What originally began by Easton Press as a list of the 100 “greatest books” ever written, has actually grown to include 125 works. While any top 100 list is bound to be contested, with countless advocates wondering why their favorite work was excluded, any work on the list below is bound to be a work that has significantly impacted western civilization.
This particular set tends to be heavier on novels at the expense of philosophical and scientific works compared to other lists on ThinkingWest.
- Aeschylus – The Oresteia
- Aesop – Aesop’s Fables
- Alcott, Louisa May – Little Women
- Aristophanes – The Birds, The Frogs
- Aristotle – Politics & The Poetics
- Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
- Bacon, Sir Francis – Essays/ Effayes
- Baudelaire, Charles – The Flowers of Evil
- Beowulf
- Boccaccio, Giovanni – The Decameron
- Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
- Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
- Browning, Robert – Collected Poems
- Bunyan, John – The Pilgrim’s Progress
- Burton, Richard – The Arabian Nights
- Butler, Samuel – The Way of All Flesh
- Carroll, Lewis – Alice in Wonderland
- Cervantes – Don Quixote
- Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
- Chekhov, Anton – Two Plays: The Cherry Orchard/ Three Sisters
- Confucius – The Analects of Confucius
- Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
- Conrad, Joseph – Lord Jim
- Cooper, James Fennimore – The Last of the Mohicans
- Crane, Stephen – Red Badge of Courage
- Dante – The Divine Comedy
- Darwin, Charles – The Descent of Man
- Darwin, Charles – The Origin of Species
- Defoe, Daniel – Journal of the Plague Year
- Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
- Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
- Dickens, Charles – David Copperfield
- Dickens, Charles – Great Expectations
- Dickens, Charles – Short Stories
- Dickinson, Emily – Collected Poems
- Donne, John – Collected Poems
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor – The Brothers Karamazov
- Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- Dumas, Alexandre – The Count of Monte Cristo
- Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
- Eliot, George – Middlemarch
- Eliot, George – Silas Marner
- Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
- Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Essays
- Euripides: Medea – Hippolytus – The Bacchae
- Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
- Federalist – Hamilton, Madison, Jay – The Federalist Papers
- Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
- Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
- Franklin, Benjamin – Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- Frost, Robert – Collected Poems
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
- Goldsmith, Oliver – She Stoops to Conquer
- Grimm – Brothers Grimm’s Fairy Tales
- Hardy, Thomas – Jude the Obscure
- Hardy, Thomas – Return of the Native
- Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
- Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
- Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
- Holy Bible
- Homer – Iliad
- Homer – Odyssey
- Hugo, Victor – Les Miserables
- Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame De Paris)
- Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
- Ibsen, Henrik – Three Plays
- Irving, Washington – The Alhambra
- Irving, Washington – The Legend of Sleepy Hollow & Other Stories
- James, Henry – Portrait of a Lady
- Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Keats, John – Collected Poems
- Khayyam, Omar – The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
- Kipling, Rudyard – The Jungle Books
- Lawrence, DH – Lady Chatterley’s Lover
- Livy – History of Early Rome
- London, Jack – The Sea Wolf
- Machiavelli, Niccolo – The Prince
- Maupassant, Guy de – The Tales of Guy de Maupassant
- Melville, Herman – Billy Budd/ Benito Cereno
- Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick
- Milton, John – Paradise Lost
- Moliere – Two Plays
- Orwell, George – Animal Farm
- Paine, Thomas – Rights of Man
- Plato – Dialogues on Love and Friendship
- Plato – The Republic
- Poe, Edgar Allan – Tales of Mystery and Imagination
- Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
- Rousseau, Jean-Jacques– The Confessions
- Scott, Walter – Ivanhoe
- Scott, Walter – The Talisman
- Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
- Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
- Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare, William – The Comedies
- Shakespeare, William – The Histories
- Shakespeare, William – The Tragedies
- Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion and Candida
- Shaw, George Bernard – Two Plays for Puritans
- Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
- Sophocles – Oedipus the King
- St. Augustine – The Confessions of St. Augustine
- Steinbeck, John – Of Mice and Men
- Stendhal – The Red and the Black
- Sterne, Lawrence – Tristram Shandy
- Stevenson, Robert Louis – Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
- Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
- Stoker, Bram – Dracula
- Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
- Thackeray, William Makepeace – Vanity Fair
- Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
- Tolstoy, Leo – Anna Karenina
- Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
- Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
- Twain, Mark – Huckleberry Finn
- Verne, Jules – Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
- Virgil – The Aeneid
- Voltaire – Candide
- Wells, H.G. – The Time Machine
- Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
- Wilde, Oscar – Short Stories
- Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Yeats, W.B. – Collected Poems