← the founders library

The Harvard Classics (Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf)

ed. Charles W. Eliot
Recommended by
Summary

A fifty-volume anthology of world literature compiled in 1909 by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, who claimed that every college graduate should have read its contents — and that anyone who read fifteen minutes a day from the set could obtain a liberal education. The collection spans philosophy, poetry, drama, history, and science, from Plato and Plutarch to Darwin and Franklin.