Well-Educated Mind Reading List by Susan Wise Bauer

Fiction:

1. Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes 
2. The Pilgrim's Progress -John Bunyan
3. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
4. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 
5. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens  
6. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 
7. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
8. Moby Dick - Herman Melville  
9. Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
10. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
11. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
12. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 
13. The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
14. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
15. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain 
16. The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
17. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad  
18. The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton 
19. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald  
20. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Wolfe
21. The Trial - Franz Kafka
22. Native Son - Richard Wright 
23. The Stranger - Albert Camus
24. 1984 - George Orwell  
25. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
26. Seize the Day - Saul Bellow 
27. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez  
28. If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino 
29. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison  
30. White Noise - Don DeLillo  
31. Possession - A.S. Byatt
32. The Road - Cormac McCarthy

 Autobiography

1. Augustine - The Confessions
2. Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe
3. Michel De Montaigne - Essays
4. Teresa Of Avila - The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself
5. Rene Descartes - Meditations
6. John Bunyan - Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners
7. Mary Rowlandson - The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration
8. Jean Jacques Rousseau - Confessions
9. Benjamin Franklin - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
10. Frederick Douglass - Life and Times of Frederick Douglas
11. Henry David Thoreau - Walden 
12. Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself 
13. Booker T. Washington - Up from Slavery 
14. Friedrich Nietzsche - Ecce Homo
15. Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf 
16. Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with Truth
17. Gertrude Stein - Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 
18. Thomas Merton  - Seven Storey Mountain  
19. C.S. Lewis - Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life
20. Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X
21. Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
22. May Sarton - Journal of a Solitude 
23. Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago
24. Charles W. Colson - Born Again
25. Richard Rodriguez - Hunger of Memory: Education of Richard Rodriguez
26. Jill Ker Conway - The Road from Coorain
27. Elie Wiesel - All Rivers Run to the Sea

History/Politics

1. Herodotus - The Histories
2. Thucydides - The Peloponnesian War
3. Plato - The Republic  
4. Plutarch - Lives
5. Augustine - The City of God
6. Bede - The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
7. Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
8. Sir Thomas More - Utopia
9. John Locke - The True End of Civil Government 
10. David Hume - The History of England, Volume V
11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
12. Thomas Paine - Common Sense
13. Edward Gibbon - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
14. Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 
15. Alexis De Tocqueville - Democracy in America 
16. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - Communist Manifesto
17. Jacob Burckhardt - Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
18. W.E.B. Du Bois - The Souls of Black Folk
19. Max Weber - The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism
20. Lytton Strachey - Queen Victoria
21. George Orwell - The Road to Wigan Pier 
22. Perry Miller - The New England Mind
23. John Kenneth Galbraith - The Great Crash
24. Cornelius Ryan - The Longest Day
25. Betty Friedan - The Feminine Mystique
26. Eugene D. Genovese - Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
27. Barbara Tuchman - A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
28. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein - All the President's Men
29. James McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
30. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich - A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard
31. Francis Fukuyama - End of History and the last Man

Drama

1. Aeschylus - Agamemnon
2. Sophocles - Oedipus the King
3. Euripides - Medea
4. Aristophanes - The Birds
5. Aristotle - Poetics  
6. Everyman (14th Century)
7. Christopher Marlowe - Doctor Faustus
8. William Shakespeare - Richard III
9. William Shakespeare - A Midsummer Night's Dream
10. William Shakespeare - Hamlet
11. Moliere - Tartuffe 
12. William Congreve - The Way of the World
13. Oliver Goldsmith - She Stoops to Conquer 
14. Richard Brinsley Sheridan - The School for Scandal 
15. Henrik Ibsen - A Doll's House 
16. Oscar Wilde - The Importance of Being Ernest
17. Anton Chekhov - The Cherry Orchard 
18. George Bernard Shaw - Saint Joan
19. T.S. Eliot - Murder in the Cathedral 
20. Thornton Wilder - Our Town
21. Eugene O'Neill - Long Day's Journey into Night
22. Jean Paul Sartre - No Exit 
23. Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire 
24. Arthur Miller - Death of a Salesman 
25. Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot 
26. Robert Bolt - A Man for All Seasons
27. Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
28. Peter Shaffer - Equus

Poetry 

1. The Epic of Gilgamesh 
2. Homer - The Iliad and the Odyssey
3. Greek Lyricists 
4. Horace - The Odes 
5. Beowulf 
6. Dante Alighieri - Inferno 
7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 
8. Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
9. William Shakespeare - Sonnets 
10. John Donne 
11. King James Bible - Psalms 
12. John Milton - Paradise Lost 
13. William Blake - Songs of Innocence and of Experience 
14. Williams Wordsworth 
15. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
16. John Keats
17.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
18. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
19. Walt Whitman
20. Emily Dickinson 
21. Christina Rossetti
22. Gerald Manley Hopkins
23. William Butler Yeats
24. Paul Laurence Dunbar
25. Robert Frost 
26. Carl Sandburg
27. William Carlos Williams
28. Ezra Pound
29. T.S. Eliot
30. Langston Hughes 
31. W.H. Auden

Science

1. Hippocrates - On Airs, Waters and Places
2. Aristotle - Physics
3. Lucretius - On the Nature of Things
4. Nicolaus Copernicus - Commentariolus
5. Francis Bacon - Novum Organum
6. Galileo Galilie - Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
7. Robert Hooke - Micrographia
8. Isaac Newton - excerpts from Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica 
9. Georges Cuvier - Preliminary Discourse
10. Charles Lyell - Principles of Geology 
11. Charles Darwin - On the Origin of Species
12. Gregor Mendel - Experiments in Plant Hybridization
13. Alfred Wegener - The Origin of Continents and Oceans
14. Albert Einstein - The General Theory of Relativity
15. Max Planck - The Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory
16. Julian Huxley - Evolution: The Modern Synthesis
17. Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life?
18. Rachel Carson - Silent Spring
19. Desmond Morris- The Naked Ape 
20. James D. Watson - The Double Helix 
21. Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
22. Steven Weinberg - The First Three Minutes:
23. A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe 
24. E. O. Wilson- On Human Nature
25. James Lovelock -  Gaia 
26. Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man
27. James Gleick - Chaos: Making a New Science
28. Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
29. Walter Alvarez  - T. Rex and the Crater of Doom