In 1910, Dr. Charles W. Eliot, then President of Harvard University, put together an extraordinary library of "all the books needed for a real education."
This honored collection encompasses more than 2,000 years of the world's greatest poetry, drama, history, philosophy, scripture, and more. The full 50-volume set brings together more than 1,850 works by over 300 masters of thought and letters, and includes Dr. Eliot's Reader's Guide and a General Index containing upwards of 18,000 entries.
The following are books included in the leather bound Harvard Classics as published by the Easton Press. The Harvard Classics was formerly known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf of Knowledge and contains a total of 50 books.
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The Easton Press produced two versions of The Harvard Classics:
Millennium Edition, Publication Dated 1993 to 1994
Standard Edition, Publication Dated 2001
Dr. Eliot's Editor Introduction, Reader's Guide and General Index
The Divine Comedy: Hell, Purgatory, Paradise by Dante Alighieri
Folk-Lore and Fable of Aesop, Grimm and Andersen
The Confessions of St. Augustine, The Imitation of Christ
Francis Bacon, John Milton’s Prose, Thomas Browne
Pilgrim’s Progress - John Bunyan / The Lives of John Donne and George Herbert by Izaak Walton
On the Sublime, The French Revolution by Edmund Burke
Robert Burns’ Poems and Songs
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
Don Quixote of the Mancha by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
Letters of Marcus Tullius Cicero / Letters of Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus
Two Years Before the Mast and Twenty-Four Years After by Henry Richard Dana
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
Works of Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau and Hobbes
Essays and English Traits of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Scientific Papers of Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin and others
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin / John Woolman Journal / Fruits of Solitude by William Penn
Faust, Egmont Herman and Dorothea by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe Faust / Christopher Marlowe by Dr. Faustus
Chronicle and Romance: Froissart, Malory, Holinshed
Scientific Papers of Harvey, Jenner, Lister, Pasteur
The Odyssey by Homer
English Philosophers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Locke, Berkeley, Hume
The Prince - Machiavelli / Utopia - Thomas More / 29 Essays by Martin Luther
I Promessi Sposi by Alessandro Manzoni
Autobiography of John Stuart Mill / Essays and Addresses on Liberty by Thomas Carlyle
Complete Poems in English of John Milton
Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, Renan: Essays
Thoughts, Letters and Minor Works of Blaise Pascal
Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius
Plutarch’s Lives
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Virgil’s Aeneid
American Historical Documents
Arabian Nights, The Thousand and One Nights
Continental Drama - Various Authors
Elizabethan Drama by Various Authors (2 volumes)
English Essays: Sidney to Macaulay
English Poetry by Various Authors (3 volumes)
Epic and Saga by Various Authors
Essays, English and American
Modern English Drama by Various Authors
Nine Greek Dramas by Various Authors
Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books by Various Authors
Sacred Writings: Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan (2 volumes)
Voyages and Travels by Various Authors
The Harvard Classics, originally known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, is a 51-volume anthology of classic works from world literature, compiled and edited by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot that was first published in 1909.
Eliot, then President of Harvard University, had stated in speeches that the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 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 to make good on this statement by selecting an appropriate collection of works; the Harvard Classics was the result. Eliot worked for one year together with William A. Neilson, a professor of English; Eliot determined the works to be included and Neilson selected the specific editions and wrote introductory notes. Each volume had 400 to 450 pages or so; and the included texts are "so far as possible, entire works or complete segments of the world's written legacies."
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." A separate 20-volume selection by Eliot, the Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction, was published in 1917.
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.
Additional information and source: Harvard Classics