Great books

The great books are books that are thought to constitute an essential foundation in the literature of Western culture. Specified sets of great books typically range from 100–150, though they differ according to purpose and context. For instance, some lists are built to be read by undergraduates in a college semester system (130 books, Torrey Honors Institute), some are compiled to be sold as a single set of volumes (500 books, Mortimer Adler), while some lists aim at a thorough literary criticism (2,400 books, Harold Bloom).

The great books are those that tradition, and various institutions and authorities, have regarded as constituting or best expressing the foundations of Western culture (the Western canon is a similar but broader designation); derivatively the term also refers to a curriculum or method of education based around a list of such books. Mortimer Adler lists three criteria for including a book on the list:

Thomas Jefferson, well known for his interest in higher education, frequently composed great books lists for his friends and correspondents, for example, for Peter Carr in 1785 and again in 1787.

In 1909, Harvard University published a 51-volume great books series, titled the Harvard Classics. These volumes are now in the public domain.

The Great Books of the Western World came about as the result of a discussion among American academics and educators, starting in the 1920s and 1930s and begun by Prof. John Erskine of Columbia University, about how to improve the higher education system by returning it to the western liberal arts tradition of broad cross-disciplinary learning. These academics and educators included Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, Jacques Barzun, and Alexander Meiklejohn. The view among them was that the emphasis on narrow specialization in American colleges had harmed the quality of higher education by failing to expose students to the important products of Western civilization and thought.

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