Great Books of the Western World

Great Books of the Western World is a 60-volume anthology published by Encyclopædia Britannica, first in 1952 (54 volumes, edited by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler) and in a revised second edition in 1990 (60 volumes, edited by Adler with Clifton Fadiman and Philip W. Goetz). The set grew out of the Great Books seminars at the University of Chicago and Columbia, and was chosen on three criteria: continuing relevance, rewarding re-reading, and participation in "the great conversation" about the ideas indexed in the Syntopicon. This file follows the 1990 second edition. Volumes 1 and 2 are the Syntopicon, Adler's two-volume index to 102 "Great Ideas" (his introductory essay The Great Conversation was issued as a separate unnumbered volume). Volumes 3 to 54 are arranged chronologically by the first author in each volume and labelled by author; volumes 55 to 60 are the twentieth-century additions, labelled by subject. The 1990 edition dropped Apollonius, Fielding, Sterne and Fourier, added Calvin, Erasmus, Molière, Racine, Voltaire, Diderot, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Balzac, Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, Twain and Ibsen, and updated many translations. The Bible is deliberately omitted. Very large collected volumes (the Greek dramatists, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Shakespeare, Freud) list the major works individually and roll the remainder into a note.