The Gateway to the Great Books is a ten volume set of readings, designed as a preparatory set to the Great Books of the Western World.

Volume 1: Introduction; Syntopical Guide

• A letter to the reader
• Introduction
• Syntopical guide
• Appendices
  • A plan of graded reading
  • Recommended novels
  • Recommended anthologies of poetry

Volume 2: Imaginative Literature I

• Daniel Defoe
  • Robinson Crusoe (excerpts)
• Rudyard Kipling
  • “Mowgli’s Brothers” from The Jungle Book
• Victor Hugo
  • “The Battle with the Cannon” from Ninety-Three
• Guy de Maupassant
  • “Two Friends”
• Ernest Hemingway
  • “The Killers” from Men Without Women
• Sir Walter Scott
  • “The Two Drovers” from Chronicles of the Canongate
• Joseph Conrad
  • “Youth”
• Voltaire
  • Micromégas
• Oscar Wilde
  • “The Happy Prince” from The Happy Prince and Other Tales
• Edgar Allan Poe
  • “The Tell-Tale Heart”
  • “The Masque of the Red Death”
• Robert Louis Stevenson
  • The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
  • The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
• Charles Dickens
  • “A Full and Faithful Report of the Memorable Trial of Bardell against Pickwick” from The Pickwick Papers
• Nikolai Gogol
  • “The Overcoat”
• Samuel Butler
  • “Customs and Opinions of the Erewhonians” from Erewhon
• Sherwood Anderson
  • “I’m a Fool”
• Anonymous
  • Aucassin and Nicolette

Volume 3: Imaginative Literature II

• Stephen Crane
  • “The Open Boat”
• Herman Melville
  • “Billy Budd”
• Ivan Bunin
  • “The Gentleman from San Francisco”
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
• George Eliot
  • “The Lifted Veil”
• Lucius Apuleius
  • “Cupid and Psyche” from The Golden Ass
• Ivan Turgenev
  • “First Love”
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • “White Nights”
• John Galsworthy
  • “The Apple-Tree”
• Gustave Flaubert
  • “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitaller”
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”
• Honoré de Balzac
  • “A Passion in the Desert”
• Anton Chekhov
  • “The Darling”
• Isaac Singer
  • “The Spinoza of Market Street”
• Alexander Pushkin
  • “The Queen of Spades”
• D. H. Lawrence
  • “The Rocking-Horse Winner”
• Henry James
  • “The Pupil”
• Thomas Mann
  • “Mario and the Magician”
• Isak Dinesen
  • “Sorrow-Acre”
• Leo Tolstoy
  • “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”
  • “The Three Hermits”
  • “What Men Live By”

Volume 4: Imaginative Literature III

• Molière
  • The Misanthrope
  • The Doctor in Spite of Himself
• Richard Sheridan
  • The School for Scandal
• Henrik Ibsen
  • An Enemy of the People
• Anton Chekhov
  • The Cherry Orchard
• George Bernard Shaw
  • The Man of Destiny
• John Synge
  • Riders to the Sea
• Eugene O’Neill
  • The Emperor Jones

Volume 5: Critical Essays

• Virginia Woolf
  • “How Should One Read a Book?”
• Matthew Arnold
  • “The Study of Poetry”
  • “Sweetness and Light”
• Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
  • “What Is a Classic?”
  • “Montaigne”
• Francis Bacon
  • “Of Beauty”
  • “Of Discourse”
  • “Of Studies”
• David Hume
  • “Of the Standard of Taste”
• Arthur Schopenhauer
  • “On Style”
  • “On Some Forms of Literature”
  • “On the Comparative Place of Interest and Beauty in Works of Art”
• Friedrich Schiller
  • “On Simple and Sentimental Poetry”
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • “A Defense of Poetry”
• Walt Whitman
  • Preface to Leaves of Grass
• William Hazlitt
  • “My First Acquaintance with Poets”
  • “On Swift”
  • “Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen”
• Charles Lamb
  • “My First Play”
  • “Dream Children, a Reverie”
  • “Sanity of True Genius”
• Samuel Johnson
  • Preface to Shakespeare
• Thomas de Quincey
  • “Literature of Knowledge and Literature of Power”
  • “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”
• T. S. Eliot
  • “Dante”
  • “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

Volume 6: Man and Society I

• John Stuart Mill
  • “Childhood and Youth” from Autobiography
• Mark Twain
  • “Learning the River” from Life on the Mississippi
• Jean de La Bruyère
  • “Characters” from A Book of Characters
• Thomas Carlyle
  • ‘The Hero as King” from On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Thoreau”
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • “Sketch of Abraham Lincoln”
• Walt Whitman
  • “Death of Abraham Lincoln”
• Virginia Woolf
  • “The Art of Biography”
• Xenophon
  • “The March to the Sea” from The Persian Expedition
  • “The Character of Socrates” from Memorabilia
• William H. Prescott
  • “The Land of Montezuma” from The Conquest of Mexico
• Haniel Long
  • “The Power within Us”
• Pliny the Younger
  • “The Eruption of Vesuvius”
• Tacitus
  • “The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola”
• François Guizot
  • “Civilization” from History of Civilization in Europe
• Henry Adams
  • “The United States in 1800” from History of the United States of America
• John Bagnell Bury
  • “Herodotus” from The Ancient Greek Historians
• Lucian
  • “The Way to Write History”
• Great Documents
  • The English Bill of Rights
  • Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
  • The Virginia Declaration of Rights
  • The Declaration of Independence
  • Charter of the United Nations
  • Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Thomas Paine
  • “A Call to Patriots – December 23, 1776”
• George Washington
  • “Circular Letter to the Governors of All the States on Disbanding the Army”
  • “The Farewell Address”
• Thomas Jefferson
  • “The Virginia Constitution” from Notes on the State of Virginia
  • “First Inaugural Address”; “Biographical Sketches”
• Benjamin Franklin
  • “A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America”
  • “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania”
• Jean de Crevecoeur
  • “The Making of Americans” from Letters from an American Farmer
• Alexis de Tocqueville
  • “Observations on American Life and Government” from Democracy in America
• Henry David Thoreau
  • “Civil Disobedience”
  • “A Plea for Captain John Brown”
• Abraham Lincoln
  • “Address at Cooper Institute”
  • “First Inaugural Address”
  • “Letter to Horace Greeley”
  • “Meditation on the Divine Will”
  • “The Gettysburg Address”
  • “Second Inaugural Address”
  • “Last Public Address”

Volume 7: Man and Society II

• Francis Bacon
  • “Of Youth and Age”
  • “Of Parents and Children”
  • “Of Marriage and Single Life”
  • “Of Great Place”
  • “Of Seditions and Troubles”
  • “Of Custom and Education”
  • “Of Followers and Friends”
  • “Of Usury”
  • “Of Riches”
• Jonathan Swift
  • “Resolutions when I Come to Be Old”
  • “An Essay on Modern Education”
  • “A Meditation upon a Broomstick”
  • “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country”
• David Hume
  • “Of Refinement in the Arts”
  • “Of Money”
  • “Of the Balance of Trade”
  • “Of Taxes”
  • “Of the Study of History”
• Plutarch
  • “Of Bashfulness”
• Robert Louis Stevenson
  • “The Lantern-Bearers” from Across the Plains
• John Ruskin
  • “An Idealist’s Arraignment of the Age” from Four Clavigera
• William James
  • “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings”
  • “The Energies of Men”
  • “Great Men and Their Environment”
• Arthur Schopenhauer
  • “On Education”
• Michael Faraday
  • “Observations on Mental Education”
• Edmund Burke
  • “Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol”
• John Calhoun
  • “The Concurrent Majority”
• Thomas Babington Macaulay
  • “Machiavelli”
• Voltaire
  • “English Men and Ideas” from Letters on the English
• Dante
  • “On World Government” from De Monarchia
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • “A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe”
• Immanuel Kant
  • “Perpetual Peace”
• Carl von Clausewitz
  • “What Is War?” from On War
• Thomas Robert Malthus
  • “The Principle of Population” from Population: The First Essay

