Reading the "Five-foot Shelf" of Harvard Classics

A new book documents a Princetonian’s year-long immersion in the Harvard Classics, the venerable "Five-foot Shelf" of Great Books.

Princeton alumnus Christopher Beha records the life-affecting experience of reading his way straight through the "Five-foot Shelf" of Harvard Classics, the Great Books famously published in 1909 under the editorship of Harvard's towering president, Charles W. Eliot. Harvard Magazine contributing editor Adam Kirsch guided readers on a witty and urbane tour through the collection in "The 'Five-foot Shelf' Reconsidered," published in these pages in 2001.

Beha's book, The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else (Grove Press), was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review on June 28.

You might also like

Making Money Funny

Matt Levine’s spunky Bloomberg column

Reconstructing the Berlin Wall

David Leo Rice explores the strange, unseen forces shaping our world.

Off the Shelf

The wealth gap, shamanism, the life of David Nathan, and more

Most popular

Hold the Fries

Baked, boiled, and mashed potatoes are better.

What’s At Stake—Your Letters

Harvard Magazine readers respond to Harvard’s standoff with the Trump administration.

See Their Faces

Confronting “some of the most challenging images in the history of photography”

Explore More From Current Issue

A crowd of people shout and march during a nighttime demonstration, while a man and woman in the foreground hold two silver-colored pans above their heads and bang on them with sticks

Erica Chenoweth’s data shows how—and when—authoritarians fall.

Illustration of a tilted dollar bill with George Washington’s face, partially submerged in ocean waves under cloudy skies.

The preeminence of U.S. currency at risk

An illustration of a green leaf being hit by a beam of light and bouncing off the leaf and then becoming a color prisim

Light-based analysis of botanical collections link plants to Earth’s changing climate.