Harvard Classics

The Harvard Classics, originally known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, was a fifty-volume anthology of works selected by Charles W. Eliot. It was originally published in 1909. Dr. Eliot, then President of Harvard University, had stated in speeches that the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending fifteen minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf. (Originally he had said a three-foot shelf). The publisher P. F. Collier and Son saw an opportunity, and challenged him make good on this statement by selecting an appropriate collection of works; the Harvard Classics was the result.

Contents

1 Publication 2 Contents 2.1 The Harvard Classics 2.2 The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction 3 Quote 4 Further reading and external links

Publication

The collection was widely advertised by Collier and Son, in Collier's Magazine and elsewhere, with great success. As Adam Kirsch, writing in 2001 Harvard Magazine, notes, "It is surprisingly easy, even today, to find a complete set of the Harvard Classics in good condition. At least one is usually for sale on eBay, the Internet auction site, for $300 or so, a bargain at $6 a book. The supply, from attics or private libraries around the country, seems endless—a tribute to the success of the publisher, P.F. Collier, who sold some 350,000 sets within 20 years of the series' initial publication."

Malcolm X read the entire set when he was in prison.

Collier's was a major publisher of sets in the early 1900s and throughout the century issued many multi-volume sets of authors as diverse as Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, John Steinbeck, P. G. Wodehouse and Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

The concept of education through systematic reading of seminal works themselves (rather than textbooks), was carried on by John Erskine at Columbia University, and, in the 1930s, Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago, carried this idea further with the concepts of education through study of the "great books" and "great ideas" of Western civilization. This led to the publication of Great Books of the Western World, which is still in print and actively marketed. In 1937, under Stringfellow Barr, St. John's College introduced a curriculum based on the direct study of "great books."

The Harvard Classics set is popular today with those interested in home schooling.

Contents

The Harvard Classics

NEW YORK: P.F. COLLIER & SON, 1909–1917

1. His Autobiography, by Benjamin Franklin; Journal, by John Woolman; Fruits of Solitude, by William Penn
2. The Apology, Phædo and Crito of Plato; The Golden Sayings of Epictetus; The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
3. Essays, Civil and Moral & The New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon; Areopagitica & Tractate on Education, by John Milton; Religio Medici, by Sir Thomas Browne
4. Complete Poems Written in English, by John Milton
5. Essays and English Traits, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
6. Poems and Songs, by Robert Burns
7. The Confessions of Saint Augustine; The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas á Kempis
8. Agamemnon, The Libation-Bearers, The Furies & Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus; Oedipus the King & Antigone of Sophocles; Hippolytus & The Bacchæ of Euripides; The Frogs of Aristophanes
9. On Friendship, On Old Age & Letters, by Cicero; Letters, by Pliny the Younger
10. Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
11. The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
12. Lives, by Plutarch
13. Æneid, by Vergil
14. Don Quixote, Part 1, by Cervantes
15. The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan; The Lives of Donne and Herbert, by Izaak Walton
16. Stories from the Thousand and One Nights
17. Fables, by Æsop; Household Tales, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm; Tales, by Hans Christian Andersen
18. All for Love, by John Dryden; The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan; She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith; The Cenci, by Percy Bysshe Shelley; A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, by Robert Browning; Manfred, by Lord Byron
19. Faust, Part I, Egmont & Hermann and Dorothea, by J.W. von Goethe; Dr. Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe
20. The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri
21. I Promessi Sposi, by Alessandro Manzoni
22. The Odyssey of Homer
23. Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr..
24. On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution & A Letter to a Noble Lord, by Edmund Burke
25. Autobiography & On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill; Characteristics, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh & Sir Walter Scott, by Thomas Carlyle
26. Life Is a Dream, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca; Polyeucte, by Pierre Corneille; Phædra, by Jean Racine; Tartuffe, by Molière; Minna von Barnhelm, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing; Wilhelm Tell, by Friedrich von Schiller
27. English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay
28. Essays: English and American
29. The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin
30. Scientific Papers
31. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
32. Literary and Philosophical Essays
33. Voyages and Travels: Ancient and Modern
34. Discourse on Method, by René Descartes; Letters on the English, by Voltaire; On the Inequality among Mankind & Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar, by Jean Jacques Rousseau; Of Man, Being the First Part of Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
35. The Chronicles of Jean Froissart; The Holy Grail, by Sir Thomas Malory; A Description of Elizabethan England, by William Harrison
36. The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli; The Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper; Utopia, by Sir Thomas More; The Ninety-Five Theses, Address to the Christian Nobility & Concerning Christian Liberty, by Martin Luther
37. Some Thoughts Concerning Education, by John Locke; Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists, by George Berkeley; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume
38. The Oath of Hippocrates; Journeys in Diverse Places, by Ambroise Paré; On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, by William Harvey; The Three Original Publications on Vaccination Against Smallpox, by Edward Jenner; The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever, by Oliver Wendell Holmes; On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery, by Joseph Lister; Scientific Papers, by Louis Pasteur; Scientific Papers, by Charles Lyell
39. Prefaces and Prologues
40. English Poetry I: Chaucer to Gray
41. English Poetry II: Collins to Fitzgerald
42. English Poetry III: Tennyson to Whitman
43. American Historical Documents: 1000–1904
44. Confucian: The Sayings of Confucius; Hebrew: Job, Psalms & Ecclesiastes; Christian I: Luke & Acts
45. Christian II: Corinthians I & II & Hymns; Buddhist: Writings; Hindu: The Bhagavad-Gita; Mohammedan: Chapters from the Koran [sic]
46. Edward the Second, by Christopher Marlowe; Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth & The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
47. The Shoemaker's Holiday, by Thomas Dekker; The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson; Philaster, by Beaumont and Fletcher; The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster; A New Way to Pay Old Debts, by Philip Massinger
48. Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works, by Blaise Pascal
49. Epic & Saga: Beowulf, The Song of Roland, The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel & The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs
50. Lectures on the Harvard Classics

