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100 Great Books of Western Civilization
compiled by Mortimer Addler
(which every educated person should read)

1.Homer – Iliad; Odyssey
2.The Old Testament
3.Aeschylus – Tragedies
4.Sophocles – Tragedies
5.Herodotus – Histories
6.Euripides – Tragedies
7.Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War
8.Hippocrates – Medical Writings
9.Aristophanes – Comedies
10.Plato – Dialogues
11.Aristotle – Works
12.Epicurus – “Letter to Herodotus”; “Letter to Menoecus”
13.Euclid – Elements
14.Archimedes – Works
15.Apollonius – Conics
16.Cicero – Works (esp. Orations; On Friendship; On Old Age; Republic; Laws; Tusculan Disputations; Offices)
17.Lucretius – On the Nature of Things
18.Virgil – Works (esp. Aeneid)
19.Horace – Works (esp. Odes and Epodes; The Art of Poetry)
20.Livy – History of Rome
21.Ovid – Works (esp. Metamorphoses)
22.Quintilian – Institutes of Oratory
23.Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia
24.Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola; Germania; Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogue on Oratory)
25.Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic
26.Epictetus – Discourses; Enchiridion
27.Ptolemy – Almagest
28.Lucian – Works (esp. The Way to Write History; The True History; The Sale of Creeds; Alexander the Oracle Monger; Charon; The Sale of Lives; The Fisherman; Dialogue of the Gods; Dialogues of the Sea-Gods; Dialogues of the Dead)
29.Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
30.Galen – On the Natural Faculties
31.The New Testament
32.Plotinus – The Enneads
33.St. Augustine – “On the Teacher”; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine
34.The Volsungs Saga or Nibelungenlied
35.The Song of Roland
36.The Saga of Burnt Njál
37.Maimonides – The Guide for the Perplexed
38.St. Thomas Aquinas – Of Being and Essence; Summa Contra Gentiles; Of the Governance of Rulers; Summa Theologica
39.Dante Alighieri – The New Life (La Vita Nuova); “On Monarchy”; Divine Comedy
40.Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales
41.Thomas à Kempis – The Imitation of Christ
42.Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks
43.Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
44.Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly; Colloquies
45.Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
46.Thomas More – Utopia
47.Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises
48.François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
49.John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion
50.Michel de Montaigne – Essays
51.William Gilbert – On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
52.Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote
53.Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene
54.Francis Bacon – Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis
55.William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays
56.Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
57.Johannes Kepler – The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
58.William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; Generation of Animals
59.Grotius – The Law of War and Peace
60.Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan; Elements of Philsophy
61.René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul
62.Corneille – Tragedies (esp. The Cid, Cinna)
63.John Milton – Works (esp. the minor poems; Areopagitica; Paradise Lost; Samson Agonistes)
64.Molière – Comedies (esp. The Miser; The School for Wives; The Misanthrope; The Doctor in Spite of Himself; Tartuffe; The Tradesman Turned Gentleman; The Imaginary Invalid; The Affected Ladies)
65.Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensées; Scientific Treatises
66.Boyle – The Sceptical Chemist
67.Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light
68.Benedict de Spinoza – Political Treatises; Ethics
69.John Locke – A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
70.Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies (esp. Andromache; Phaedra; Athalie (Athaliah))
71.Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Opticks
72.Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays on Human Understanding; Monadology
73.Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
74.Jonathan Swift – The Battle of the Books; A Tale of a Tub; A Journal to Stella; Gulliver’s Travels; A Modest Proposal
75.William Congreve – The Way of the World
76.George Berkeley – A New Theory of Vision; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
77.Alexander Pope – An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man
78.Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; The Spirit of the Laws
79.Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
80.Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
81.Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; Lives of the Poets
82.David Hume – A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; History of England
83.Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on Inequality; On Political Economy; Emile; The Social Contract; Confessions
84.Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
85.Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
86.William Blackstone – Commentaries on the Laws of England
87.Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace
88.Edward Gibbon – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
89.James Boswell – Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
90.Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)
91.Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers (together with the Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution and United States Declaration of Independence)
92.Jeremy Bentham – Comment on the Commentaries; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
93.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth
94.Thomas Robert Malthus – An Essay on the Principle of Population
95.John Dalton – A New System of Chemical Philosophy
96.Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat
97.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – The Phenomenology of Spirit; Science of Logic; Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
98.William Wordsworth – Poems (esp. Lyrical Ballads; Lucy poems; sonnets; The Prelude)
99.Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems (esp. Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ); Biographia Literaria
100.David Ricardo – On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
101.Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma
102.Carl von Clausewitz – On War
103.Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
104.François Guizot – History of Civilization in France
105.Lord Byron – Don Juan
106.Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism
107.Michael Faraday – The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity
108.Nikolai Lobachevsky – Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels
109.Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology
110.Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy
111.Honoré de Balzac – Works (esp. Le Père Goriot; Le Cousin Pons; Eugénie Grandet; Cousin Bette; César Birotteau)
112.Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal
113.Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
114.Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America
115.John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; Principles of Political Economy; On Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
116.Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
117.William Makepeace Thackeray – Works (esp. Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond; The Virginians; Pendennis)
118.Charles Dickens – Works (esp. Pickwick Papers; Our Mutual Friend; David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Hard Times)
119.Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
120.George Boole – The Laws of Thought
121.Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden
122.Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – Das Kapital (Capital); The Communist Manifesto
123.George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch
124.Herman Melville – Typee; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
125.Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
126.Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories
127.Henry Thomas Buckle – A History of Civilization in England
128.Francis Galton – Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development
129.Bernhard Riemann – The Hypotheses of Geometry
130.Henrik Ibsen – Plays (esp. Peer Gynt; Brand; Hedda Gabler; Emperor and Galilean; A Doll’s House; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder)
131.Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; “What Is Art?”; Twenty-Three Tales
132.Richard Dedekind – Theory of Numbers
133.Wilhelm Wundt – Physiological Psychology; Outline of Psychology
134.Mark Twain – The Innocents Abroad; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court; The Mysterious Stranger
135.Henry Adams – History of the United States; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams; Degradation of Democratic Dogma
136.Charles Peirce – Chance, Love, and Logic; Collected Papers
137.William Sumner – Folkways
138.Oliver Wendell Holmes – The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers
139.William James – Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; A Pluralistic Universe; Essays in Radical Empiricism
140.Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors
141.Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality; The Will to Power; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist
142.Georg Cantor – Transfinite Numbers
143.Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method; The Foundations of Science
144.Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays to the Theory of Sex; Introduction to Psychoanalysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; The Ego and the Id; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
145.George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces
146.Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
147.Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
148.John Dewey – How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; The Quest for Certainty; Logic – The Theory of Inquiry
149.Alfred North Whitehead – A Treatise on Universal Algebra; An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
150.George Santayana – The Life of Reason; Scepticism and Animal Faith; The Realms of Being (which discusses the Realms of Essence, Matter and Truth); Persons and Places
151.Vladimir Lenin – Imperialism; The State and Revolution
152.Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time (formerly translated as Remembrance of Things Past)
153.Bertrand Russell – Principles of Mathematics; The Problems of Philosophy; Principia Mathematica; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
154.Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
155.Albert Einstein – The Theory of Relativity; Sidelights on Relativity; The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
156.James Joyce – “The Dead” in Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
157.Jacques Maritain – Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; Freedom and the Modern World; A Preface to Metaphysics; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
158.Franz Kafka – The Trial; The Castle
159.Arnold J. Toynbee – A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
160.Jean-Paul Sartre – Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
161.Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – The First Circle; Cancer Ward