Significant Fiction

Thanks to the efforts of folks at Standard eBooks, Project Gutenberg, and elsewhere, there are now freely available versions of many out-of-copyright books. This page compiles some lists of 'best' or 'classic' works with a large fraction of titles available. Despite the name it also captures a great deal of nonfiction. Whether you're looking for a good novel, or doing a Great Books self-study, scroll on!

The 'Classics'

Mortimer Adler, an important figure in the development of the 'Great Books' concept, popularized a canon of five hundred books in this bestseller. From Mortimer Adler's list in How to Read a Book

Ancient (Prior to 500 CE)

• Homer - The Iliad; The Odyssey
• The Old and New Testaments
• Aeschylus - Tragedies
• Sophocles - Tragedies
• Herodotus - Histories
• Euripides - Tragedies
• Thucydides - History of the Peloponnesian War
• Hippocrates - Medical Writings
• Aristophanes - Comedies
• Plato - Dialogues
• Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics
• Epicurus - Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus
• Euclid - Elements
• Archimedes - Works
• Apollonius - Conics
• Cicero - Works
• Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
• Virgil - Aeneid
• Horace - Odes; The Art of Poetry
• Livy - History of Rome (Parts 2 and 3)
• Ovid - Metamorphoses
• Quintillian - Institutes of Oratory
• Plutarch - Parallel Lives and Moralia
• Tacitus - Annals; Histories
• Nicomachus of of Gerasa - Introduction to Arithmetic
• Epictetus - Discourses; Enchiridion
• Ptolmey - Almagest
• Lucian - Works
• Marcus Aurelius - Meditiations
• Galen - On the Natural Faculties
• Plotinus - The Enneads
• St. Augustine - On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine

Medieval (500-1450 CE)

• The Volsungs Saga
• Nibelungenlied
• The Song of Roland
• The Saga of Burnt Njal
• Maimonides - The Guide for the Perplexed
• St. Thomas Aquinas - Of Being and Essence; Summa Contra Gentiles; Of the Governance of Rulers; Summa Theologica
• Dante Alighieri - The New Life; On Monarchy; Divine Comedy
• Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron
• The Canterbury Tales
• Thomas a Kempis - The Imitation of Christ

Modern (After 1450 CE)

