Columbia Reading List, 1937-1938

Fall Semester

• Homer. Iliad.
• Herodotus. The Persian Wars.
• Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War.
• Aeschylus. Oresteia.
• Sophocles. Oedipus the King; Antigone.
• Euripides. Electra; Iphigenia in Taurus.
• Aristophanes. The Frogs; Plutus.
• Plato. Ion; Apology; Republic.
• Aristotle. The Poetics; The Ethics.
• Lucretius. On the Nature of Things.
• Aurelius. Meditations.
• Virgil. Aeneid.
• Augustine. Confessions.

Spring Semester

• Dante. Inferno.
• Machiavelli. The Prince.
• Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel.
• Montaigne. Essays.
• Shakespeare. Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2.
• Cervantes. Don Quixote.
• Milton. Paradise Lost.
• Spinoza. Ethics.
• Moliere. Tartuffe; The Misanthrope; The Physician in Spite of Himself.
• Swift. Gulliver's Travels.
• Fielding. Tom Jones.
• Rousseau. Confessions.
• Voltaire. Candide.
• Goethe. Faust, Part 1.

Source: Denby, David. Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. © 1996 by David Denby

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