The L.A. Time's List

Mortimer J. Adler’s Additions

 Twentieth-Century:

Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics

Willa Cather, A Lost Lady

Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya

Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory

William Faulkner, A Rose For Emily

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra

Henri Poincare, Science and Hypothesis

Claude Levi-Strauss, selections from Structural Anthropology

Marcel Proust, Swann in Love

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Max Weber, Essays in Sociology

Earlier Centuries:

Jane Austen, Emma

Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Erasmus, Praise of Folly

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House

Moliere, The Miser

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Voltaire, Candide

Henry Lewis:

W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Woke Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman

Jane Tompkins:

Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage

George Lucas, Star Wars

Alice Miller, For Your Own Good

Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind

Steven Spielberg, ET

E.D. Hirsch:

The Bible

Shakespeare, the tragedies

Martin Luther King Jr., I Have A Dream speech