What are The Great Works of the Western World?

The Great Works of the Western World are the arbitrarily selected books which certain scholars believed (and still do) encapsulated the entirety of western knowledge and wisdom.

Wikapedia describes the development of this series in some detail.


The following writings are included in this canon:

(The first two volumes consist of the Syntopicon, a topical index to these volumes)

Volume 3 Homer
Volume 4 Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes
Volume 5 Herodotus, Thucydides
Volume 6 Plato
Volume 7 Aristotle l
Volume 8 Aristotle ll
Volume 9 Hypocrates, Galen
Volume 10 Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Nicomachus
Volume 11 Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus
Volume 12 Virgil
Volume 13 Plutarch
Volume 14 Tacitus
Volume 15 Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler
Volume 16 Augustine
Volume 17 Aquinas l
Volume 18 Aquinas ll
Volume 19 Dante, Chaucer
Volume 20 Calvin
Volume 21 Machiavelli, Hobbes
Volume 22 Rabelais
Volume 23 Erasmus, Montaigne
Volume 24 Shakespeare l
Volume 25 Shakespeare ll
Volume 26 Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey
Volume 27 Cervantes
Volume 28 Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza
Volume 29 Milton
Volume 30 Pascal
Volume 31 Molière, Racine
Volume 32 Newton, Huygens
Volume 33 Locke, Berkeley, Hume
Volume 34 Swift, Voltaire, Diderot
Volume 35 Montesquieu, Rousseau
Volume 36 Adam Smith
Volume 37 Gibbon l
Volume 38 Gibbon ll
Volume 39 Kant
Volume 40 J. S. Mill
Volume 41 Boswell
Volume 42 Lavoisier, Faraday
Volume 43 Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche
Volume 44 Tocqueville
Volume 45 Goethe, Balzac
Volume 46 Austen, George Eliot
Volume 47 Dickens
Volume 48 Melville, Twain
Volume 49 Darwin
Volume 50 Marx
Volume 51 Tolstoy
Volume 52 Dostoevsky, Ibsen
Volume 53 William James,
Volume 54 Freud
Volume 55 Bergson, Dewey, Whitehead, Russell, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Barth
Volume 56 Poincare, Planck, Whitefead, Einstein, Eddington, Bohr, Hardy, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dobshznsky, Waddington
Volume 57 Veblen, Tawney, Keynes
Volume 58 Frazer, Weber, Levi-Straus
Volume 59 Henry James, Shaw, Conrad, Chekhov, Pirandello, Proust, Cather, Mann, Joyce
Volume 60 Woolf, Kafka, Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, O`Neill, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Brecht, Hemingway, Orwell, Beckett

Looks like I'm going to be busy for a while.