Great Books of the Western World by Great Books Foundation
Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volume...
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Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Waiting for Godot (pronounced /ˈɡɒdoʊ/) is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait for someone named Godot. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects...
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Animal Farm by George Orwell
Animal Farm is a dystopian novella by George Orwell. Published in England on 17 August 1945, the book reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II. Orwell, a democrat...
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The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber by Ernest Hemingway
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Set in Africa, it was published in the September 1936 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine concurrently with "The Snows of...
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Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht
Mother Courage and Her Children (German: Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder) is a play written in 1939 by the German dramatist and poet Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) with significant contributions from Ma...
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A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner
"A Rose for Emily" is a short story by American author William Faulkner first published in the April 30, 1930 issue of Forum. This story takes place in Faulkner's fictional city, Jefferson, in his ...
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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The novel chronicles an era that Fitzgerald himself dubbed the "Jazz Age". Following the shock and chaos of World War I, American society enjoyed unprecedented levels of prosperity during the "roar...
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Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill
Mourning Becomes Electra is a play cycle written by American playwright Eugene O'Neill. The play premiered on Broadway at the Guild Theatre on 26 October 1931 where it ran for 150 performances befo...
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The Prussian Officer by D. H. Lawrence
The Prussian Officer and Other Stories is a collection of early short stories by D. H. Lawrence which Duckworth, his London publisher, brought out on 26 November 1914. An American edition was produ...
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The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
The Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It is often cited as one of the seminal works of short fiction of the 20th century and is widely st...
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To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centering on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporality and psycholog...
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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a semi-autobiographical novel by James Joyce, first serialized in The Egoist from 1914 to 1915 and published in book form in 1916. It depicts the formativ...
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Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
The novella Death in Venice was written by the German author Thomas Mann, and was first published in 1912 as Der Tod in Venedig. It was first published in English in 1925 as Death in Venice and Oth...
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A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
Willa Cather's A Lost Lady was first published in 1923. It tells the story of Marian Forrester and her husband, Captain Daniel Forrester who live in the Western town of Sweet Water, along the Trans...
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In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Swann's Way, the first part of A la recherche de temps perdu, Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle, was published in 1913. In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work. The narr...
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Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello
Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore) is the most famous and celebrated play by the Italian writer Luigi Pirandello. The play is a satirical tragicomedy. It was ...
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Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov
Uncle Vanya (Russian: Дядя Ваня – Dyadya Vanya) is a tragicomedy by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov published in 1899. Its first major performance was in 1900 under the direction of Konstantin...
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Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The story details an incident when Marlow, an Englishman, took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Although Conrad does not specify the name of th...
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Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw
Saint Joan is a play by George Bernard Shaw, based on the life and trial of Joan of Arc. Published not long after the canonization of Joan of Arc by the Roman Catholic Church, the play dramatises b...
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The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James
The Beast in the Jungle is a 1903 novella by Henry James, first published as part of the collection, The Better Sort. Almost universally considered one of James' finest short narratives, this story...
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The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga
The Autumn of the Middle Ages, or The Waning of the Middle Ages, (published in 1919 as Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen and translated into English in 1924) is the best-known work by the Dutch historian ...
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The Golden Bough by James George Frazer
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). It first was ...
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The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was written by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. The book, generally considered to be his magnum opus, is largely credited with creatin...
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Genetics and the Origin of Species by Theodosius Dobzhansky
Genetics and the Origin of Species (ISBN 0-231-05475-0) is a 1937 book by the Ukrainian-American evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky and one of the important books of the modern evolutiona...
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What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger
What Is Life? is a non-fiction book on science for the lay reader written by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. One of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, Francis Crick, credited What Is Life? as a ...
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Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty pri...
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A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy
A 1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy. It concerns the aesthetics of mathematics with some personal content, and gives the layman an insight into the mind of a working mathematician.
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Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature by Niels Bohr
Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volume...
