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

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

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