The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer guides readers through their first steps in a self-motivated classical education by reading through famous works in four genres: novels, autobiographies, histories, and drama. Her book contains a great list for those interested in expanding their education by reading books that have greatly impacted western civilization. Though far from comprehensive, Bauer’s list provides a diverse list of worthy works; she recommends reading chronologically within each genre to understand the historical development of the genre as a whole.
Novels
- Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
- The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
- Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
- Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
- The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
- Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
- The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
- The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
- Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
- The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
- The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
- The Trial, Franz Kafka
- Native Son, Richard Wright
- The Stranger, Albert Camus
- 1984, George Orwell
- Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
- Seize the Day, Saul Bellow
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- If on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino
- Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
- White Noise, Don Delillo
- Possession, A.S. Byatt
Autobiographies
- The Confessions, St. Augustine of Hippo
- The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery Kempe
- Essays, Michel de Montaigne
- The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself, Teresa of Avila
- Meditations, Rene Descartes
- Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, John Bunyan
- The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration, Mary Rowlandson
- Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin
- Walden, Henry David Thoreau
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written By Herself, Harriet Jacobs
- Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass
- Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
- Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche
- Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
- An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mohandas Gandhi
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
- The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
- Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, C.S. Lewis
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcom X
- Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton
- The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
- Born Again, Charles W. Colson
- Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Richard Rodriguez
- The Road from Coorain, Jill Ker Conway
- All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs, Elie Wiesel
Histories
- The Histories, Herodotus
- The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
- The Republic, Plato
- Lives, Plutarch
- The City of God, St. Augustine of Hippo
- The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede
- The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
- Utopia, Sir Thomas More
- The True End of Civil Government, John Locke
- The History of England, Volume V, David Hume
- The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Common Sense, Thomas Paine
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
- Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
- The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt
- The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B Du Bois
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
- Queen Victoria, Lytton Strachey
- The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
- The New England Mind, Perry Miller
- The Great Crash, John Kenneth Galbraith
- The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan
- The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
- Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Eugene D. Genovese
- A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman
- All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, James M. McPherson
- A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Marta Ballard, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
- The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama
Drama
- Agamemnon, Aeschylus
- Oedipus the King, Sophocles
- Medea, Euripides
- The Birds, Aristophanes
- Poetics, Aristotle
- Everyman
- Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe
- Richard III, William Shakespeare
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
- Hamlet, William Shakespeare
- Tartuffe, Moliere
- The Way of the World, William Congreve
- She Stoops to Conquer, Oliver Goldsmith
- The School for Scandal, Richard Brinsley Sheridan
- A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen
- The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
- The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
- Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw
- Murder in the Cathedral, T.S. Eliot
- Our Town, Thornton Wilder
- Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Eugene O’Neill
- No Exit, Jean Paul Sartre
- A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
- Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
- Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
- A Man for All Seasons, Robert Bolt
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
- Equus, Peter Shaffer
Poetry
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- The Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer
- Greek Lyricists
- Odes, Horace
- Beowulf
- Inferno, Dante Alighieri
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
- Sonnets, William Shakespeare
- John Donne
- Psalms, King James Bible
- Paradise Lost, John Milton
- Songs of Innocence and of Experience, William Blake
- The Poetry of
- William Wordsworth
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- John Keats
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Walt Whitman
- Emily Dickinson
- Christina Rossetti
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- William Butler Yeats
- Paul Laurence Dunbar
- Robert Frost
- Carl Sandburg
- William Carlos Williams
- Ezra Pound
- T.S. Eliot
- Langston Hughes
- W.H. Auden
- Philip Larkin
- Allen Ginsberg
- Sylvia Plath
- Mark Strand
- Adrienne Rich
- Seamus Heaney