TWEM Basic List

[Sophia]

Here is the most basic list of the books Bauer recommends reading, broken down by subject. I've not yet included the additional poets she recommends, and the reference works are not yet in here. It was formatted in Excel, so the format may be a bit wonky.

The Well-Educated Mind Book List

NOVELS
Year published Title Author Ordered Received Read
1605 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes
1679 The Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan
1726 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
1815 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
1838 Oliver Twist Charles Dickens
1847 Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
1850 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
1851 Moby Dick Herman Melville
1851 Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe
1857 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
1866 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky
1877 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
1878 The Return of the Native Thomas Hardy
1881 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
1884 Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
1895 The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane
1902 The Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
1905 The House of Mirth Edith Wharton
1925 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
1925 Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf
1925 The Trial Franz Kafka
1940 Native Son Richard Wright
1942 The Stranger Albert Camus
1949 1984 George Orwell
1952 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison
1956 Seize the Day Saul Bellow
1967 100 Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1970 If on a winter's night a traveller Italo Calvino
1977 Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
1985 White Noise Don Delillo
1990 Possession A.S. Byatt


Autobiography and Memoir
Year published Title Author Ordered Received Read
400 Confessions Augustine of Hippo
1430 The Book of Margery Kempe Margery Kempe
1580 Essays Michele de Montaigne
1588 The Life of St. Teresa of Avila Teresa of Avila
1641 Meditations Rene Descartes
1666 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners John Bunyan
1682 The Narrative of Captivity and Restoration Mary Rowlandson
1781 Confessions Jean Jacques Rousseau
1791 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin
1854 Walden Henry David Thoreau
1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Harriet Jacobs
1881 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass
1901 Up from Slavery Booker T. Washington
1908 Ecce Homo Fredrich Neitzsche
1925 Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler
1929 An Autobiography: Stories of my Experiments with Truth Mohandas Ghandi
1933 An Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Gertrudd Stein
1948 The Seven Story Mountain Thomas Merton
1955 Surprised by Joy: The Story of my Early Life C.S. Lewis
1965 The Autobiography of Malcolm X Malcolm X
1973 Journal of a Solitude May Sarton
1973 The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
1977 Born Again Charles Colson
1982 Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez Richard Rodriguez
1989 The Road from Coorain Jill Ker Conway
1995 All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs Elie Wiesl


History and Politics
Year published Title Author Ordered Received Read
441 BCE The Histories Herodatus
400 BCE The Peloponesian War Thucydides
375 BCE The Republic Plato
731 The Ecclesiastical History of the English People Bede
1513 The Prince Niccolo Macchiavelli
1516 Utopia Sir Thomas More
1690 The End of Civil Government John Locke
1754 The History of England, Volume V David Hume
1762 The Social Contract Jean Jacques Rousseau
1776 Common Sense Thomas Paine
1776-1788 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Clinton
1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft
1835-1840 Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville
1848 Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
1860 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy Jacob Burkhardt
1903 The Souls of Black Folk W.E.B du Bois
1904 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber
1921 Queen Victoria Lytton Strachey
1937 The Road to Wigan Pier George Orwell
1939 The New England Mind Perry Miller
1955 The Great Crash 1929 John Kenneth Galbraith
1959 The Longest Day Cornelius Ryan
1963 The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan
1974 Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World Slaves Made Eugene D. Genovese
1978 A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century Barbara Tuchman
1987 All the President's Men Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
1988 The Battle Cry for Freedom: The Civil War Era James M. Mc Pherson
1990 A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
1992 The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fuykuyama


Drama
Year published Title Author Ordered Received Read
458 BCE Agamemnon Aeschylus
450 BCE Oedipus the King Sophocles
431 BCE Medea Euripides
400 BCE The Birds Aristophanes
330 BCE Poetics Aristotle
14th c Everyman
1588 Doctor Faustus Christopher Marlowe
1592-1593 Richard III William Shakespeare
1594-1959 A Midsummer Night's Dream William Shakespeare
1600 Hamlet William Shakespeare
1669 Tartuffe Moliere
1700 The Way of the World William Congreve
1773 She Stoops to Conquer Oliver Goldsmith
1777 The School for Scandal Richard Brinsley Sheridan
1879 A Doll's House Henrick Ibsen
1899 The Importance of Being Ernest Oscar Wilde
1904 The Cherry Orchard Anton Chekov
1924 Saint Joan George Bernard Shaw
1935 Murder in the Cathedral T.S. Eliot
1938 Our Town Thornton Wilder
1940 Long Day's Journey into Night Eugene O'Neill
1944 No Exit Jean Paul Sartre
1947 A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams
1949 Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller
1952 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett
1960 A Man for All Seasons Robert Bolt
1967 Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead Tom Stoppard
1974 Equus Peter Shaffer


POETRY
Year published Title Author Ordered Received Read
2000 BCE The Epic of Gilgamesh
800 BCE The Iliad and the Odyssey Homer
600 BCE Greek Lyrics Various
65-8 BCE Odes Horace
1000 Beowulf
1265-1321 Inferno Dante Alighieri
1350 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
1343-1400 The Canturbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer
1564-1616 Sonnets William Shakespeare
1572-1631 John Donne: The Complete English Poems John Donne
1600 Psalms: The King James Bible
1608-1674 Paradise Lost John Milton
1757-1827 Songs of Innocence and Experience William Blake
1770-1850 Selected Poetry of William Wordsworth William Wordsworth
1772-1834 Selected Poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1795-1821 John Keats: Complete Poems John Keats
1807-1882 Longfellow: Selected Works Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
1809-1883 Tennyson's Poetry Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1819-1892 Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman
1830-1886 Final Harvest: Emily Dickenson's Poems Emily Dickenson
1830-1894 Poems and Prose Christina Rosetti
1844-1889 Hopkins: Poems and Prose Gerard Manly Hopkins
1865-1939 The Collected Poems and Works of W.B. Yeats William Butler Yeats
1872-1906 The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar Paul Laurence Dunbar
1874-1963 The Poetry of Robert Frost Robert Frost
1878-1967 Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems Carl Sandburg
1883-1963 Selected Poems William Carlos Williams
1885-1972 Selected Poems of Ezra Pound Ezra Pound
1888-1965 The Wasteland and Other Poems T.S. Eliot
1902-19678 Selected Poems of Langston Hughes Langston Hughes
1907-1973 Selected Poems W.H. Auden