For young readers
About ages 8 to 12. Read it together, or on your own.
Imagine a conversation that has gone on for almost three thousand years. A poet in ancient Greece tells a story about a hero. Hundreds of years later, a philosopher asks whether that hero was really good. Another writer answers him. A scientist checks an old idea with a new experiment. Each one has read the ones before.
People call this the Great Conversation, and the books in it the great books. When you read one, you get to join in. You can agree, disagree, and ask your own questions.
Try this: a conversation chain
Sit in a circle. The first person asks a big question, like "What makes someone brave?" The next person gives an answer and one reason. The next person says what they think of that answer, and adds their own. Keep going around. You have just had a small great conversation!
This ladder is a climb through those books, one rung at a time. Every rung has a part just for young readers, like this one.
For teens and adults
The full lesson.
The Great Books idea is simple to state. Some books take up the deepest questions people ask, they have shaped how later people thought, and they are worth reading in the original (or a faithful translation) rather than only in summaries. Read together, they form a long conversation across the centuries, which anyone who reads them can join.
Where the idea came from
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1920 | At Columbia University, the English professor John Erskine begins his General Honors course, planned since 1917 and delayed by the First World War. Juniors and seniors read one classic a week, from Homer onward, and discuss it in seminar. Mortimer Adler was one of his students. |
| Early 1930s | Robert Maynard Hutchins, the young president of the University of Chicago, and Mortimer J. Adler, whom he brought there in 1930, teach a Great Books seminar together and argue for an education built on the classics. |
| 1937 | St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, under Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan, adopts a four-year program built almost entirely on the great books, with seminars, tutorials and laboratories in place of lectures and textbooks. A second campus opened in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1964. |
| 1946 | The University of Chicago begins the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, a four-year, non-credit course of weekly discussions of great books. It still runs today. |
| 1947 | Hutchins and Adler start the Great Books Foundation, which helps adults and students run discussion groups all over the country. |
| 1952 | Encyclopaedia Britannica publishes Great Books of the Western World in 54 volumes, with Hutchins as editor-in-chief and Adler as associate editor. Volume 1 is Hutchins' essay The Great Conversation, and volumes 2 and 3 are Adler's Syntopicon, an index of great ideas across the set. |
| 1990 | The second edition, edited by Adler with Philip W. Goetz, grows to 60 volumes. It adds six volumes of 20th-century works, new translations, Voltaire's Candide, and four women authors (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf), and drops a few works, such as Apollonius on conic sections. This is the set this ladder follows. |
Hutchins' opening essay argues, in his own words, that these books belong to everyone, not only to scholars, and that a free people needs citizens who can think through the great questions together. The essay is still under copyright, so we describe it rather than quote it; a library can lend you the set.
The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.
Why it works
The case against a fixed list
The Great Books idea has always had critics, and a fair reader should know their arguments as well as the defenders' replies.
| Critics say | Defenders reply |
|---|---|
| Any list reflects the people who chose it. The 1952 set had no women authors and almost no writers from outside Europe and North America. | The list is a starting point, not a fence. The 1990 edition added authors, and the conversation can welcome more; the test is the work's depth, not its author. |
| A list called "great" can be treated as beyond question, which is the opposite of what the authors themselves did. | The books disagree with each other constantly. Reading them teaches questioning, not obedience. |
| Reading old books without their history leads to misreading them. | History helps, and good teachers supply it, but the books can also be read for their arguments, which can be judged on their merits. |
| The 1952 set was sold door to door as a status symbol, and many sets sat unread. Critics such as Dwight Macdonald mocked the Syntopicon as a shortcut to culture. | However it was sold, the set put the originals in many homes and libraries, and discussion groups across the country read them. |
| Some works, especially in science, are out of date. | They show how knowledge was won, and the ideas they argue about are still with us. |
Teddy Rook Book doesn't take a side in the argument over the canon. We follow the 1990 set because the owner of the set asked for it and because it is a good map of a long conversation. You are free to read beyond it, and we hope you will.
How this ladder works
- Every rung is one work (or one part of a long work) from the 60 volumes, in eras from the Greeks to the 20th century. Each rung shows its volume number, so you can find it on your shelf.
- Three paths on every rung: for young readers (about 8 to 12), for teens and adults, and going deeper. Read the one that fits, or all three.
- Short excerpts come only from translations old enough to be in the public domain, each with its source. Where no free English translation exists, we describe the work in our own words and tell you where to find it.
- Practice checks what you learned: who wrote what, when, the main ideas, and for the science books the real math and physics. Pass a rung and it comes back for short reviews, like every ladder on this site.
- Cross-links take you to the matching Physics, Astronomy, Math, Chemistry or Biology topics, and to the Harvard Classics Daily readings by the same author.
- Rungs marked "being written" are on the way. The science books come first.
Going deeper
Context, the big questions, and how later books answered.
An older shelf. The Great Books idea in America is older than Erskine's course. In 1909 and 1910, Charles W. Eliot, the former president of Harvard, published the Harvard Classics, a fifty-volume "five-foot shelf" meant to give a good liberal education to anyone who read fifteen minutes a day. Its reading guide is the basis of this site's Harvard Classics Daily, and many of its authors are on this ladder too.
Why "conversation"? The word fits because the books really do answer each other. Aristotle argues with Plato; Augustine answers the Roman historians; Galileo writes his dialogue against the followers of Aristotle; Rousseau answers Hobbes and Locke about the state of nature; Marx and Mill read Adam Smith. Our Great Ideas index lets you follow one idea through many of them.
The canon debates. In the 1980s and 1990s, American colleges argued hard about whether to require a list of Western classics, and if so which. Some writers defended a common core of reading as shared ground for citizens; others argued that a required list should include more voices, or that no single list should be required. Both sides often agreed that students should read difficult original works closely; they differed on which works, and why.
Where it lives today. Great-books programs still run in many forms: whole colleges like St. John's, honors programs and core curricula at many universities, adult reading groups, homeschool co-ops, and families reading at the kitchen table.
Talk about it together
- If you could ask one question to a writer from long ago, who would it be and what would you ask?
- Why might it matter to read a book itself, rather than a summary of it?
- What makes a good conversation? What makes a bad one?
- Should there be a list of books everyone reads? What would you put on it, and who should decide?
- Arnold says reading the best that has been thought should change our own habits of thought. Has a book ever changed your mind?
- What is one book from your family or culture that you would add to the conversation?