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The Expanding Universe by Arthur Eddington
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was a British astrophysicist of the early 20th century. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars...
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Relativity by Albert Einstein
In clear, concise language that is accessible to all, Albert Einstein's brilliant theory is explained and its implications discussed.
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An Introduction to Mathematics by Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead, OM (February 15, 1861 – December 30, 1947) was an English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of scien...
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The Word of God and the Word of Man by Karl Barth
Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volume...
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Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations is, along with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one of the two most influential works by the 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In it, Wittgenstein discus...
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The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
The Problems of Philosophy (1912) is one of Bertrand Russell's attempts to create a brief and accessible guide to the problems of philosophy. Focusing on problems he believes will provoke positive ...
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Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead, OM (February 15, 1861 – December 30, 1947) was an English mathematician who became a philosopher. He wrote on algebra, logic, foundations of mathematics, philosophy of scien...
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Experience in Education by John Dewey
Experiential education is a philosophy of education that focuses on the transactive process between teacher and student involved in direct experience with the learning environment and content. The ...
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The Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen
The Master Builder (Norwegian: Bygmester Solness) is a play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. It was first published in 1892 and first performed in Berlin on 19 January 1893.
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Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen
Hedda Gabler is a play first published in 1890 by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The play premiered in 1891 in Germany to negative reviews, but has subsequently gained recognition as a classic ...
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The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen
The Wild Duck (original Norwegian title: Vildanden) is an 1884 play by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen.
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A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen
A Doll's House is an 1879 play by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Written one year after The Pillars of Society, the play was the first of Ibsen's to create a sensation and is now perhaps his mo...
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Revered by all of the town's children and dreaded by all of its mothers, Huckleberry Finn is indisputably the most appealing child-hero in American literature. Unlike the tall-tale, idyllic worl...
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Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit is a serial novel by Charles Dickens published originally between 1855 and 1857. It is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period.
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Middlemarch by George Eliot
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, later Marian Evans. It is her seventh novel, begun in 1869 and then put aside during the final i...
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Emma by Jane Austen
Before she began the novel, Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like."[1] In the very first sentence she introduces the title character as "Emma Woodhouse, ...
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Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac
La Cousine Bette (English: Cousin Betty or Cousin Bette) is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who ...
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Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
De la démocratie en Amérique (published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840) is a classic French text by Alexis de Tocqueville on the United States in the 1830s and its strengt...
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Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil (German: Jenseits von Gut und Böse), subtitled "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future" (Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft), is a book by the German philosopher Friedrich N...
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Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard
Fear and Trembling (original Danish title: Frygt og Bæven) is an influential philosophical work by Søren Kierkegaard, published in 1843 under the pseudonym Johannes de silentio (John the Silent). T...
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Rameau's Nephew by Denis Diderot
Rameau's Nephew, or the Second Satire (French: Le Neveu de Rameau ou La Satire seconde) is an imaginary philosophical conversation written by Denis Diderot, probably between 1761 and 1772.
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Phèdre by Jean Racine
Phèdre (originally Phèdre et Hippolyte) is a dramatic tragedy in five acts written in alexandrine verse by Jean Racine, first performed in 1677.
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Bérénice by Jean Racine
Bérénice is a five-act tragedy by the French 17th-century playwright Jean Racine. Bérénice was not played often between the 17th and the 20th centuries. Today it is one of Racine's more popular pla...
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The Would-Be Invalid by Molière
The Imaginary Invalid (French: Le Malade imaginaire) is a three-act comedy by the French playwright Molière. It was first performed in 1673 and was the last work he wrote. Molière collapsed during ...
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The Would-Be Gentleman by Molière
Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (known as The Bourgeois Gentleman or The Middle-Class Gentleman) is a five-act comédie-ballet—a ballet interrupted by spoken dialogue—by Molière, first presented on October...
