101

Greatest Books

Timothy H. Wilson

About this List

I have selected these works as the 101 Greatest Books of the great books. They merit several close readings and the examination of contextual material and other interpretations of the works. For this reason, one could spend the rest of one's life just reading this short list of books.

The list is organized chronologically by birth of the author. In some cases, in order to keep certain schools of thought or poetry together, I have deviated from this rule slightly. The list is divided into the three periods often used to delineate the history of ideas: Ancient, Medieval and Modern. I follow Leo Strauss in further sub-dividing the Modern period into "Three Waves of Modernity".

In addition to the list below of the 101 Greatest Books, I also have:

A video where I discuss the Top 10 Greatest Books of All Time; and
A more extensive list of 1001 Great Books of the Western Canon -- this list is provided in an excel pivot table that can be downloaded, for "slicing and dicing" the data by language, genre, time period etc.

Ancient (2000 BCE - 500 CE)

Anonymous, The Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 18th Century BCE)
Homer, The Iliad (760-710 BCE) 🖥️ (Video)
----, The Odyssey (760-710 BCE) 🖥️ (Video)
The Hebrew Bible, Genesis (10th - 2nd Century BCE)
----, Exodus (550 BCE)
----, Job (350 BCE)
----, Psalms (350 BCE)
----, Isaiah (750 BCE)
----, Amos (750 BCE)
Heraclitus (535 - 475 BCE), Fragments
Aeschylus (525-456 BCE), Agamemnon (458 BCE)
----, Eumenides (458 BCE)
Sophocles (496-406 BCE), Oedipus Rex (429 BCE)
----, Antigone (441 BCE)
Euripides (480-406 BCE), Medea (431 BCE)
----, The Bacchae (405 BCE)
Thucydides (460-400 BCE), The History of the Peloponnesian War (404 BCE)
Aristophanes (450-386 BCE), The Clouds (423 BCE)
Plato (427-347 BCE), The Apology of Socrates
----, Phaedo
----, Symposium
----, The Republic
----, Phaedrus
Aristotle (384-322 BCE), Nicomachean Ethics
----, Poetics
----, Politics
----, On the Soul
Lucretius (99-55 BCE), On the Nature of Things
Cicero (106-43 BCE), The Republic (51 BCE)
Virgil (70-19 BCE), The Aeneid (29-19 BCE) 🖥️ (Video)
Epictetus (50-135 CE), Discourses
The New Testament, The Gospel of Matthew (50-100 CE)
----, Epistle to the Romans
----, First Epistle to the Corinthians
----, Epistle to the Galatians

Medieval (500 - 1500)

36. Augustine of Hippo, (354-430), On the Freedom of the Will (387-95)

37. ----, Confessions (397-400)

38. ----, On the Trinity (415)

39. ----, On Christian Doctrine (426)

40. Boethius (477-524), The Consolation of Philosophy (524)

41. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), On Truth (1259)

42. ----, Summa Theologica (1265-74)

43. ----, Political Writings (on Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics) (1272)

44. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), La Vita Nuova (1294)

45. ----, The Divine Comedy (1308-20)

46. Francesco Petrarch (1304-74), Rime Sparse (1374)

47. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-75), Decameron (1348-53)

48. Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400), The Canterbury Tales (1400)

49. ----, Troilus and Creseyde (1400)

First Wave of Modernity (1500 - 1780)

50. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), The Prince (1513)

51. Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Utopia (1516) 🖥️ (Video)

52. Francois Rabelais (1483-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-64)

53. Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), Essays (1570-92)

54. Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), Don Quixote (1605/16)

55. William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Henry IV, Part 1 (1596-97)

56. ----, Hamlet (1600-01)

57. ----, Othello (1604)

58. ----, King Lear (1605-06)

59. ----, Macbeth (1606)

60. ----, The Sonnets (1609) 🖥️ (Video)

61. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Leviathan (1651)

62. Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Discourse on Method (1637)

63. John Milton (1608-74), Paradise Lost (1667/74) 🖥️ (Video)

64. ----, Paradise Regained (1671)

65. Moliere (1622-73), Tartuffe (1664)

66. Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), Ethics (1677)

67. John Locke (1632-1704), Second Treatise of Government (1689)

68. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), Robinson Crusoe (1719) 🖥️ (Video)

69. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Gulliver's Travels (1726)

70. Alexander Pope (1688-1744), An Essay on Man (1732-34)

71. Voltaire (1698-1778), Candide (1759)

72. David Hume (1711-76), Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

73. Hamilton, Madison and Jay, Federalist Papers (1787-88)

Second Wave of Modernity (1780-1880)

74. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-88), Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755)

75. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), Critique of Pure Reason (1781)

76. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Faust (1808/32)

77. William Blake (1757-1827), Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93)

78. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

79. Jane Austen (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice (1813)

80. John Stuart Mill (1806-73), On Liberty (1859)

81. Charles Darwin (1809-82), Origin of the Species (1859)

82. Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55), Fear and Trembling (1843)

83. Emily Bronte (1818-47), Wuthering Heights (1847)

84. Karl Marx (1818-83), The German Ideology (1845)

85. George Eliot (1819-80), Middlemarch (1871-72)

86. Walt Whitman (1819-92), Leaves of Grass (1855)

87. Herman Melville (1819-91), Moby Dick (1851)

88. Gustave Flaubert (1821-80), Madame Bovary (1856)

89. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-81), Crime and Punishment (1866)

90. ----, Brothers Karamozov (1880)

91. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Anna Karenina (1877)

Third Wave of Modernity (1880-Present)

92. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), On the Uses and Disadvantages of History (1874)

93. ----, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85)

94. Sigmund Freud (1859-1939), The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)

95. Marcel Proust (1871-1922), Swann's Way (1913)

96. Franz Kafka (1883-1924), Metamorphosis (1915)

97. James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

98. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Mrs Dalloway (1925) 🖥️ (Video)

99. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), The Waste Land (1922)

100. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Being and Time (1927)

101. William Faulkner (1897-1962), As I Lay Dying (1930)

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