Volume 8: Natural Science

• Francis Bacon
  • “The Sphinx”
• John Tyndall
  • “Michael Faraday” from Faraday as a Discoverer
• Ève Curie
  • “The Discovery of Radium” from Madame Curie
• Charles Darwin
  • “Autobiography”
• Jean-Henri Fabre
  • “A Laboratory of the Open Fields”
  • “The Sacred Beetle”
• Loren Eiseley
  • “On Time”
• Rachel Carson
  • “The Sunless Sea” from The Sea Around Us
• J. B. S. Haldane
  • “On Being the Right Size” from Possible Worlds
• Thomas Henry Huxley
  • “On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals”
  • “On a Piece of Chalk”
• Francis Galton
  • “The Classification of Human Ability” from Hereditary Genius
• Claude Bernard
  • “Experimental Considerations Common to Living Things and Inorganic Bodies”
• Ivan Pavlov
  • “Scientific Study of the So-called Psychical Processes in the Higher Animals”
• Friedrich Wöhler
  • “On the Artificial Production of Urea”
• Charles Lyell
  • “Geological Evolution” from Principles of Geology
• Galileo
  • “The Starry Messenger”
• Tommaso Campanella
  • “Arguments for and against Galileo” from The Defense of Galileo
• Michael Faraday
  • The Chemical History of a Candle
• Dmitri Mendeleev
  • “The Genesis of a Law of Nature” from The Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements
• Hermann von Helmholtz
  • “On the Conservation of Force”
• Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld
  • “The Rise and Decline of Classical Physics” from The Evolution of Physics
• Arthur Eddington
  • “The Running-Down of the Universe” from Nature and the Physical World
• James Jeans
  • “Beginnings and Endings” from The Universe Around Us
• Kees Boeke
  • “Cosmic View”

Volume 9: Mathematics

• Lancelot Hogben
  • “Mathematics, the Mirror of Civilization” from Mathematics for the Million
• Andrew Russell Forsyth
  • “Mathematics, in Life and Thought”
• Alfred North Whitehead
  • “On Mathematical Method” from An Introduction to Mathematics
  • “On the Nature of a Calculus”
• Bertrand Russell
  • “The Study of Mathematics”
  • “Mathematics and the Metaphysicians”
  • “Definition of Number”
• Edward Kasner and James R. Newman
  • “New Names for Old”
  • “Beyond the Googol”
• Tobias Dantzig
  • “Fingerprints”
  • “The Empty Column”
• Leonhard Euler
  • “The Seven Bridges of Königsberg “
• Norman Robert Campbell
  • “Measurement”
  • “Numerical Laws and the Use of Mathematics in Science”
• William Clifford
  • “The Postulates of the Science of Space”
• Henri Poincaré
  • “Space”
  • “Mathematical Creation”
  • “Chance”
• Pierre-Simon Laplace
  • “Probability” from A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities
• Charles Sanders Peirce
  • “The Red and the Black”

Volume 10: Philosophical Essays

• John Erskine
  • “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent”
• William Clifford
  • “The Ethics of Belief”
• William James
  • “The Will to Believe”
  • “The Sentiment of Rationality”
• John Dewey
  • “The Process of Thought” from How We Think
• Epicurus
  • “Letter to Herodotus”
  • “Letter to Menoeceus”
• Epictetus
  • The Enchiridion
• Walter Pater
  • “The Art of Life” from The Renaissance
• Plutarch
  • “Contentment”
• Cicero
  • “On Friendship”
  • “On Old Age”
• Francis Bacon
  • “Of Truth”
  • “Of Death”
  • “Of Adversity”
  • “Of Love”
  • “Of Friendship”
  • “Of Anger”
• George Santayana
  • “Lucretius”
  • “Goethe’s Faust”
• Henry Adams
  • “St. Thomas Aquinas” from Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
• Voltaire
  • “The Philosophy of Common Sense”
• John Stuart Mill
  • “Nature”
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Nature”
  • “Self-Reliance”
  • “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic”
• William Hazlitt
  • “On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth”
• Thomas Browne
  • “Immortality” from Urn-Burial