Columbia Reading List, 1961-1962

Fall Semester

• Homer. Iliad.
• Aeschylus. Oresteia; Prometheus Bound.
• Herodotus. The Persian Wars.
• Sophocles. Oedipus the King; Antigone; Ajax; Philoctetes.
• Euripides. Hippolytus; Medea; The Bacchae.
• Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War.
• Aristophanes. The Frogs; Lysistrata; The Clouds.
• Plato. Ion; Apology; Phaedo; Symposium; Republic.
• Aristotle. The Ethics; The Art of Poetry.
• Lucretius. On the Nature of Things.
• Virgil. Aeneid.
• The Bible. Genesis; Amos; Job.

Spring Semester

• The Bible. Matthew; John; Romans.
• Augustine. Confessions.
• Dante. Inferno.
• Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel.
• Montaigne. Essays.
• Shakespeare. Henry IV, Part 1; King Lear; Antony and Cleopatra; The Tempest.
• Cervantes. Don Quixote.
• Milton. Paradise Lost.
• Spinoza. Ethics.
• Moliere. School for Wives; Tartuffe; The Misanthrope; The Physician in Spite of Himself.
• Swift. Gulliver's Travels.
• Voltaire. Candide.
• Goethe. Faust, Parts 1 and 2.
• Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment.

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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