Harvard President Charles W. Eliot once remarked that the entire sum of 
a liberal education would fit on a five-foot bookshelf.  At the request 
of a publisher, Eliot drew up a list of specific works from ancient to 
then-modern times.  This was published in fifty volumes about 100 years 
ago as The Harvard Classics.  At one time it seemed, practically every 
family in the neighborhood I grew up in owned a set.  Even though I was 
lucky enough to enjoy a liberal education of my own, it was one of the 
things of my childhood that I took with me when I struck out on my 
own.  The entire anthology is now available on line at
 
http://www.bartleby.com/hc/

Here's a list showing the contents of each volume:

Vol. 1. Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography), John Woolman (Journal), 
William Penn (Fruits of Solitude), 416 pp.
  
Vol. 2. Plato (Apology, Phaedo & Crito), Epictetus (Golden Sayings), 
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations), 352 pp. 

Vol. 3. Francis Bacon (Essays Civil & Moral, The New Atlantis), 
Milton's Prose (Areopagitica, Tractate on Education), Sir Thomas Browne 
Religio Medici), 347 pp. 

Vol. 4. Complete Poems in English of John Milton, 363 pp. 

Vol. 5. Essays and English Traits, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 493 pp. 

Vol. 6. Poems and Songs, Robert Burns, 609 pp. 

Vol. 7. The Confessions of St. Augustine, Thomas A. Kempis (The 
Imitation of Christ), 379 pp. 

Vol. 8. Nine Greek Dramas by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides & 
Aristophanes, 466 pp. 

Vol. 9. Letters of Marcus Tullius Cicero and Gaius Plinius Caecilius 
Secundas, 438 pp. 

Vol. 10. Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, 590 pp. 

Vol. 11. The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, 552 pp. 

Vol. 12. Plutarch's Lives, 403 pp. 

Vol. 13. Aeneid, Virgil translated by John Dryden, 432 pp. 

Vol. 14. Don Quixote, Part I, Miguel De Cervantes, translated by Thomas 
Shelton, 545 pp. 

Vol. 15. Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, The Lives of John Donne and 
George Herbert by Izaak Walton, 424 pp 

Vol. 16. The Thousand and One Nights, 460 pp. 

Vol. 17. Folk-Lore and Fable, Aesop, Grimm, Andersen, 383 pp. 

Vol. 18. Modern English Drama, Dryden, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Shelly, 
Browning, Byron, 444 pp. 

Vol. 19. Faust Pt 1, Egmont, Hermann and Dorothea by Johann Wolfgang 
von Goethe, Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, 431 pp. 

Vol. 20. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri, 429 pp.

Vol. 21. I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), Alessandro Manzoni, 668 pp. 

Vol. 22. The Odyssey of Homer, 347 pp. 

Vol. 23. Two Years Before the Mast, R. H. Dana, Jr., 424 pp. 

Vol. 24. On the Sublime & the Beautiful, Reflections on the French 
Revolution, A Letter to a Noble Lord, Edmund Burke, 443 pp. 

Vol. 25. John Stuart Mill (Autobiography, Essay on Liberty), Thomas 
Carlyle (Characteristics, Inaugural Address, Essay on Scott), 468 pp. 

Vol. 26. Continental Drama: Calderon, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, 
Lessing, Schiller, 474 pp. 

Vol. 27. English Essays, Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay, 421 pp. 

Vol. 28. Essays, English and American, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, 
Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau and 
others, 485 pp. 

Vol. 29. Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin, 547 pp. 

Vol. 30. Scientific Papers: Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin, Newcomb, etc., 
367 pp. 

Vol. 31. Autobiography, Benvenuto Cellini, 454 pp. 

Vol. 32. Literary & Philosophical Essays, Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, 
Renan, etc., 419 pp. 

Vol. 33. Voyages and Travels, 394 pp. 

Vol. 34. french & English Philosophers: Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, 
Hobbes, 434 pp. 