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The School for Wives by Molière
The School for Wives (French: L'école des femmes) is a theatrical comedy written by the 17th century French playwright Molière and considered by some critics to be one of his finest achievements. I...
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The Praise of Folly by Erasmus
The Praise of Folly (Greek title: Morias Enkomion (Μωρίας Εγκώμιον), Latin: Stultitiae Laus, sometimes translated as In Praise of Folly, Dutch title: Lof der Zotheid) is an essay written in 1509 by...
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Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin
Institutes of the Christian Religion (Institutio Christianae religionis) is John Calvin's seminal work on Protestant systematic theology. Highly influential in the Western world and still widely re...
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Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
Psychosocial developmentConsciousPreconsciousUnconsciousPsychic apparatusId, ego, and super-egoLibidoDriveTransferenceCountertransferenceEgo defensesResistanceProjection
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Thoughts for the Times on War and Death by Sigmund Freud
Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volume...
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Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety by Sigmund Freud
Psychosocial developmentConsciousPreconsciousUnconsciousPsychic apparatusId, ego, and super-egoLibidoDriveTransferenceCountertransferenceEgo defensesResistanceProjection
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The Ego and the Id by Sigmund Freud
"The Ego and the Id" is a prominent paper by the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. It is an analytical study of the human psyche outlining his theories of the psychodynamics of the id, ego, and super-eg...
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Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud
Psychosocial developmentConsciousPreconsciousUnconsciousPsychic apparatusId, ego, and super-egoLibidoDriveTransferenceCountertransferenceEgo defensesResistanceProjection
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A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud
Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volume...
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The Unconscious by Sigmund Freud
The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud is an essay by the psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, originally delivered as a talk on May 9, 1957 and later published in L...
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The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
This book introduces Freud's theory of the unconscious with respect to dream interpretation. Dreams, in Freud's view, were all forms of "wish-fulfillment" — attempts by the unconscious to resolve a...
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Observations on "Wild" Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud
Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volume...
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The Origin and Development of Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud
Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volume...
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The Odyssey by Homer
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work traditionally ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the m...
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The Suppliants by Aeschylus
The Suppliants (Greek: Ικέτιδες / Hiketides; also translated as "The Suppliant Maidens") is a play by Aeschylus. It was probably first performed sometime after 470 BC as the first play in a trilogy...
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The Persians by Aeschylus
The Persians is an Athenian tragedy by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus. First produced in 472 BCE, it is the oldest surviving play in the history of theatre. It dramatises the Persian respon...
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Seven Against Thebes by Aeschylus
The Seven against Thebes (Greek: Ἑπτά ἐπί Θήβας, Hepta epi Thēbas) is the third play in an Oedipus-themed trilogy produced by Aeschylus in 467 BC. It concerns the battle between an Argive army led ...
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Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus
Prometheus Bound is an Ancient Greek tragedy. In Antiquity, this drama was attributed to Aeschylus, but is now considered by some scholars to be the work of another hand, perhaps one as late as ca....
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Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles
Oedipus at Colonus is one of the three Theban plays of the Athenian tragedian Sophocles. It was written shortly before Sophocles' death in 406 BC and produced by his grandson (also called Sophocles...
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Oedipus the King by Sophocles
Oedipus the King is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles that was first performed c. 429 BC. It was the second of Sophocles's three Theban plays to be produced, but it comes first in the internal chron...
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Philoctetes by Sophocles
Philoctetes is a play by Sophocles (Aeschylus and Euripides also each wrote a Philoctetes but theirs have not survived). It was first performed at the Festival of Dionysus in 409 BC, where it won f...
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Women of Trachis by Sophocles
Women of Trachis (Ancient Greek: Τραχίνιαι, Trachiniai; also translated as The Trachiniae) is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles.
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The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
The History of the Peloponnesian War is an account of the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece, fought between the Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta) and the Delian League (led by Athens). It was ...
