The Easton Press 100 Greatest Books Ever Written

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.

  1. Aeschylus – The Oresteia
  2.  Aesop – Aesop’s Fables
  3.  Alcott, Louisa May – Little Women
  4.  Aristophanes – The Birds, The Frogs
  5.  Aristotle – Politics & The Poetics
  6.  Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
  7.  Bacon, Sir Francis – Essays/ Effayes
  8.  Baudelaire, Charles – The Flowers of Evil
  9.  Beowulf
  10.  Boccaccio, Giovanni – The Decameron
  11.  Bronte, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
  12.  Bronte, Emily – Wuthering Heights
  13.  Browning, Robert – Collected Poems
  14.  Bunyan, John – The Pilgrim’s Progress
  15.  Burton, Richard – The Arabian Nights
  16.  Butler, Samuel – The Way of All Flesh
  17.  Carroll, Lewis – Alice in Wonderland
  18.  Cervantes – Don Quixote
  19.  Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
  20.  Chekhov, Anton – Two Plays: The Cherry Orchard/ Three Sisters
  21.  Confucius – The Analects of Confucius
  22.  Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
  23.  Conrad, Joseph – Lord Jim
  24.  Cooper, James Fennimore – The Last of the Mohicans
  25.  Crane, Stephen – Red Badge of Courage
  26.  Dante – The Divine Comedy
  27.  Darwin, Charles – The Descent of Man
  28.  Darwin, Charles – The Origin of Species
  29.  Defoe, Daniel – Journal of the Plague Year
  30.  Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
  31.  Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
  32.  Dickens, Charles – David Copperfield
  33.  Dickens, Charles – Great Expectations
  34.  Dickens, Charles – Short Stories
  35.  Dickinson, Emily – Collected Poems
  36.  Donne, John – Collected Poems
  37.  Dostoevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
  38.  Dostoevsky, Fyodor – The Brothers Karamazov
  39.  Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan – The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
  40.  Dumas, Alexandre – The Count of Monte Cristo
  41.  Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
  42.  Eliot, George – Middlemarch
  43.  Eliot, George – Silas Marner
  44.  Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
  45.  Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Essays
  46.  Euripides: Medea – Hippolytus – The Bacchae
  47.  Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
  48.  Federalist – Hamilton, Madison, Jay – The Federalist Papers  
  49.  Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones  
  50.  Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
  51.  Franklin, Benjamin – Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
  52.  Frost, Robert – Collected Poems
  53.  Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
  54.  Goldsmith, Oliver – She Stoops to Conquer
  55.  Grimm – Brothers Grimm’s Fairy Tales
  56.  Hardy, Thomas – Jude the Obscure
  57.  Hardy, Thomas – Return of the Native
  58.  Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
  59.  Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
  60.  Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
  61.  Holy Bible
  62.  Homer – Iliad
  63.  Homer – Odyssey
  64.  Hugo, Victor – Les Miserables
  65.  Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Notre-Dame De Paris)
  66.  Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
  67.  Ibsen, Henrik – Three Plays
  68.  Irving, Washington – The Alhambra
  69.  Irving, Washington – The Legend of Sleepy Hollow & Other Stories
  70.  James, Henry – Portrait of a Lady
  71.  Joyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  72.  Keats, John – Collected Poems
  73.  Khayyam, Omar – The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
  74.  Kipling, Rudyard – The Jungle Books
  75.  Lawrence, DH – Lady Chatterley’s Lover
  76.  Livy – History of Early Rome
  77.  London, Jack – The Sea Wolf
  78.  Machiavelli, Niccolo – The Prince
  79.  Maupassant, Guy de – The Tales of Guy de Maupassant
  80.  Melville, Herman – Billy Budd/ Benito Cereno
  81.  Melville, Herman – Moby-Dick
  82.  Milton, John – Paradise Lost
  83.  Moliere – Two Plays
  84.  Orwell, George – Animal Farm
  85.  Paine, Thomas – Rights of Man
  86.  Plato – Dialogues on Love and Friendship
  87.  Plato – The Republic
  88.  Poe, Edgar Allan – Tales of Mystery and Imagination
  89.  Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
  90.  Rousseau, Jean-Jacques– The Confessions
  91.  Scott, Walter – Ivanhoe
  92.  Scott, Walter – The Talisman
  93.  Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  94.  Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
  95.  Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
  96.  Shakespeare, William – The Comedies
  97.  Shakespeare, William – The Histories
  98.  Shakespeare, William – The Tragedies
  99.  Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion and Candida  
  100.  Shaw, George Bernard – Two Plays for Puritans
  101.  Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
  102.  Sophocles – Oedipus the King
  103.  St. Augustine – The Confessions of St. Augustine
  104.  Steinbeck, John – Of Mice and Men
  105.  Stendhal – The Red and the Black
  106.  Sterne, Lawrence – Tristram Shandy
  107.  Stevenson, Robert Louis – Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  108.  Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
  109.  Stoker, Bram – Dracula
  110.  Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
  111.  Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
  112.  Thackeray, William Makepeace – Vanity Fair
  113.  Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
  114.  Tolstoy, Leo – Anna Karenina
  115.  Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
  116.  Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
  117.  Twain, Mark – Huckleberry Finn
  118.  Verne, Jules – Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
  119.  Virgil – The Aeneid
  120.  Voltaire – Candide
  121.  Wells, H.G. – The Time Machine
  122.  Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
  123.  Wilde, Oscar – Short Stories
  124.  Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
  125.  Yeats, W.B. – Collected Poems

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