The following list is one of the most famous book lists around. The set was compiled and published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952, and the second edition, which expanded on the original body of work, was released in 1990. A competitor to the Harvard’s Classics set, the Great Books of the Western World (GBWW) comprises well over 100 of the greatest works to influence western thought. The brunt of the work in compiling these works is credited to the editor in chief, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and associate editor, Mortimer J. Adler. Keep in mind, any “classic” list will inevitably omit worthy works. In fact, I would argue, they leave out a majority of the great works. It’s more helpful to think of such a list as merely a selection of great works, much like a menu at a fine restaurant.
“This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind.”
– Robert Hutchins, Editor in Chief
For those interested in purchasing the GBWW, ebay often has several complete sets available for purchase (as of June 2020) between $300 – $450. (~$6-7 per volume). The complete set is 54 volumes, most of which contain multiple books. The following is a list of each book without categorization into the particular volume it appears in. Additionally, some authors (e.g. Sigmund Freud) have so many of their works represented, that listing all of them here is not helpful. For these works (those authors with more than three works represented), I have simply listed as “works of Author” to reduce the list to a manageable size.
If you’re serious about studying the GBWW set in a methodical way, check out the 10 year reading plan provided for the 1952 edition.
Below are a number of images of the GBWW set, highlighting the authors represented, an example title page, the decorative spines, author biographies, text size comparison, and the Syntopicon (vols. 2 & 3), which provide encyclopedic coverage of the “great ideas” along with references to their mentions throughout the GBWW set.
Where can you buy the Great Books of the Western World? While no longer actively printed, you can find some existing sets out there on Amazon or eBay.











On the ThinkingWest Youtube Channel, we’ve provided an in depth review of the GBWW book set below. Christian Poole covers aesthetics, font size, readability, the GBWW’s origins, what works are included, and how to obtain the GBWW set today.
1952 Edition
The following list includes links to suggested editions that can be purchased by those who do not wish to bother with finding a version published by Britannica. Purchasing any book through these links supports ThinkingWest with a small percentage of the total – at no added cost to the buyer.
- The Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer
- works of Aeschylus
- works of Sophocles
- works of Euripides
- works of Aristophanes
- The History, Herodotus
- History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
- The Dialogues (incl. Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Gorgias, The Republic, etc.), Plato
- Nicomachean Ethics and other works, Aristotle
- works of Hippocrates
- On the Natural Faculties, Galen
- The Thirteen Books of Euclid’s Elements, Euclid
- works of Archimides
- On Conic Sections, Apollonius of Perga
- Introduction to Arithmetic, Nicomachus of Gerasa
- On the Nature of Things, Lucretius
- The Discourses, Epictetus
- The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
- Eclogues, Georgics, and Aenid, Virgil
- Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Plutarch
- The Annals, and The Histories, P. Cornelius Tacitus
- Almagest, Ptolemy
- On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, Nicolaus Copernicus
- The Harmonies of the World, Johannes Kepler
- Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, Johannes Kepler
- The Six Enneads, Plotinus
- The Confessions, Augustine of Hippo
- The City of God, Augustine of Hippo
- On Christian Doctrine, Augustine of Hippo
- Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas
- Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri
- The Prince, Machiavelli
- Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
- Gargantua and Pantagruel, Francois Rabelais
- Essays, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
- works of Shakespeare
- On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies, William Gilbert
- Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, Galileo Galilei
- On the Motion and the Heart and Blood in Animals, William Harvey
- On the Circulation of Blood, William Harvey
- On the Generation of Animals, William Harvey
- The History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes
- The Advancement of Learning, Sir Francis Bacon
- Novum Organum, Sir Francis Bacon
- New Atlantis, Sir Francis Bacon
- works of Rene Descartes
- Ethics, Benedict de Spinoza
- Paradise Lost, John Milton
- Samson Agonistes, John Milton
- Areopagitica, John Milton
- The Provincial Letters, Blaise Pascal
- Pensees, Blaise Pascal
- Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Sir Isaac Newton
- Optics, Sir Isaac Newton
- Treatise on Light, Christian Huygens
- A Letter Concerning Toleration, John Locke
- Concerning Civil Government, Second Essay, John Locke
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
- The Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume
- Gulliver’s Travels, Johnathan Swift
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne
- The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Henry Fielding
- The Spirit of the Laws, Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
- A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Jean Jacques Rousseau
- A Discourse on Political Economy, Jean Jacques Rousseau
- The Social Contract, Jean Jacques Rousseau
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
- The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Parts I & II), Edward Gibbon
- works of Immanuel Kant
- The Declaration of Independence
- The Articles of Confederation
- The Constitution of the United States of America
- The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
- On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
- Considerations on Representative Government, John Stuart Mill
- Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., James Boswell
- Elements of Chemistry, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
- Analytical Theory of Heat, Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier
- Experimental Researches in Electricity, Michael Faraday
- The Philosophy of the Right, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- The Philosophy of History, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Moby Dick, or the Whale, Herman Melville
- The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin
- The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Charles Darwin
- Capital, Karl Marx
- Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- War and Peace, Count Leo Tolstoy
- The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
- The Principles of Psychology, William James
- works of Sigmund Freud
1990 (Second) Edition.
The following works were added to expand the original 54 volume set to 60 volumes.
- Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin
- The Praise of Folly, Erasmus
- works of Moliere
- Berenice, Jean Racine
- Phedre, Jean Racine
- Candide, Voltaire
- Rameau’s Nephew, Denis Diderot
- Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard
- Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
- Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
- Cousin Bette, Honore de Balzac
- Emma, Jane Austen
- Middlemarch, George Eliot
- Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens
- Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
- works of Henrik Ibsen
- Pragmatism, William James
- An Introduction to Metaphysics, Henri Bergson
- Experience and Education, John Dewey
- Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead
- The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
- What is Metaphysics?, Martin Heidegger
- Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
- The Word of God and the Word of Man, Karl Barth
- Science and Hypothesis, Henri Poincare
- Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, Max Planck
- An Introduction to Mathematics, Alfred North Whitehead
- Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, Albert Einstein
- The Expanding Universe, Arthur Eddington
- Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature, Niels Bohr
- Discussion with Einstein on Epistemology, Niels Bohr
- A Mathematician’s Apology, G.H. Hardy
- Physics and Philosophy, Werner Heisenberg
- What is Life?, Erwin Schrodinger
- Genetics and the Origin of Species, Theodosius Dobzhansky
- The Nature of Life, C.H. Waddington
- The Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen
- The Acquisitive Society, R.H. Tawney
- The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes
- The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer
- Essays in Sociology, Max Weber
- The Autumn on the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga
- Structural Anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss
- The Beast in the Jungle, Henry James
- Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw
- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
- Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov
- Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello
- Remembrance of Things Past: “Swan in Love”, Marcel Proust
- A Lost Lady, Willa Cather
- Death in Venice, Thomas Mann
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
- To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
- The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
- The Prussian Officer, D.H. Lawrence
- The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
- Mourning Becomes Electra, Eugene O’Neill
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner
- Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht
- The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, Ernest Hemingway
- Animal Farm, George Orwell
- Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett