prosper Merimee
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thakeray
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Scarlett Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Camille, Alexandre Duma Fils
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Idylls of the King, Lord Tennyson
Silos Marner, George Eliot
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev
Crime and Punishment, Feodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov, Feodor Dostoyevsky
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Far From the Maddening Crowd, Thomas Hardy
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain
Anna Karenia, Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
Dracula, Bram Stoker
The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
The Call of the Wold, Jack London
Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis
An American Tragedy, Theodore Dresier
The Great Gatesby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
The Republic, Plato
The Prince, Machiavelli
The Social Contract, Jean Jaques Rousseau
The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
The Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
Das Kapital, Karl Marx
The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler
Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus
Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
Othello, William Shakespeare
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
The Tempest, William Shakespeare
Tratuffe, Moliere
Peer Gynt, Henrik Ibsen
A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
Cyranp de Bergerac, Edmond Rosland
The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
Meditations, Rene Descartes
Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant
The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer
Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
How We Think, John Dewey
On-line Enclyclopedia
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Netscape
Reference Encyclopedias History
CRC
Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics
Gutenberg Project - E-Texts by
Title
Gutenberg Project - E-Texts by
Author
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