"What books would you choose for a twenty-first century Harvard Classics?" the editors asked readers (November-December, page 56), inviting them to submit lists of 10 books, excluding various titles and authors deemed likely consensus choices. By press time, 38 lists were in hand. The book chosen most often was James Joyce's Ulysses (six times), followed by Lectures on Physics, by Richard Feynman (four). Some examples:
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
The Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus
Pensées, Blaise Pascal
Emma, Jane Austen
Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Le Rouge et le Noir, Stendhal
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust
--from Percy Crosby, Ph.D. '60, of Mesa, Arizona
Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
The Return of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen
The Man Born to Be King, He That Shall Come, and Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers
The Wasteland and Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
Women Artists 1550-1950, Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin
Feminism and Art History, Norma Broude and Mary Garrard
Rembrandt's Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies, Julius Held
John Adams, David McCullough
The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom
A Marginal Jew, John P. Meier
--from Alicia Craig Faxon, A.M. '53, of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
Childhood and Society, Erik Erikson
Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes
The Double Helix, James Watson
Our Town, Thornton Wilder
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber
The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche
Law in Modern Society, Roberto Unger
The Idea of a Christian Society, T.S. Eliot
Consilience, Edward O. Wilson
--from Richard B. Bloom '76, of Bristol, Pennsylvania
The History of the Persian Wars, Herodotus
The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki
The Story of the Stone, Cao Xueqin
The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio
City of God, Saint Augustine
Ulysses, James Joyce
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
--from Drew Chuppe '83, A.M. '88, G '90, of South Bend, Indiana
Selected Poems, Sappho
Selected Writings, Hildegard of Bingen
The Tale of Genji, Lady Murasaki
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir
The Princess of Clèves, Mme. de Lafayette
A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Beloved, Toni Morrison
Complete Poems, Emily Dickinson
--from Ann M. Moore '61, of Hampton, Virginia
The Human Comedy, Honoré de Balzac
I and Thou, Martin Buber
On War, Carl von Clausewitz
The Journey to the West, Wu Cheng'en
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Collected Poems, William Butler Yeats
--from a member of the class of '68 who wishes anonymity
From other lists: D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterly's Lover; Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes; Katharine Graham, Personal History; Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah; Heinrich Böll, Billiards at Half-Past Nine; Alfred C. Kinsley, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male; Tony Kushner, Angels in America; Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics; J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground; Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland; Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard.
