Columbia Reading List, 1937-1938
Frequently Asked Questions
Who wrote this list?
See the heading above and the credit below
to find out who wrote this list. If you don't like the selections in
this list or the arrangement, take it up with the author(s).
Why isn't my favorite author listed here?
This list may not include your favorite author, but
he or she may be on other Great Books lists. Check the
author index to see.
See the Great Books FAQ
for more about the Great Books and these lists of them.
Fall Semester
- Homer. Iliad.
- Herodotus. The Persian Wars.
- Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War.
- Aeschylus. Oresteia.
- Sophocles. Oedipus the King; Antigone.
- Euripides. Electra; Iphigenia in Taurus.
- Aristophanes. The Frogs; Plutus.
- Plato. Ion; Apology; Republic.
- Aristotle. The Poetics; The Ethics.
- Lucretius. On the Nature of Things.
- Aurelius. Meditations.
- Virgil. Aeneid.
- Augustine. Confessions.
Spring Semester
- Dante. Inferno.
- Machiavelli. The Prince.
- Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel.
- Montaigne. Essays.
- Shakespeare. Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.
- Cervantes. Don Quixote.
- Milton. Paradise Lost.
- Spinoza. Ethics.
- Moliere. Tartuffe; The Misanthrope; The Physician
in Spite of Himself.
- Swift. Gulliver's Travels.
- Fielding. Tom Jones.
- Rousseau. Confessions.
- Voltaire. Candide.
- Goethe. Faust, Part 1.
Source: Denby, David. Great Books: My Adventures with
Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western
World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. © 1996 by David Denby.
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