The Great Books Foundation is an independent, nonprofit educational organization whose mission is to provide people of all ages with the opportunity to read, discuss, and learn from outstanding works of literature.

Founded in 1947 the Foundation was established to encourage lifelong learning for all citizens. As part of a grass-roots movement to promote continuing education beyond the classroom, the Foundation aimed to provide opportunities for all Americans to participate in a "Great Conversation" of some of the world's best writing.

An estimated 15,000 adults participate in more than 850 Great Books discussion groups that meet regularly in libraries, homes, schools, and community centers.

Below is a selection of titles discussed by the Great Books Foundation. For more information visit their website at: http://www.greatbooks.org

Ecclesiastes-KJV By Lessing, Doris May 1999/10 - Grove Press 9780802136145 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection The publication of the King James version of the Bible, translated between 1603 and 1611, coincided with an extraordinary flowering of English literature and is universally acknowledged as the greatest influence on English-language literature in history. Now, world-class literary writers introduce the book of the King James Bible in a series of beautifully designed, small-format volumes. The introducers' passionate, provocative, and personal engagements with the spirituality and the language of the text make the Bible come alive as a stunning work of literature and remind us of its overwhelming contemporary relevance. ...More

Oedipus the King: Sophocles By Sophocles Clay, Diskin Berg, Stephen 1988/03 - Oxford University Press 9780195054934 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection Washington Square Press Enriched Classics make great literature even more accessible to a new generation of readers, with expanded and updated reader's supplements and essential historical information. Oedipus the King is the 2,000-year-old masterpiece that raises basic questions about human behavior that are still vigorously debated by students and scholars. ...More

On Dreams By Freud, Sigmund Strachey, James 1980/09 - W. W. Norton & Company 9780393001440 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection ...More

The Metamorphosis By Kafka, Franz Kuper, Peter Kuper, Peter 2004/07 - Three Rivers Press (CA) 9781400052998 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection Kuper's electric drawings bring Kafka's prose to vivid life, reviving the original story's humor and poignancy in a way that will surprise and delight readers of Kafka and graphic novels alike. ...More

Faust: Part 1 By Von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Sis, Peter Jarrell, Randall 2001/12 - Farrar Straus Giroux 9780374527860 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection Goethe's classic, enlivened by Randall Jarrell's fine translation and Peter Sis's dark, dreamy illustrationsRandall Jarrell's translation of "Faust is one of his most important achievements. In 1957 he inscribed Goethe's motto on the first page of his notebook--"Ohne Hast aber ohne Rast" ("Without haste but without rest")--and from then until his death in 1965 he worked on the masterpiece of his "own favorite daemon, dear good great Goethe." His intent was to make the German poetry free, unrhymed poetry in English. He all but finished the job before he died, and the few lines that remained untouched--"Gretchen's Room"--were rendered into English by Robert Lowell.This elegant new edition features numerous beautiful line drawings and jacket lettering by the renowned Czech artist Peter Sis, author ...More

Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals By Kant, Immanuel Abbott, Thomas Kingsmill 2006/01 - Digireads.com 9781420926910 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals is Immanuel Kant's classic exposition of moral philosophy. In this work Kant sets forth a system for determining what is and what isn't moral. Kant's ideas on morality are intriguing and exemplary of his deft at philosophical writing and thinking. ...More

A Simple Heart By Flaubert, Gustave Flausbert, Gustave McDowall, Arthur 1996/04 - New Directions Publishing Corporation 9780811213189 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection In A Simple Heart, the poignant story that inspired Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot, Felicite, a French housemaid, approaches a lifetime of servitude with human-scaled but angelic aplomb. No other author has imparted so much beauty and integrity to so modest an existence. Flaubert's "great saint" endures loss after loss by embracing the rich, true rhythms of life: the comfort of domesticity, the solace of the Church, and the depth of memory. This novella showcases Flaubert's perfectly honed realism: a delicate counterpoint of daily events with their psychological repercussions. "Flaubert is diagnosis", Ezra Pound wrote, "the whole of Flaubert, the whole fight for the novel as 'histoire morale contemporaine' was a fight against maxims, against abstractions, a fight back toward a human and/or to ...More

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None By Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm Kaufmann, Walter 1995/09 - Modern Library 9780679601753 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection ...More

Inferno By Dante Alighieri Mandelbaum, Allen Moser, Barry 1982/01 - Bantam Books 9780553213393 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection In this superb translation with an introduction and commentary by Allen Mandelbaum, all of Dante's vivid images--the earthly, sublime, intellectual, demonic, ecstatic--are rendered with marvelous clarity to read like the words of a poet born in our own age. ...More

Reflections on the Revolution in France By Burke, Edmund 2006/02 - Dover Publications 9780486445076 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection The great English statesman and writer's epistolary manifesto is a cornerstone of modern conservative thought. Here, Burke uses examples from the chaotic aftermath of the French Revolution to demonstrate why political change must achieve a discernible end--the formation of something better--rather than serve as a means to waging permanent anti-authoritarian revolt. ...More

The Education of Henry Adams By Adams, Henry 2002/12 - Dover Publications 9780486424439 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection A scion of the famous Adams family of American statesmen, historian Henry Adams was more drawn to scholarship than to politics. His well-known autobiographical work--privately printed in 1907 and published posthumously in 1918--reflects his constant search for order and unity in a world he regarded as teetering on the brink of self-destruction. Adams subtitled his work "A Study of 20th-Century Multiplicity" and cast himself as a modern everyman, seeking coherence in a fragmented universe and concluding that his education was inadequate for the demands of modern society. This Dover reprint will be the least expensive unabridged edition of this landmark in 20th-century American literature. Unabridged republication of a standard edition. ...More

King Lear: The New Variorum Edition By Shakespeare, William Furness, Horace Howard 2000/06 - Dover Publications 9780486410968 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection Most fully annotated edition offers complete text from First Folio, with all variant readings from earliest Quarto of 1608 to Schmidt edition of 1879. Critical appreciations by Johnson, Coleridge, Lamb, Shelley, others. ...More

Poetics By Aristotle Heath, Malcolm 1997/03 - Penguin Books 9780140446364 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection Aristotle's Poetics is one of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history. A penetrating, near-contemporary account of Greek tragedy, it demonstrates how the elements of plot, character and spectacle combine to produce 'pity and fear' - and why we derive pleasure from this apparently painful process. It introduces the crucial concepts of mimesis ('imitation'), hamartia ('error') and katharsis, which have informed serious thinking about drama ever since. It examines the mythological heroes, idealized yet true to life, whom Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides brought on to the stage. And it explains how the most effective plays rely on complication and resolution, recognitions and reversals. Essential reading for all students of Greek literature and ...More

The Republic By Plato 2000/04 - Dover Publications 9780486411217 Check the Library Catalog A Great Books Foundation Selection Influential philosophical treatise of fourth century b.c. chiefly concerns the idea of justice, plus Platonic theories of ideas, criticism of poetry, philosopher's role. Source of the cave myth. Jowett translation. ...More