The Well-Educated Mind

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

Book, 178 Books

In her best-selling work on home education, The Well-Trained Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children; that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In The Well-Educated Mind, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading. Followed carefully, her advice will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.

This list was originally published in 2003 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

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Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
551 Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan 1678 British English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
339 The Adventures of Oliver Twist Charles Dickens 1837 British English
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
74 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
184 Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe 1852 American English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
739 The Return of the Native Thomas Hardy 1878 British English
73 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
552 The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane 1895 American English
31 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899 British English
217 The House of Mirth Edith Wharton 1905 American English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
32 Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf 1925 British English
21 The Trial Franz Kafka 1925 Czech German
107 Native Son Richard Wright 1940 American English
23 The Stranger Albert Camus 1942 French French
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
2733 Seize The Day Saul Bellow 1956 American English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
318 If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino 1979 Italian Italian
260 Song of Solomon Toni Morrison 1977 American English
364 White Noise Don DeLillo 1985 American English
718 Possession A. S. Byatt 1990 British English
290 The Road Cormac McCarthy 2006 American English
133 Confessions Augustine 397 Roman Latin
2692 The Book Of Margery Kempe Margery Kempe 1436 British Middle english
75 Essays Michel de Montaigne 1580 French French
2721 The Life Of Saint Teresa Of Avila By Herself Teresa of Avila 1588 Spanish Spanish
1030 Meditations on First Philosophy Rene Descartes 1641 French Latin
15910 Grace Abounding To The Chief Of Sinners John Bunyan 1666 British English
15910 Narrative Of The Captivity And Restoration Of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson Mary White Rowlandson 1682 American English
275 The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1782 French French
689 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin 1791 American English
913 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass 1845 American English
108 Walden Henry David Thoreau 1854 American English
2003 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Harriet Jacobs 1861 American English
906 Up from Slavery Booker T. Washington 1901 American English
3222 Ecce Homo Friedrich Nietzsche 1908 German German
716 Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler 1925 German German
1573 The Story Of My Experiments With Truth Mahatma Gandhi 1927 Indian Gujarati
395 The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Gertrude Stein 1933 American English
1068 The Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton 1948 American English
14930 Surprised By Joy C. S. Lewis 1955 British English
306 The Autobiography of Malcolm X Alex Haley 1965 American English
521 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou 1969 American English
14232 Journal Of A Solitude May Sarton 1973 American English
206 The Gulag Archipelago Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1973 Russian Russian
17152 Born Again Charles W. Colson 1976 British English
14232 Hunger of Memory Richard Rodriguez 1982 American English
5773 The Road from Coorain Jill Ker Conway 1989 Australian English
17152 All Rivers Run To The Sea Elie Wiesel 1995 American French
624 The Histories of Herodotus Herodotus -450 Greek Ancient greek
596 The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides -410 Greek Ancient greek
220 The Republic Plato -379 Greek Ancient greek
334 Parallel Lives Plutarch 100 Greek Greek
1459 The City of God Augustine 413 Roman Latin
14777 Ecclesiastical History Of The English People Bede 731 British Latin
152 The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 Italian Italian
881 Utopia Thomas More 1516 British Latin
952 Two Treatises of Government John Locke 1689 British English
10629 History Of England David Hume 1754 British English
527 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762 French French
3424 Common Sense Thomas Paine 1776 British English
830 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon 1776 British English
774 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft 1792 British English
229 Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville 1835 French French
324 Communist Manifesto Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels 1848 German German
1583 The Civilization Of The Renaissance In Italy Jacob Burckhardt 1860 Swiss German
557 The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois 1903 American English
911 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber 1905 German German
14211 Queen Victoria Lytton Strachey 1921 British English
10635 The Road to Wigan Pier George Orwell 1937 British English
15910 The New England Mind Perry Miller 1939 American English
14159 The Great Crash, 1929 John Kenneth Galbraith 1955 Canadian English
14898 The Longest Day Cornelius Ryan 1959 American English
709 The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan 1963 American English
2472 Roll, Jordan, Roll Eugene Genovese 1974 American English
3249 A Distant Mirror Barbara Wertheim Tuchman 1978 American English
3148 All the President's Men Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein 1974 American English
2382 Battle Cry of Freedom James M. McPherson 1988 American English
9847 A Midwife's Tale Laurel Thatcher Ulrich 1990 American English
3952 The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama 1992 American English
285 Oresteia Aeschylus -458 Greek Ancient greek
106 Oedipus the King Sophocles -429 Greek Ancient greek
307 Medea Euripides -431 Greek Ancient greek
1383 The Birds Aristophanes -414 Greek Ancient greek
1297 Poetics Aristotle -322 Greek Greek
11628 Everyman Philip Roth 2006 American English
627 The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus Christopher Marlowe 1604 British English
950 Richard III William Shakespeare 1592 British English
1661 A Midsummer Night's Dream William Shakespeare 1595 British English
71 Hamlet William Shakespeare 1600 British English
984 Tartuffe Molière 1664 French French
4787 The Way Of The World William Congreve 1700 British English
3921 She Stoops to Conquer Oliver Goldsmith 1773 British English
4091 The School For Scandal Richard Brinsley Sheridan 1777 British English
424 A Doll's House Henrik Ibsen 1879 Norwegian Norwegian
1382 The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde 1895 Irish English
877 The Cherry Orchard Anton Chekhov 1904 Russian Russian
4667 Saint Joan George Bernard Shaw 1923 Irish English
2490 Murder In The Cathedral T. S. Eliot 1935 British English
3052 Our Town Thornton Wilder 1938 American English
1305 Long Day's Journey Into Night Eugene O'Neill 1956 American English
1409 No Exit Jean Paul Sartre 1944 French French
599 A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams 1947 American English
428 Death Of A Salesman Arthur Miller 1949 American English
101 Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett 1953 Irish French
2724 A Man For All Seasons Robert Bolt 1960 American English
3182 Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead Tom Stoppard 1966 British English
14931 Equus Peter Shaffer 1973 British English
264 The Epic Of Gilgamesh Unknown -2100 Multiple Akkadian
37 The Iliad Homer -750 Greek Ancient greek