Great Books Foundation Faculty Reading Lists

List A:

Genesis, chs. 1-3 ( Bible)

Sophocles, Antigone

Aeschylus, The Eumenides

W.C. Williams, "Spring and All"

T.S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi"

Milton, Paradise Lost, XII, 466-end

Wordsworth, The Prelude, XI, 105-122

Jean de Crevecoeur, "The Making of Americans"

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

John Stuart Mill, "Childhood and Youth" ( chs. 1-3 of Autobiography)

Ivan Turgenev, "First Love"

D.H. Lawrence, "The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

List B:

Sophocles, Antigone

Plato, Republic, Bks. I-V

Aristotle, Politics, Bk. I

Plutarch, "Lycurgus", (from Lives)

Milton, Samson Agonistes

Shakespeare, King Lear

Machiavelli, The Prince

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

William James, "Habit" (from Psychology)

Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

List C:

Plato, Republic, Books I-II

Sophocles, Antigone

Aristotle, Ethics, Book IV, 1-3

Virgil, Aeneid, Book IV (or Books I-IV)

Machiavelli, The Prince

George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara

Mark Twain, "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg"

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

D.H. Lawrence, "The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail"

List D:

Ecclesiastes (from the Bible)

Augustine, Confessions, Book XI

Shakespeare, Hamlet

Shakespeare, King Lear

W.B. Yeats, "Sailing to Byzantium"

Thomas Hardy, "Convergence of the Twain"

Louise Bogan, "Medusa"

Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"

Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

Sir Charles Lyell, "Geological Evolution" (Vol. III, ch. 1, Principles of Geology) with Loren Eisley, "On Time" (the first essay in The Immense Journey)

D.H. Lawrence, "The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes the Memorious" and "The Garden of Forking Paths" (from Labyrinthes)

List E:

Plato, Symposium

Aristotle, Ethics, Book VIII

Virgil, Aeneid, Book IV (or Books I-IV)

Chaucer, "Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale" (also relevant part of General Prologue, lines 334-76)

Shakespeare, King Lear

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Walt Whitman, "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed"

Ivan Turgenev, "First Love"

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God