1001
Great Books
Timothy H. Wilson
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This is a list of the Great Books of the Western Canon. These are the books that one should endeavor to read at least once in one's lifetime. Given the length of the list, it would be impossible to read the books several times or to examine contextual material for each one, as I intend to do for the list of the 101 Greatest Books. In fact, by making the list 1001 titles in length, I am intentionally alluding to an activity that could go on indefinitely, just as the "One Thousand and One Nights" are tales told in an effort to indefinitely postpone death. However, while the list is intentionally long, it is still possible to try to read each of these books in one's lifetime.
In addition to the extensive list below of the 1001 Great Books, I also have two shorter lists:
A video where I discuss the Top 10 Greatest Books of All Time; and
A list of 101 Greatest Books of the Western Canon
The list of 1001 Great Books in an Excel table, with a pivot dashboard allowing one to "slice and dice" the data by: genre, epoch, country of origin of author etc.
About the List
About the List
Periods
Periods
The Third Wave of Modernity (primarily the 20th Century) is represented by the most titles on this list. (See the Modern Authors page for a brief description of the "three waves of modernity"). By contrast, the Medieval period is represented by only 8% of the titles on this list.
In doing so, I in no way intend to diminish the Middle Ages. In fact, my list has a rather robust representation of both the medieval and ancient periods compared to other such lists of "great books". The fact the list contains more recent titles is a function of the volume of publishing in the modern era, not of the qualitative superiority of our age in relation to the ancient and medieval periods.
Original Language
Original Language
The list contains texts with 13 different original languages of publication; among these:
40% of the titles are English
17% of the titles are Greek
15% of the titles are German
9% of the titles are Latin
7% of the titles are French
6% of the titles are Hebrew
Genre
Genre
In thinking about genre, I think about philosophy in the broadest sense as the mode of inquiring into the nature of things. Philosophy is in tension, in this way, with both the tradition of "Revelation" or religious thinking, as well as with the "Poetry", or literature more broadly.
Being such a broad characterization, I've categorized as "philosophy" texts that most would consider as the foundational texts of the natural and social sciences. For this reason, philosophy is represented with the most texts on this list (409). Literature has been divided into Poetry, Fiction and Drama. If they had been combined, "Literature" would have been the largest generic category with 444 titles.
Finally, Religion and History have 136 and 12 titles respectively on this list.
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