• Leonardo da Vinci - Notebooks
• Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince; Discourses on Livy
• Desiradus Erasmus - The Praise of Folly; Colloquies
• Nicolaus Copernicus - On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
• Thomas More - Utopia
• Martin Luther - Table Talk; Three Treatises
• Francois Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel
• John Calvin - Institutes of the Christian Religion
• Michel de Montaigne - Essays
• William Gilbert - On the Lodestone and Magnetic Bodies
• Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
• Edmund Spenser - Prothalamion; the Fairie Queene
• Francis Bacon - Essays; The Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum; New Atlantis
• William Shakespeare
  • Poetry
  • The Comedy of Errors
  • Romeo and Juliet
  • Much Ado About Nothing
  • Henry V
  • The Merry Wives of Windsor
  • The Tempest
• Galileo Galilei - Starry Messenger; Two New Sciences
• Johannes Kepler - The Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Harmonices Mundi
• William Harvey - On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; Generation of Animals
• Grotius - The Law of War and Peace
• Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan; Elements of Philosophy
• Rene Descartes - Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations of First Philosophy; Principles of Philosophy; The Passions of the Soul
• Corneille - The Cid; Cinna
• John Milton - Areopagitica; Paradise Lost; Samson Agoniste
• Moliere - The Miser; The School for Wives; The Misanthrope; The Doctor in Spite of Himself; Tartuffe; The Tradesman Turned Gentleman; The Imaginary Invalid; The Affected Ladies
• Blaise Pascal - The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises
• John Bunyan - The Pilgrim's Progress
• Boyle - The Skeptical Chymist
• Christiaan Huygens - Treatise on Light
• Benedict de Spinoza - Political Treatises; Ethics
• John Locke - A Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• Jean Baptiste Racine - Andromache; Phaedra; Athalie
• Isaac Newton - Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optiks
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays on Human Understanding; Monadology
• Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
• Jonathan Swift - The Battle of the Books; A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal
• William Congreve - The Way of the World
• George Berkeley - A New Theory of Vision; A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
• Alexander Pope - An Essay on Criticism; The Rape of the Lock; An Essay on Man
• Charles de Secondat - Persian Letters; The Spirit of the Law
• Voltaire - Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary
• Henry Fielding - Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones
• Samuel Johnson - The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; Lives of the Poets
• David Hume - A Treatise of Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Discourse on Inequality; On Political Economy; Emile: or On Education; The Social Contract; Confessions
• Laurence Sterne - Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy
• Adam Smith - The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations
• William Blackstone - Commentaries on the Laws of England
• Immanuel Kant - Critique of Pure Reason; Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgement; Perpetual Peace
• Edward Gibbon - Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography
• James Boswell - Journal; The Life of Samuel Johnson
• Antoine Laurent Lavoisier - Elements of Chemistry
• Federalist Papers; Articles of Confederation; United States Constitution; United States Declaration of Independence
• Jeremy Bentham - Comment on the Commentaries; Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions
• Johann Wolfgang Goethe - Faust; Poetry and Truth
• Thomas Robert Malthus - An Essay on the Principle of Population
• John Dalton - A New System of Chemical Philosophy
• Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier - Analytical Theory of Heat
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - The Phenomenology of Spirit; Science of Logic; Elements of the Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History
• William Wordsworth - Lyrical Ballads; The Prelude
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Biographia Literaria
• David Ricardo - On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
• Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice; Emma
• Carl von Clausewitz - On War
• Stendhal - The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love
• Francois Guizot - History of Civilization in France
• Lord Byron - Don Juan
• Arthur Schopenhauer - Studies in Pessimism
• Michael Faraday - The Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electriciy
• Nikolai Lobachevsky - Geometric Researches on the Theory of Parallels
• Charles Lyell - Principles of Geology
• August Comte - The Positive Philosophy
• Honore Balzac - Pere Goirot; Le Cousin Pons; Eugenie Grandet; Counsin Bette; Cesar Birotteau
• Ralph Waldo Emerson - Representative Men; Essays; Journal
• Victor Hugo - Les Miserables
• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
• Alexis de Tocqueville - Democracy in America
• John Stuart Mill - A System of Logic; Principles of Political Economy; On Liberty; Considerations on Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography
• Charles Darwin - The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography
• William Makepeace Thackeray - Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond; The Virginians; Pendennis
• Charles Dickens - Pickwick Papers; Our Mutual Friend; David Copperfield; Dombey and Son; Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Hard Times
• Claud Bernard - Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine
• George Boole - The Laws of Thought
• Henry David Thoreau - Civil Disobedience; Walden
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - Das Kapital; The Communist Manifesto
• George Eliot - Adam Bede; Middlemarch
• Herman Melville - Typee; Moby-Dick; Billy Budd
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov
• Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary; Three Stories
• Henry Thomas Buckle - A History of Civilization in England
• Francis Galton - Inquiries into Human Faculties and Its Development
• Bernhard Riemann - The Hypotheses of Geometry
• Henrik Ibsen - Peer Gynt; Brand; Hedda Gabler; Emperor and Galilean; A Doll's House; The Wild Duck; The Master Builder
• Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales
• Richard Dedekind - Theory of Numbers
• Wilhelm Wundt - Physiological Psychology; Outline of Psychology
• Mark Twain - The Innocents Abroad; Huckleberry Finn; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; The Mysterious Stranger
• Henry Adams - History of the United States; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; The Education of Henry Adams; Degredation of Democratic Dogma
• Charles Peirce - Chance, Love, and Logic; Collected Papers
• William Sumner - Folkways
• Oliver Wendell Holmes - The Common Law; Collected Legal Papers
• William James - The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; A Pluralistic Universe; Essays in Radical Empiricism
• Henry James - The American; The Ambassadors
• Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; On the Genealogy of Morality; The Will to Power; Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist
• Georg Cantor - Transfinite Numbers
• Jules Henri Poincare - Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method; The Foundations of Science
• Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Introduction to Psychoanalysis; Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; The Ego and the Id; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
• George Bernard Shaw - Plays
• Max Planck - Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography
• Henri Bergson - Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two Sources of Morality and Religion
• John Dewey - How We Think; Democracy and Education; Experience and Nature; The Quest for Certainty; Logic - The Theory of Inquiry
• Alfred North Whitehead - A Treatise on Universal Algebra; An Introduction to Mathematics; Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; The Aims of Education and Other Essays; Adventures of Ideas
• George Santayana - The Life of Reason; Scepticism and Animal Faith; The Realms of Being; Persons and Places
• Vladimir Lenin - Imperialism; The State and Revolution
• Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time
• Bertrand Russell - Principles of Mathematics; The Problems of Philosophy; Principia Mathematica; The Analysis of Mind; An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth; Human Knowledge, Its Scope and Limits
• Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain; Joseph and His Brothers
• Albert Einstein - The Theory of Relativity; Sidelights on Relativity; The Meaning of Relativity; On the Method of Theoretical Physics; The Evolution of Physics
• James Joyce - Dubliners; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses
• Jacques Maritain - Art and Scholasticism; The Degrees of Knowledge; Freedom and the Modern World; A Preface to Metaphysics; The Rights of Man and Natural Law; True Humanism
• Franz Kafka - The Trial; The Castle
• Arnold J. Toynbee - A Study of History; Civilization on Trial
• Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea; No Exit; Being and Nothingness
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The First Circle; Cancer Ward

