Reading list
The Harvard Classics: the Five-Foot Shelf, free
In 1909 Charles W. Eliot, Harvard's retired president, claimed that fifteen minutes a day with the right books, enough to fill a five-foot shelf, would give anyone a liberal education. The publisher Collier took him at his word, and the fifty volumes of the Harvard Classics sold by the hundred thousand to families who wanted the university without the fees.
26 books, all free to read
These are the works from that shelf that you can read free here, in the order we would suggest. Our editions are not always the translations Eliot printed, and a few volumes were anthologies of essays and poems we hold as separate books. His fifteen minutes a day still works; it is about ten posts.
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1. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
by Benjamin Franklin
The shelf opened with Franklin: the printer's apprentice who taught himself everything, including how to fix his own faults.
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2. Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius
Eliot put the emperor beside Plato and Epictetus in one of the first volumes, as the shelf's guide to living.
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3. Dialogues with the Apology, Crito and Phaedo
by Plato
The trial and death of Socrates, the dialogues Eliot chose to open ancient philosophy.
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4. Short Works with the Enchiridion
by Epictetus
Epictetus's handbook, on the same early shelf as Marcus Aurelius.
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6. Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Don Quixote, the first modern novel and one of the few novels Eliot admitted.
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7. The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri
Dante's journey through the afterlife, the shelf's medieval summit.
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9. The Confessions of St. Augustine
by Augustine of Hippo
Augustine's confessions, the first great autobiography, paired on the shelf with The Imitation of Christ.
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10. The Imitation of Christ
by Thomas à Kempis
Four short books of devotion, the most read Christian book after the Bible for centuries.
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11. The Pilgrim’s Progress
by John Bunyan
Bunyan's allegory of a pilgrim's journey, once in every English-speaking home.
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13. The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
Darwin's Origin of Species, which had been out only fifty years when the shelf was made.
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14. The Voyage of the Beagle
by Charles Darwin
The voyage that gave Darwin his theory, told as travel writing. Livelier than the Origin.
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15. Two Years Before the Mast
by Richard Henry Dana Jr.
A Harvard student ships out as a common sailor round Cape Horn. A sea classic and an exposé.
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16. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
by Benvenuto Cellini
A Renaissance goldsmith boasts of his art, his duels and his escapes. The most entertaining memoir on the shelf.
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17. Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
by Plutarch
Plutarch's paired lives of Greeks and Romans, the source of half of Shakespeare's plots.
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18. The Prince
by Niccolò Machiavelli
Machiavelli's Prince, in the volume with More's Utopia and Luther.
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19. The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
by Francis Bacon
Bacon's essays, short and packed: of studies, of truth, of revenge.
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21. Hamlet
by William Shakespeare
Hamlet, with Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest, in the Elizabethan drama volumes.
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22. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
by Christopher Marlowe
Marlowe's Faustus sells his soul; Eliot set him beside Goethe's Faust.
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23. The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill
by John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill's account of an extraordinary education and the breakdown that followed it.
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24. Household Tales
by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
The Grimms' fairy tales, from the shelf's volume of folklore and fable.
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26. Essays
by Michel de Montaigne
Montaigne, whose essays Eliot included among the literary and philosophical ones.
More lists
Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.