George Eliot
Walt Whitman
Emily Dickinson
Matthew Arnold
Mark Twain
Henry Adams
CHAPTER ELEVEN. Some Victorians and Others
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
Ivan Turgenev
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Leo Tolstoy
Robert Browning
Lewis Carroll
Thomas Hardy
William James
Henry James
Arthur Conan Doyle
Rudyard Kipling
CHAPTER TWELVE. Turn of the Century
Sigmund Freud
C.P. Cavafy
Alfred North Whitehead
William Butler Yeats
J.M. Synge
Beatrix Potter
Robert Frost
Wallace Stevens
Thomas Mann
Edith Wharton
Willa Cather
Étienne Gilson
James Joyce
Henrik Ibsen
Bernard Shaw
CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Entre Deux Guerres
Eugen Herrigel
Isak Dinesen
Virginia Woolf
Franz Kafka
Austin Tappan Wright
Ringgold “Ring” Lardner
Erwin Schrödinger
William Carlos Williams
Marianne Moore
T.S. Eliot
Ezra Pound
Eugene O’Neill
Nancy Mitford
C.S. Lewis
J.R.R. Tolkien
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
E.B. White
James Thurber
Archibald MacLeish
Mark Van Doren
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
CHAPTER FOURTEEN. Hiroshima and After
John Hersey
Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Charles Galton Darwin
Fernand Braudel
Mortimer J. Adler
John Steinbeck
George Orwell
T.H. White
Samuel Beckett
Robert A. Heinlein
W.H. Auden
Margaret Wise Brown
Elizabeth Bishop
Tennessee Williams
Richard Wilbur
Albert Camus
Arthur Miller
Arthur C. Clarke
J.D. Salinger
Julian Jaynes
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
CHAPTER FIFTEEN. Only Yesterday
Fred Bodsworth
Primo Levi
Leo Rosten
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
José Saramago
Joseph Heller
John Berger
John le Carré
Alan Furst
Czelaw Milosz
Sébastien Japrisot
Toni Morrison
Cormac McCarthy
Larry McMurtry
Daniel Quinn
JM. Coetzee
Roberto Calasso
Mark Helprin
Donna Leon, Michael Dibdin, and Henning Mankell
Carl Hiaasen
Michael Pollan
Patrick O’Brian
J.K. Rowling
TEN-YEAR READING PLAN
chapter one
The Golden Age
In the beginning … two thousand seven hundred years ago, more or less. That great beginning led people of later times to call it a Golden Age. It is almost incomprehensible that the first poet about whom we know anything in the history of the Western world is also, as Dante later called Homer, the greatest of all. The same is true of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; they are not only the first dramatists but also among the best. Herodotus and Thucydides are, if not the greatest historians, then the most inventive and memorable not only for their stories but also for the judgments they pronounced. And Aristophanes taught us how to laugh at the follies of even the most powerful tyrants.
Homer; Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; and Herodotus and Thucydides were all Greeks; that is, they were inhabitants twenty-five hundred years ago of a small, disorderly country at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Homer predated the others by two or three hundred years, but his presence continued to be felt by all classical Greeks for as long as people thought it meant something special to be Greek. He was not an Athenian, as most of the others were, but he might as well have been. Nor was the language he spoke and wrote exactly the same as theirs, although it was close enough to be understood by them when they read him. The entire population of what could have been called Greece, or Hellas, in the fifth century before the birth of Christ was probably not greater than the population of a medium sized city of today. The total number of persons calling themselves Greeks (or Hellenes) may have represented less than 1 percent of the population of the world. But they had an advantage not shared by any one else at the time. They were fighting for their lives, not just as individuals but as members of a civilization that treasured liberty. They were fighting to be free, and that is a powerful incentive.
HOMER
fl. 750-675 BCE ?
The Iliad
The Odyssey
Almost nothing is known about the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey. It is only a guess that he lived, probably somewhere on the Mediterranean’s eastern littoral or perhaps on one of the Aegean islands, sometime in the eighth or seventh century before the Christian era. It is customary to say he flourished 750-675 BCE. It used to be thought that he, like most of his contemporaries, could neither read nor write, but the latest theories hold that he must have inscribed the two great epics, although no manuscripts dating from that period have ever been found. The language of the poems is a curious mixture of more or less ancient dialects and later versions of Greek, but this doesn’t mean the works are merely collections of stories or songs. It now seems almost certain that a single man, whom we call Homer (as did the Greeks twenty-five hundred years ago), wrote the two poems that, for a hundred generations, have continued to move our hearts and souls because of their deep understanding of what it means to be human. It is not surprising, then, that they have also influenced almost every great literary work since.