Vol. 35. Chronicle & Romance: Froissart, Malory, Holinshed, 404 pp. 

Vol. 36. Machiavelli (The Prince), Sir Thomas More (Utopia), Martin 
Luther (Ninety-Five Theses), 397 pp. 

Vol. 37. English Philosophers of the 17th & 18th Century: Locke, 
Berkeley, Hume, 445 pp. 

Vol. 38. Scientific Papers: Harvey, Jenner, Lister, Pasteur, 440 pp. 

Vol. 39. Prefaces & Prologues to Famous Books, 462 pp. 

Vol. 40. English Poetry, 1 , From Chaucer to Gray, 476 pp. 

Vol. 41. English Poetry, 2 , From Collins to Fitzgerald, (477- 988 pp.) 

Vol. 42. English Poetry, 3 , From Tennyson to Whitman (989 - 1508 pp.) 

Vol. 43. American Historical Documents, 491 pp. 

Vol. 44. Sacred Writings, 1 , Confucian, Hebrew, Christian, 495 pp. 

Vol. 45. Sacred Writings, 2, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Mohammedan 
(496-1021 pp.) 

Vol. 46. Elizabethan Drama, 1 , Marlowe & Shakespeare, 442 pp. 

Vol. 47. Elizabethan Drama, 2 , Dekker, Jonson, Beaumont & Fletcher, 
Webster, Massinger (443-899 pp.) 

Vol. 48. Thoughts and Minor Works, Blaise Pascal, 451 pp. 

Vol. 49. Epic and Saga, Beowulf, Song of Roland, The Destruction of Da 
Derga’s Hostel, Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, 464 pp. 

Vol. 50. Introduction, Reader's Guide, Indexes 

*********************************************************

With all respect to Dr. Eliot, I think the list needs revising.  If you 
were putting together five feet of books (let's update it to two 
meters), starting with the above list, what would it look like?  
Personally, I would start by eliminating such things as volumes 21, 23 
and 31, to name a few.  What else?

7 responses total.

I would certainly KEEP #31 (there are two few spontaneous first person
accounts of personal historical happenings).

An eyewitness account of the Italian Renaissance, no less.  I admit 
have a soft spot in my heart for that book.

Okay, so Benny stays in, although I wonder if the Autobiography is 
still required reading outside of an art history course, and even there 
if it's read in toto.  

Also, I wonder if many liberally educated Americans still feel the 
reverence for Robert Burns' poetry that had Eliot devote an entire 
volume to it.  Frost maybe, Whitman definitely, but Burns?  I propose 
limiting Burns to a few selected poems in what is volume 41 above.

After the task of excluding and condensing, you'd have to add the 
writers Eliot left about because they hadn't yet been generally 
recognized, like Thoreau, or they hadn't yet written anything, like 
Tolkien.  (When you look at the list in #0, you can see that Eliot 
wasn't afraid to include contemporaries, or near-contemporaries.)  

I'd eliminate Emerson's English Traits, and bundle his Essays First & 
Second Series and his "Nature" in a volume with Thoreau's Walden.  As 
to Tolkien...I don't know.  Should he be included at all?

Nabokov is a favorite of mine, but what if anything of his should be 
included?  I nominate Speak, Memory and a selection of his short 
stories, maybe bundled in a volume with a selection of stories by 
Borges.  But the critics and Nabokov experts would probably want to see 
Lolita in there.

As a companion volume to Sacred Writings, which would now have to 
include some New Age classics, I'd want to have a collection of 
Skeptical Writings.

not sure what v.33 is, so i'd replace it with moby dick.

a volume of american playwrights, eugene o'neill, sam shepard...

confucian Xunzi bound with taoist Zhuangzi

harlem renaissance volume, baldwin, invisible man, autobio of malcolm x

James Joyce's Ulysses.

Those who think that knowledge/wisdom of any subject/discipline can be
obtained by reading a few books, should read the essay, "On not being a
philosopher".

This is about a liberal education, not about knowledge/wisdom. 

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