The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction

The Harvard classics shelf of fiction, is selected by Charles W. Eliot, LLD (1834-1926), with notes and introductions by William Allan Neilson. It also features an index to Criticisms and Interpretations.

1 & 2 The History of Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding

3 A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne; Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

4 Guy Mannering, by Sir Walter Scott

5 & 6 Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray

7 & 8 David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

9 The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot

10 The Scarlet Letter & Rappaccini's Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne; Rip Van Winkle & The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving; Three Short Stories, by Edgar Allan Poe; Three Short Stories, by Francis Bret Harte; Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog, by Samuel L. Clemens; The Man Without a Country, by Edward Everett Hale

11 The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James

12 Notre Dame de Paris, by Victor Marie Hugo

13 Old Goriot, by Honoré de Balzac; The Devil's Pool, by George Sand; The Story of a White Blackbird, by Alfred de Musset; Five Short Stories, by Alphonse Daudet; Two Short Stories, by Guy de Maupassant

14 & 15 Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship & The Sorrows of Werther, by J. W. von Goethe; The Banner of the Upright Seven, by Gottfried Keller; The Rider on the White Horse, by Theodor Storm; Trials and Tribulations, by Theodor Fontane

16 & 17 Anna Karenin & Ivan the Fool, by Leo Tolstoy

18 Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

19 A House of Gentlefolk & Fathers and Children, by Ivan Turgenev

20 Pepita Jimenez, by Juan Valera; A Happy Boy, by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson; Skipper Worse, by Alexander L. Kielland

Quote

The Five-Foot Shelf, with its introductions, notes, guides to reading, and exhaustive indexes, may claim to constitute a reading course unparalleled in comprehensiveness and authority. --from Notes on the Lectures William Allan Neilson

Further reading and external links

• Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Journal of John Woolman, Fruits of Solitude (Harvard Classics, Part 1), Kessinger Publishing Company; (January 2004) ISBN 0766182088
• Harvard Classics 51 Volumes, P. F. Collier & Son, ISBN 1199606979
• Eliot, Charles W., ed. The Harvard Classics and Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. 1909–1917 (http://www.bartleby.com/hc/) Online version at Bartleby.com
• Great Books of the Western World ISBN 0852295316 37,000 pages
• The "Five-foot Shelf" Reconsidered (http://www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/110176.html), article by Adam Kirsch
• The New Book of Knowledge ISBN 071720538X 7,000,000 words
• Grolier Online The New Book of Knowledge Online Features (http://go.grolier.com/go-ol/static/features/nbkfeatrs.htm)