Great Books of the Western World

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

About this list

Great Books Foundation, 130 Books

Great Books of the Western World is a series of books originally published in the United States in 1952 by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. to present the western canon in a single package of 54 volume...

This list was originally published in 1990 and was added to this site over 12 years ago.

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Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
30 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
110 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1400 British Middle english
152 The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 Italian Italian
345 Leviathan Thomas Hobbes 1651 British English
145 Gargantua and Pantagruel Francois Rabelais 1532 French French
75 Essays Michel de Montaigne 1580 French French
343 The Sonnets William Shakespeare 1609 British English
129 First Folio William Shakespeare 1623 British English
2264 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Sigmund Freud 1905 Austrian German
111 The Waste Land T. S. Eliot 1922 British English