Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition is an 84 lesson, educational program put out by the Teaching Company that I listened to a while back. Here are the authors and books included in that course.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Genesis
Deuteronomy
Isaiah
Job
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey
Sappho
Pindar – Odes
Aeschylus – The Oresteia, Agamemnon
Sophocles – Ajax
Euripedes – Hippolytus
Herodotus – The Histories
Thucydides – History of the Pelopponisian War
Aristophanes – Clouds and Frogs
Plato – The Republic
Menander – Dyskolos
Catullus – Poems
Horace – Odes
Virgil – The Aeneid
Ovid -The Love Poems and Metamorphoses
Livy – Book 1, in Early History of Rome
Plutarch – “Alexander” in Age of Alexander
Apuleius – The Golden Ass
Petronius – Satyricon
Four Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
Augustine – Confessions and City of GodBeowolf: A New Verse Translation – Liuzza
The Song of Roland, trans. Brault
The Poem of the Cid, trans. Hamilton and Perry
Gottfried von Strassburg – Tristan, trans. Hatto
The Complete Romances of Chretien de Troyes, trans. Staines
The Romance of the Rose, trans. Horgan
Dante – La vita nuova, trans. Reynolds, Convivio, trans. Ryan, De volgari eloquentia, trans. Haller, De monarchia, trans. Shaw, The Divine Comedy, trans. Ciardi
Petrarch – Canzoniere, Secret Book, Letter to Posterity, The ascent of Mount Ventoux
Boccaccio – The Decameron, trans. Waldman
Gawain and the Green Night, trans. Harrison
Chaucer – Troilus, Cressida, trans. Krapp, The Canterbury Tales
Christine de Pizan – The Book of the City of Ladies
Erasmus – Praise of Folly
More – Utopia
Montaigne – On the Education of Children, Apology for Raymond Sebond
Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantgruel
Marlowe – Dr. Faustus
Shakespeare – The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet
Lope de Vega – Fuente Ovejuna
Cervantes – Don Quixote
Milton – Paradise Lost, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity
Pascal – Pensees
Moliere – Tartuffe
Jean Racine – Phaedra
Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz – A Sore Juana Anthology – Trueblood, ed.
Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe
Alexander Pope – The Major Works, The Rape of the Lock
Jonathon Swift – Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings
Voltaire – The Portable Voltaire
Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality, The Social Contract, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Confessions
Samuel Johnson – The Major Works
Denis Diderot, Jean d’Alembert, et al – Encyclopedia, or Analytic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts; Diderot – Rameau’s Nephew
William Blake – Blake’s Poetry and Designs
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust, Part One and Part Two, Greenberg, trans.
Wordsworth – Selected Poetry, ed. Gill and Wu
Jane Austin – Pride and Prejudice, ed. Gray
Stendal – Charterhouse of Parma, trans. Howard, Red and Black, trans. and ed. Adams
Melville – Moby Dick, 2nd ed., ed. Hayford and Parker
Walt Whitman – Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Kaplan
Gustav Flaubert – Madame Bovary, trans, Steegmuller, The Temptation of St. Anthony, trans. Hearn
Charles Dickens – Great Expectations, ed. Rosenberg
Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment
Tolstoy – Anna Karenina, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky
Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 3rd ed., ed. Cooley
Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 3rd ed., ed. Elledge
Oscar Wilde – The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
Henry James – Portrait of a Lady
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
William Butler Yeats – Yeats’s Poetry, Drama and Prose
Marcel Proust – Swann’s Way, Remembrance of Things Past
James Joyce – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses
Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dallway, To the Lighthouse
Faulkner – As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury
Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus, The Plague, The Stranger
Samuel Beckett – Waiting For Godot, Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
T.S. Eliot – Selected Prose
