Great Books
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (abridged) (1605)
- King James Bible, Psalms (1611)
- John Donne, Divine Meditations (c. 1635)
- Rene Descartes, Meditations (1641)
- John Milton, Paradise Lost (selections) (1644)
- Molière, Tartuffe (1669)
- Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1670)
- John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1679)
- John Locke, “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” or “On the True End of
- Civil Government” (1690)
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract” (1762)
- Edmund Burke, “On American Taxation” (1774)
- The Declaration of Independence (1776)
- Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
- Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781)
- Alexander Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)
- Constitution of the United States (ratified 1788)
- William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (1789)
- Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography (1791)
- Thomas Paine, “The Rights of Man” (1792)
- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
- William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798)
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1815)
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
- John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” and other poems (1820s)
- James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Lady of Shalott” and other poems (1832)
- Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1838)
- Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and other stories (1839)
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1844)
- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
- Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)