Despite modern condemnation due to its perceived Eurocentric lens, the Western literary canon has stood as a bastion of revered works, shaping cultural and intellectual landscapes across continents. Defined by a collection of seminal texts deemed essential to understanding Western civilization’s heritage, its evolution has been as rich and complex as the narratives it encapsulates. As Niall Ferguson might say, civilization is the West and the rest.
This is the Mirror’s list of works that should be on every school curriculum but probably aren’t:
Fiction
Homer’s- Odyssey
Homer’s- Iliad
The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
1984 – George Orwell
Anna Karenina, War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Metamorphosis and The Trial – Franz Kafka
Ulysses, Dubliners – James Joyce
The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom, Light in August, As I lay Dying, The Wild Palms, Spotted Horses – William Faulkner
Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
Lost Illusions – Honoré de Balzac
Ford Madox Ford – The Good Soldier, the Parade’s End tetralogy
To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolfe
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust
The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea – Earnest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
One of Ours, O Pioneers!, Paul’s Case – Willa Cather
Lolita, Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name – James Baldwin
The Rabbit Novels – John Updike
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
A Good Man Is Hard to Find – Flannery O’Connor
Ham on Rye – Charles Bukowski
Dead Souls, The Nose, The Overcoat – Nikolai Gogol
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Theater/Drama
The Frogs, The Birds, Lysistrata – Aristophanes
Oedipus Rex, Antigone – Sophocles
Oresteia – Aeschylus
All of Shakespeare
The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, Peer Gynt – Henrik Ibsen
Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekov
Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Iceman Comet, Desire Under the Elm – Eugene O’Neill
Old Times – Harold Pinter
Blood Wedding – Federico García Lorca
Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
Blithe Spirit, Present Laughter – Noël Coward
Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo – David Mamet
A Raisin in the Sun – Lorraine Hansberry
Buried Child – Sam Shepard
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Nevis Mountain Dew – August Wilson
A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie – Tennessee Williams
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead – Tom Stoppard
Poets
Edgar Allan Poe
Samuel Coleridge
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
William Butler Yeats
Pablo Neruda
William Wordsworth
William Blake
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
T.S.Eliot
Christina Georgina Rossetti
Alexander Pushkin
Anna Akhmatova
Langston Hughes
Emily Dickenson
Gwendolyn Brooks
Sylvia Plath
Robert Frost
Maya Angelou
e.e.cummings
Rupi Kaur
Charles Bukowski
Philosophy
Plato’s- Republic
Aristotle – Poetics
Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
Nicomachean Ethics – Aristotle
The City of God – Augustine of Hippo
The Art of War – Sun Tzu
Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu
A Treatise of Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals – David Hume
Discourse on the Method – Descartes
Summa Theologica – Thomas Aquinas
Self-Reliance – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Walden, or Life in the Woods – Henry David Thoreau
Thus Spoke Zarathustra – Friedrich Nietzche
The World as Will and Representation – Arthur Schopenhauer
Phenomenology of Spirit – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Critique of Pure Reason – Immanuel Kant
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Being and Time – Martin Heidegger
Being and Nothingness – Jean-Paul Sartre
Simone de Beauvoir – The Second Sex, The Woman Destroyed
Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , Totem and Taboo, and Civilization and Its Discontents.
Modern Man in Search of a Soul – Carl Jung
The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, The Souls of Black Folk – W.E.B. Du Bois
Beauty – Roger Scruton
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard
Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, The History of Sexuality
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Robert Pirsig
The book of common prayer, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust – Paul de Man
Of Grammatology – Jacques Derrida
Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition – Hannah Arendt
Economics
Capitalism and Freedom – Milton Friedman
The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels
The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
The Affluent Society – John Kenneth Galbraith
Freakonomics – Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
Basic Economics – Thomas Sowell
Rich Dad Poor Dad – Robert T. Kiyosaki
The Creature from Jekyll Island – G. Edward Griffin
Science
On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
Brief Answers to the Big Questions, A Brief History of Time – Steven Hawking
Helgoland – Carlo Rovelli
Cosmos – Carl Sagan
Ideas And Opinions – Albert Einstein
What is Life? – Erwin Schrodinger
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Five Easy Pieces – Richard Feynman
Double Helix – James D. Watson
Losing Eden – Lucy Jones
Silent Spring – Rachel Carson
Age of Spirtual Machines – Ray Kurzweil
The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
Wonderful Life – Stephen Jay Gould
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth – James Lovelock
History
The Histories – Herodotus
Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans – Plutarch
Civilization: The West and the Rest – Niall Ferguson
A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson
The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples – Winston Churchill
The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme – John Keegan
The Guns of August – Barbara W. Tuchman
Orientalism – Edward W. Said
John Adams – by David McCullough
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 – Edward Gibbon
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome – Susan Wise Bauer
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective – Robert C. Allen
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West – Dee Brown
The Civil War: A Narrative – Shelby Foote
Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War – Viet Thanh Nguyen
About the Author
WOW!
Quite a list.
I have read many books over the years, hundreds, at least, and many are on this list and I read many of the categories listed here, but not poetry.
I’ve read all 3 of the work of Gibbon about the decline and fall of Rome.
And it was interesting to note inclusion of What is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger, which could be considered an obscure work.
As to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I believe that has been canceled by the WOKE crowd out there who remind me very much of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
I agree with the Mirror’s comprehensive list.
I found Glengarry Glen Ross to be very dry – as if the characters were the walking dead.
Nothing ever actually happened, so far as I could tell.
It seems like the cast with the lines were all the losers in the realo estate firm, and my goodness, but I simply don’t relate to those types of people.
Maybe, deep down, buried beneath where my intellect could reach, there was actually some deep philosophical or perhaps spiritual meaning in there, but if there was, it went by me in a hurry, making the one experience with it enough to last a lifetime, thank you very much.
The most important book has been left out:
THE HOLY BIBLE