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The Histories of Herodotus by Herodotus
The Histories of Herodotus is considered one of the seminal works of history in Western literature. Written from the 450s to the 420s BC in the Ionic dialect of classical Greek, The Histories serve...
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Corpus Aristotelicum by Aristotle
The Corpus Aristotelicum is the collection of Aristotle's works that have survived from antiquity through Medieval manuscript transmission. These texts, as opposed to Aristotle's lost works, are te...
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Hippocratic Corpus by Hippocrates
The Hippocratic Corpus, Hippocratic Collection, or Hippocratic Canon, is a collection of around seventy early medical works from ancient Greece strongly associated with the ancient Greek physician ...
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The Complete Works of Plato by Plato
Plato (pronounced /ˈpleɪtoʊ/) (Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "broad") (428/427 BC[a] – 348/347 BC), was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the ...
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The Republic by Plato
The Republic is a Socratic dialogue by Plato, written c. 380 B.C.E.. It is one of the most influential works of philosophy and political theory, and Plato's best known work. In Plato's fictional di...
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Euclid's Elements by Euclid
Euclid's Elements (Greek: Στοιχεῖα) is a mathematical and geometric treatise consisting of 13 books written by the Greek mathematician Euclid in Alexandria circa 300 BC. It is a collection of defin...
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De Rerum Natura by Lucretius
De rerum natura is a first century BC epic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius with the goal of explaining Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. The poem, written in dactylic hexam...
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Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Meditations (Τὰ εἰς ἑαυτόν, Ta eis heauton, literally "thoughts/writings addressed to himself") is the title of a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius setting forth his ideas on Stoic phi...
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The Aeneid by Virgil
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the late 1st century BC (29–19 BC) that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the...
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Parallel Lives by Plutarch
Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, commonly called Parallel Lives or Plutarch's Lives, is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral vi...
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Annals by Cornelius Tacitus
The Annals (Latin: Annales) is a history book by Tacitus covering the reign of the four Roman Emperors succeeding to Caesar Augustus. The parts of the work that survived from antiquity cover most o...
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On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres by Nicolaus Copernicus
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), first printed in 1543 in Nuremberg, is the seminal work on the heliocentric theory of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicu...
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The Harmony of the Worlds by Johannes Kepler
Harmonices Mundi (Latin: The Harmony of the Worlds, 1619) is a book by Johannes Kepler. In the work Kepler discusses harmony and congruence in geometrical forms and physical phenomena. The final se...
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Confessions by Augustine
Confessions is the name of an autobiographical work, consisting of 13 books, by St. Augustine of Hippo, written between AD 397 and AD 398. Modern English translations of it are sometimes published ...
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Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas
The Summa Theologica (Latin: "Summary of Theology" or "Highest Theology") or the Summa Theologiæ or simply the Summa, written 1265–1274) is the most famous work of Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), al...
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The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the ...
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The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval literature. Translated here into modern English, these tales of a mo...
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The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Il Principe (The Prince) is a political treatise by the Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. Originally called De Principatibus (About Principalities), it was origi...
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Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly called Leviathan, is a book written by Thomas Hobbes which was published in 1651. It is titled after th...
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Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel (in French, La vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel) is a connected series of five novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It is the story of t...
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Essays by Michel de Montaigne
Essays is the title given to a collection of 107 essays written by Michel de Montaigne that was first published in 1580. Montaigne essentially invented the literary form of essay, a short subjectiv...
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The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's sonnets, or simply The Sonnets, is a collection of poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare that deal with such themes as time, love, beauty and mutability. They were proba...
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First Folio by William Shakespeare
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is the 1623 published collection of William Shakespeare's plays. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the First Folio. Printed in folio...
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Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud
Presents the renowned psychologist's ideas on sexual aberrations and the development and features of human sexuality during infancy and puberty
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The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
“For many successive generations now, ‘The Waste Land,’ ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ and ‘Four Quartets’ have continued to excited readers and to inspire young poets. Teenagers still disc...
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