One Hundred Best Books for an Education (According to Will Durant)

Written By Walden Education
 

Can you spare an hour a day?

This is all Will Durant asks of us: “Let me have seven hours a week,” he promises, “and I will make a scholar and a philosopher out of you.”

Durant is one of the world’s greatest thinkers. His genius, along with that of his wife, Ariel, brought us the monumental series The Story of Civilization — eleven books amassing the collective history of humanity, written over four decades.

In a slim essay, Durant presents to the reader his list of one hundred books that promise to produce a meaningful, formative and comprehensive education.

As Durant was writing at the beginning of the 20th century, many of these books may be unfamiliar to the modern reader or difficult to find. However, even a brief collection of these books will afford a significant study.

As a final consideration, it should be noted that Durant subtitled his below collection “The Road to Freedom.”

I. Introductory

  1. The Outline of Science, J.A. Thomson

  2. The Human Body, Logan Clendening

  3. The New Dietetics, J.H. Kellogg (pp. 1-531, 975-1011)

  4. Principles of Psychology, William James

  5. Folkways, W.G. Sumner

  6. The Outline of History, H.G. Wells

  7. The Golden Bough, Sr Jas. Frazer

II. Asia and Africa

  1. The Human Adventure, Breasted & Robinson (vol. 1, ch. 2-7)

  2. The Wisdom of China, Brian Brown

  3. The Bible

  4. History of Art, Elie Faure

  5. History of Science, H.S. Williams

IV. Rome

  1. Lives, Plutarch

  2. On the Nature of Things, Lucretius

  3. The Aeneid, Virgil

  4. Mediations, Marcus Aurelius

  5. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

V. The Age of Christianity

  1. Rubaiyat, Omar Khayyam

  2. Heloise and Abelard, George Moore

  3. Divine Comedy, Dante

  4. History of English Literature, H. Taine

  5. Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

  6. Mont St. Michel and Chartres, H. Adams

  7. History of Music, C. Gray

VIII. Europe in the Seventeenth Century

  1. Reflections, La Rochefoucauld

  2. Molière

  3. Essays, Francis Bacon

  4. Paradise Lost, John Milton

  5. Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

  6. Ethics and On the Improvement of Understanding, Spinoza

IX. Europe in the Eighteenth Century

  1. Portraits of the 18th Century, Sainte-Beuve

  2. Works, Candide, Zadig, and Toleration and History, Voltaire

  3. Confessions, Rousseau

  4. Origins of Contemporary France, H. Taine

  5. The French Revolution, Carlyle

  6. Life of Samuel Johnson, Boswell

  7. Tom Jones, H. Fielding

  8. Tristram Shandy, L. Sterne

  9. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

  10. Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume

  11. Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft

  12. The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith

XI. America

  1. The Rise of American Civilization, C. and M. Beard

  2. Poems and Tales, Poe

  3. Essays, Emerson

  4. Walden, Thoreau

  5. Leaves of Grass, Whitman

  6. Letters and Speeches, Lincoln

XII. The Twentieth Century

  1. Jean Christophe, R. Rolland

  2. Studies in the Psychology of Sex, H. Ellis

  3. The Education of Henry Adams, H. Adams

  4. Creative Evolution, Bergson

  5. Decline of the West, O. Spengler

III. Greece

  1. History of Greece, J.B. Bury

  2. Histories, Herodotus

  3. The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides

  4. Lives of Illustrious Men, Plutarch

  5. Greek Literature, G. Murray

  6. The Iliad, Homer

  7. The Odyssey, Homer

  8. Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus

  9. Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone, Sophocles

  10. Euripides

  11. Lives of the Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius

  12. Dialogues, The Apology of Socrates, Phaedo, and The Republic, Plato

  13. Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle

  14. Politics, Aristotle

VI. The Italian Renaissance

  1. The Renaissance in Italy, J.A. Symonds

  2. Autobiography, B. Cellini

  3. Lives of the Painters and Sculptors, G. Vasari

  4. History of Modern Philosophy, H. Hoffding (sections on Bruno and Machiavelli)

  5. The Prince, Machiavelli

VII. Europe in the Sixteenth Century

  1. The Age of Reformation, P. Smith

  2. The Literature of France, E. Faguet

  3. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais

  4. Essays, Montaigne

  5. Don Quixote, Cervantes

  6. Shakespeare

X. Europe in the Nineteenth Century

  1. Napoleon, E. Ludwig

  2. Main Currents of 19th Century Literature, G. Brandes

  3. Faust, Goethe

  4. Conversations with Goethe, Eckermann

  5. Poems, Heine

  6. Poems, Keats

  7. Poems, Shelley

  8. Poems, Byron

  9. Père Goriot, Balzac

  10. Madame Bovary and Salambo, Flaubert

  11. Les Miserables, Hugo

  12. Penguin Isle, Anatole France

  13. Poems, Tennyson

  14. Pickwick Papers, Dickens

  15. Vanity Fair, Thackery

  16. Fathers and Sons, Turgenev

  17. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky

  18. War and Peace, Tolstoy

  19. Peer Gynt, Ibsen

  20. Descent of Man, Darwin

  21. Introduction to the History of Civilization in England, Buckle (ch. 1-15)

  22. Works, Schopenhauer

  23. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche

Images from Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904).

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