Mortimer J. Adler

Mortimer J. Adler was a Columbia philosopher who, with Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago, built the Great Books movement: the seminar, the reading lists, the Great Books Foundation, and the fifty-four volumes of Great Books of the Western World that Britannica published in 1952. The Syntopicon, two volumes indexing the set under a hundred and two great ideas, was his own contribution and took eight years and a staff of a hundred. How to Read a Book is still in print. He wrote into his nineties, converted to Christianity at eighty-one, and was the last public defender of the idea that there is a canon and everyone should read it.