Fiction

Modern Library Editors 100 Best Novels

• Sherwood Anderson - Winesburg, Ohio
• James Baldwin - Go Tell It on the Mountain
• Max Beerbohm - Zuleika Dobson
• Saul Bellow - Henderson the Rain King; The Adventures of Augie March
• Arnold Bennett - The Old Wives' Tale
• Elizabeth Bowen - The Death of the Heart
• Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky
• Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
• Samuel Butler - The Way of All Flesh
• James M. Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice
• Erskine Caldwell - Tobacco Road
• Willa Cather - Death Comes for the Archbishop
• John Cheever - The Wapshot Chronicles
• Joseph Conrad - The Secret Agent; Nostromo; Heart of Darkness; Lord Jim
• James Dickey - Deliverance
• E.L. Doctorow - Ragtime
• J.P. Donleavy - The Ginger Man
• Theodore Dreiser - Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy
• Lawrence Durrell - The Alexandria Quartet
• Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
• James T. Farrell - The Studs Lonigan Trilogy
• William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury; As I Lay Dying; Light in August
• F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night
• Ford Maddox Ford - The Good Soldier; Parade's End
• E.M. Forster - A Passage to India; Howards End; A Room With a View
• John Fowles - The Magus
• William Golding - Lord of the Flies
• Robert Graves - I, Claudius
• Henry Green - Loving
• Graham Greene - The Heart of the Matter
• Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
• Joseph Heller - Catch-22
• Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises; A Farewell to Arms
• Richard Hughes - A High Wind in Jamaica
• Aldous Huxley - Brave New World; Point Counter Point
• Henry James - The Wings of the Dove (& Part Two); The Ambassadors; The Golden Bowl
• James Jones - From Here to Eternity
• James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; Finnegans Wake
• William Kennedy - Ironweed
• Jack Kerouac - On the Road
• Rudyard Kipling - Kim
• Arthur Koestler - Darkness at Noon
• D.H. Lawrence - Sons and Lovers; The Rainbow; Women in Love
• Sinclair Lewis - Main Street
• Jack London - The Call of the Wild
• Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano
• Norman Mailer - The Naked and the Dead
• W. Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage
• Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
• Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer
• Iris Murdoch - Under the Net
• V.S. Naipaul - A House for Mr. Biswas; A Bend in the River
• Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita; Pale Fire
• John O'Hara - Appointment in Samarra
• George Orwell - 1984; Animal Farm
• John Dos Passos - U.S.A. Trilogy
• Walker Percy - The Moviegoer
• Anthony Powell - A Dance to the Music of Time (series)
• Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
• Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
• Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
• J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
• Muriel Spartk - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• Wallace Stegner - Angle of Repose
• John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath
• William Styron - Sophie's Choice
• Booth Tarkington - The Magnificent Ambersons
• Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five
• Robert Penn Warren - All the King's Men
• Evelyn Waugh - A Handfull of Dust; Scoop; Brideshead Revisited
• Nathanael West - The Day of the Locust
• Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence; The House of Mirth
• Thornton Wilder - The Bridge of San Luis Rey
• Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
• Richard Wright - Native Son

Textbooks

High quality, freely available resources for self study.

Mathematics

• Silvanus P. Thompson - Calculus Made Easy
• Jim Heffereon - Linear Algebra

Physics

• Richard Feynman - Lectures in Physics