Charles W. Eliot

Charles W. Eliot was president of Harvard for forty years, from 1869, and made it a modern university with the elective system, graduate schools and a research faculty. Challenged after his retirement to name the books that would give a liberal education to anyone willing to read fifteen minutes a day, he chose the fifty volumes of the Harvard Classics that Collier published in 1909, and wrote the Editor’s Introduction and Reader’s Guide that explains the choice. The five-foot shelf sold hundreds of thousands of sets and is the ancestor of every later Great Books list.