Harvard Classics: Complete 51-Volume Anthology

A 51-Volume Library of Western Literature, Philosophy, Science, History, and Political ThoughtBy Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Thomas Carlyle, Plato, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Charles Darwin, Martin Luther, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Euripides, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles Lamb, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Johnson, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, Joseph Addison, John Locke, John Fletcher, Francis Beaumont, Leigh Hunt, Epictetus, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jonathan Swift, Christopher Marlowe, Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, William Hazlitt, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Daniel Defoe, Aesop, Richard Henry Dana, John Dryden, Philip Massinger, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, John Ruskin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ernest Renan, Robert Burns, David Garrick, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Webster, Izaak Walton, John Bunyan, James Russell Lowell, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Homer, Edmund Burke, Plutarch, Molière, Aeschylus, Michael Faraday, Sophocles, William Makepeace Thackeray, Benjamin Franklin, Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, Voltaire, Robert Browning, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Dekker, John Milton, Aristophanes, Blaise Pascal, Virgil, Simon Newcomb, William Penn, Walter Bigges, Philip Sidney, Herodotus, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Giuseppe Mazzini, Francis Pretty, George Berkeley, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Alessandro Manzoni, Abraham Cowley, Michel de Montaigne, Ben Jonson, John Woolman, Benvenuto Cellini, Sydney Smith, Jean Froissart, William Henry Harrison, William Harvey, Marcus Aurelius, Hans Christian Andersen, Thomas Malory, George Gordon Byron, Thomas à Kempis, Richard Steele, Thomas Browne, Archibald Geikie, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Tacitus, William Roper, Hippocrates, Miguel de Cervantes, Thomas More, Friedrich von Schiller, Philip Nichols, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Pliny the Younger, Edgar Alan Poe, Saint Augustine, Brinsley Sheridan, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, Francis Drake, Edward Haies, Niccolo Machiavelli, Ambroise Paré, William A. Neilson

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The Harvard Classics: Complete 51-Volume Anthology assembles a capacious Western canon across philosophy, drama, poetry, history, scientific inquiry, political thought, autobiography, sermon, essay, and tale. Moving from classical epic and tragedy through Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment criticism, Romantic lyric, and modern scientific prose, it places foundational texts beside vivid shorter works: dialogues, fables, travel narratives, speeches, and experiments in reflective prose. Its range makes literature inseparable from the intellectual histories that shaped it. Edited within an early twentieth-century ideal of liberal education, the collection brings together Greek and Roman writers, medieval and Renaissance figures, and influential British, European, and American voices. Philosophers of ethics and government converse with reformers, theologians, dramatists, naturalists, historians, and inventors. The anthology thus traces major currents—classicism, Christian humanism, the Reformation, empiricism, Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism, liberal thought, and scientific modernity—while revealing both their continuities and tensions. Though canon-forming in its historical selection, its breadth illuminates the traditions through which "great books" were defined. This volume set rewards readers seeking a sustained education in comparative reading. It offers exceptional opportunities to connect arguments about liberty, faith, knowledge, nature, beauty, and civic responsibility across genres and centuries. Students, scholars, and independent readers alike will find a rich archive for examining literary form, intellectual influence, and the ongoing dialogue between imaginative expression and public thought.