Gateway to the Great Books

Gateway to the Great Books is a 10-volume series of books originally published by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. in 1963 and edited by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins. The set was designed as an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World, published by the same organization and editors in 1952. The set included selections – short stories, plays, essays, letters, and extracts from longer works – by more than one hundred authors. The selections were generally shorter and in some ways simpler than the full-length books included in the Great Books.

A number of authors in the Great Books set – such as Plutarch, Epictetus, Tacitus, Dante, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin and William James – were also represented by shorter works in the Gateway volumes. And several Gateway readings discussed authors in the Great Books series. For instance, a selection from Henry Adams' Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres critiqued the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Indeed, many writers in the Gateway set were eventually "promoted" to the second edition (1990) of the Great Books, such as , Molière, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein and John Dewey.

...
Wikipedia