The Well-Educated Mind

This is one of the 743 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.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
24 The Odyssey Homer -740 Greek Ancient greek
17010 Greek Lyrics Richmond Lattimore 1960 Greek English
3630 Odes John Keats 1820 British English
667 Beowulf Unknown 1000 Unknown Old english
29 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
7029 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Simon Armitage 2007 British Middle english
109 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1400 British Middle english
342 The Sonnets William Shakespeare 1609 British English
1236 The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne John Donne 1952 British English
13868 Book Of Psalms Alabaster Co. 2018 Unknown Hebrew
126 Paradise Lost John Milton 1667 British English
1226 Songs of Innocence and Experience William Blake 1789 British English
2151 The Poetical Works Of William Wordsworth William Wordsworth 1807 British English
6169 The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1828 British English
973 The Poems of John Keats John Keats 1817 British English
11520 The Poems Of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1845 American English
707 Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson Alfred Tennyson 1830 British English
76 Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman 1855 American English
156 Poems of Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson 1890 American English
4624 Christina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti 2001 British English
918 The Poems Of Gerard Manley Hopkins Gerald Manley Hopkins 1918 British English
268 Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats 1933 Irish English
5851 The Poems Of William Dunbar William Dunbar 1501 Scottish Middle scots
317 The Poems of Robert Frost Robert Frost 1913 American English
14897 The Complete Poems Of Carl Sandburg Carl Sandburg 1970 American English
9757 The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams 1986 American English
1441 The Cantos Ezra Pound 1933 American English
812 Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot T. S. Eliot 1963 British English
9679 The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes Langston Hughes 1994 American English
618 Poems of W. H. Auden W. H. Auden 1930 British English
13316 Hippocratic Corpus Hippocrates -429 Greek Greek
14669 Physics Aristotle -350 Greek Ancient greek
405 De Rerum Natura Lucretius 55 Roman Latin
15787 Commentariolus Nicolaus Copernicus 1514 Polish Latin
8501 Novum Organum Francis Bacon 1620 British Latin
863 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems Galileo 1632 Italian Italian
4635 Micrographia Robert Hooke 1665 British English
1015 Principia Mathematica Isaac Newton 1687 British Latin
15787 Discourse On The Revolutionary Upheavals On The Surface Of The Globe And On The Changes Which They Have Produced In The Animal Kingdom Georges Cuvier, Ian Johnston 1825 French French
15787 Principles Of Geology Charles Lyell 1830 British English
180 On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin 1859 British English
14701 Experiments on Plant Hybridization Gregor Mendel 1866 Austrian German
14701 The Origin Of Continents And Oceans Alfred Wegener 1915 German German
315 Relativity Albert Einstein 1916 German German
15787 The Origin And Development Of The Quantum Theory Max Planck 1922 German German
15787 Evolution Julian Huxley 1942 British English
3279 What Is Life? Erwin Schrödinger 1944 Austrian English
162 Silent Spring Rachel Carson 1962 American English
1364 The Naked Ape Desmond Morris 1967 British English
301 The Double Helix James D. Watson 1968 American English
2300 The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins 1976 British English
4969 The First Three Minutes Steven Weinberg 1977 American English
8391 On Human Nature E. O. Wilson 1978 American English
4802 Gaia James Lovelock 1979 British English
2661 The Mismeasure of Man Stephen Jay Gould 1981 American English
1473 Chaos James Gleick 1987 American English
1120 A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking 1988 British English
17010 T. Rex And The Crater Of Doom Walter Alvarez 1997 American English