Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan

  • Anonymous (c2000 B.C.) The Epic of Gilgamesh
  • Homer (c800 B.C.) The Iliad
  • Homer (c800 B.C.) The Odyssey
  • Confucius (551-479 B.C.) The Analects
  • Aeschylus (525-456/5 B.C.) The Oresteia
  • Sophocles (496-406 B.C.) Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone
  • Euripides (484-406 B.C.) Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, Electra, The Bacchae
  • Herodotus (484-425 B.C.) The Histories
  • Thucydides (c470-400 B.C. The History of the Peloponnesian War
  • Sun-tzu (c450-380 B.C.) The Art of War
  • Aristophanes (448-388 B.C.) Lysistra, The Clouds, The Birds
  • Plato (428-348 B.C.) Selected Works
  • Aristotle (384-322) Ethics, Politics, Poetics
  • Mencius (400-320) The Book of Mencius
  • Valmiki (Attrib.to, c300 B.C.) The Ramayana
  • Vyasa (Attrib. to, C200 B.C.) The Mahabharata
  • Anonymous (c200 B.C.) The Bhagavad Gita
  • Ssu-ma Ch’ien (145-86 B.C.) Records of the Grand Historian
  • Lucretius (c100-50 B.C.) Of the Nature of Things
  • Virgil (70-19 B.C.) The Aeneid
  • Marcus Aurelius (121-180) Meditations
  • Saint Augustine (354-430) The Confessions
  • Kalidasa (c400) The Cloud Messenger, Sakuntala
  • Revealed to Mohammed (completed 650) The Koran
  • Hui-neng (638-713) The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
  • Firdausi (c940-1020) Shah Nameh
  • Sei Shonagon (c965-1035) The Pillow-Book
  • Lady Murasaki (c976-1015) The Tale of Genji
  • Omar Khayyam (1048-?) The Rubaiyat
  • Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) The Divine Comedy
  • Luo Kuan-chung (c1330-1400) The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
  • Geoffrey Chaucer (1342-1400) The Canterbury Tales
  • Anonymous (c1500) The Thousand and One Nights
  • Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) The Prince
  • Francois Rabelais (1483-1553) Gargantua and Pantagruel
  • Wu Ch’eng-en (Attributed to 1500-1582) Journey to the West
  • Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592 Selected Essays
  • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616) Don Quixote
  • William Shakespeare (1564-1616) Complete Works
  • John Donne (1573-1631) Selected Works
  • Anonymous (Published 1618) The Plum in the Golden Vase (Ching P’ing Mei)
  • Galileo Galilei (1574-1642) Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
  • Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) Leviathan
  • Rene Descartes (1596-1650) Discourse on Method
  • John Milton (1608-1674) Paradise Lost, Lycidas, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Sonnets, Aeropagitica
  • Moliere (1622-1673) Selected Plays
  • Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) Thoughts (Pensees)
  • John Bunyan (1628-1688) Pilgrim’s Progress
  • John Locke (1632-1704) Second Treatise of Government
  • Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) The Narrow Road to the Deep North
  • Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) Robinson Crusoe
  • Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) Gulliver’s Travels
  • Voltaire (1694-1778) Candide, and Other Works.
  • David Hume (1711-1776) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
  • Henry Fielding (1707-1754) Tom Jones
  • Ts’ao Hsueh-ch’in (1715-1763) The Dream of the Red Chamber (The Story of the Stone)
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) Confessions
  • Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) Tristam Shandy
  • James Boswell (1740-1795) The Life of Samuel Johnson
  • Thomas Jefferson and others Basic Documents in American History. Edited by Clinton Rossiter)
  • Hamilton, Madison, Jay The Federalist Papers. 1787 (Edited by Clinton Rossiter)
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) Faust
  • William Blake (1757-1827) Selected Works
  • William Wordsworth (1770-1850) The Prelude, Selected Shorter Poems, Preface to The Lyrical Ballads
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) The Ancient mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan, Biographia Literaria, Writings on Shakespeare
  • Jane Austen (1775-1817) Pride and Prejudice, Emma
  • Stendhal (1783-1842) The Red and the Black
  • Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, Cousin Bette
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Selected Works
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) The Scarlet Letter, Selected Tales
  • Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) Democracy in America
  • John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) On Liberty, The Subjection of Women
  • Charles Darwin (1809-1882) The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of Species
  • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (1809-1852) Dead Souls
  • Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) Short Stories and Other Works
  • William Makepeace Thackery (1811-1863) Vanity Fair
  • Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Hard Times, Our Mutual Friend, The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit.
  • Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) The Warden, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Eustace Diamonds, The Way We Live Now, Autobiography.
  • Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) Jane Eyre
  • Emily Bronte (1818-1848) Wuthering Heights
  • Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) Walden, Civil Disobedience
  • Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) Fathers and Sons
  • Karl Marx (1818-1883) & Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) The Communist Manifesto
  • Herman Melville (1819-1891) Moby Dick, Bartleby the Scrivener
  • George Eliot (1819-1880) The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch
  • Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Selected Poems, Democratic Vistas, Preface to the first issue of Leaves of Grass (1855), A Backward Glance O’er Travelled Roads
  • Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) Madame Bovary
  • Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
  • Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) War and Peace
  • Henrick Ibsen (1828-1906) Selected Plays
  • Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Collected Poems
  • Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass
  • Mark Twain (1835-1910) Huckleberry Finn
  • Henry Adams (1838-1918) The Education of Henry Adams
  • Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) The Mayor of Casterbridge
  • William James (1842-1910) The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism, Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious Experience
  • Henry James (1843-1916) The Ambassadors
  • Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, and other works.
  • Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) Selected Works Including The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Civilization and Its Discontents
  • George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Selected Plays and Prefaces
  • Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) Nostromo
  • Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Selected Short Stories.
  • Edith Wharton (1862-1937) The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth
  • William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Collected Poems, Collected Plays, Autobiography
  • Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) Kokoro
  • Marcel Proust (1871-1922) Remembrance of Things Past
  • Robert Frost (1874-1963) Collected Poems
  • Thomas Mann (1875-1955) The Magic Mountain
  • E. M. Forster (1879-1970) A Passage to India
  • Lu Hsun (1881-1936) Collected Short Stories
  • James Joyce (1882-1941) Ulysses
  • Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves
  • Franz Kafka (1883-1924) The Trial, The Castle, Selected Short Stories
  • D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) Sons and Lovers, Women in Love
  • Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965) The Makioka Sisters
  • Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
  • T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) Collected Poems, Collected Plays
  • Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) Brave New World
  • William Faulkner (1897-1962) The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying
  • Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) Short Stories
  • Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972) Beauty and Sadness
  • Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) Labyrinths, Dreamtigers
  • Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) Lolita; Pale Fire; Speak, Memory
  • George Orwell (1903-1950) Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Burmese Days
  • R. K. Narayan (1906-) The English Teacher, The Vendor of Sweets
  • Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape
  • W. H. Auden (1907-1973) Collected Poems
  • Albert Camus (1913-1960) The Plague, The Stranger
  • Saul Bellow (1915-) The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Hunboldt’s Gift
  • Aleksander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1918-) The First Circle, Cancer Ward
  • Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  • Mishima Yukio (1925-1970) Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-) One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • Chinua Achebe (1930-) Things Fall Apart