The Lifetime Reading Plan

By CLIFTON FADIMAN

Clifton Fadiman, noted author, critic, anthologist and star of many radio and TV programs, designed the Lifetime Reading Plan especially for readers of This Week Magazine. Later on, Mr. Fadiman expanded the list into a book (The Lifetime Reading Plan, World Publishing Company, 1960: $3.75). For each of the authors he wrote a brief essay to explain the man's place in the literature of Western thought.

Mostof us have a Lifetime Savings Plan. We don't like to go along life's road with nothing in our pockets.

But how about going along it with nothing in our minds?

The man I pity most is the one who experiences this won­derful world, and leaves it without ever quite knowing what his life has been about. Whatever the state of his bank account, he lives and dies mentally bankrupt.

The Lifetime Reading Plan is designed to help avoid this. It is designed to fill our minds, slowly, gradually, year by year, over the whole of our lives, with what the greatest writers of our Western civilization have thought and felt.

The contemporary man who has shared these thoughts and feelings will still have much to learn.  But he will not feel quite so lost or bewildered. He will understand how he has emerged out of 3,000 years of history. He will know how he got the ideas by which he lives. He will feel buoyed up by the noble stream of Western civilization of which he is a part.

Books are only one key to these discoveries. But the wisest men agree that they are probably the best key.

The "Plan" comprises a list of 100 books, or rather titles, for a few come in more than one volume. Do not think of them as the "Best Books" — there is no such thing. Nor are they the only ones we might have selected. They have been chosen for only one purpose: to introduce us, year after year, during the whole of our lives, to some of the greatest of our ancestors.

Many crucial works of science and philosophy have been omitted, because they require more background than most of us have. Very few books by living authors are included, be­cause we are too close to them to know for sure who our great writers are. (This doesn't mean you shouldn't read the mod­erns. A man ought to keep up with what his contemporaries are saying.) No books of reference are suggested, because the list emphasizes "original communications," that is, the truly trail-blazing statements.

The Bible is not listed because it is assumed most American homes have one.

Finally, there's no magic about the number 100. Perhaps the list should be shorter, or longer. But one thing, I think, is true: all these books taken together, and read with care, will give the reader a sense of a Great Tradition. And he who possesses that sense is a livelier, more interesting human being and a better American citizen.

This truly is a Lifetime Reading Plan. If you are now 20 years old, and take 50 years to read these books, that's quite okay — the important thing is that you really absorb them. They are not like the latest best seller.  The reading of them should be truly a part of your whole life, just as your career or your marriage or the upbringing of your children is. You shouldn't feel any hurry about "finishing" the list. It isn't something to be "gotten through" — but a source of richness to last you a lifetime.

If a book seems too hard (and many of them are hard even for great scholars), put it aside for a year or two. Read some others. Then go back — and the hard one will seem less difficult.

Should they be read in chronological order? There's no rule. Try it that way if you wish. If it doesn't work well, try some other way. Read great novels for a year or two, perhaps; or great drama from Aeschylus to Shaw; or even start with our own time and go backward. These books have been called the Great Conversation, which means that in a sense the authors are all contemporaries, all talking, though in different ways, about the crucial ideas and feelings that have moved Western man since his beginnings.

Can you read these books without having gone to college? Most of them, yes, if you are willing to take pains. And, remember, you don't have to study them — if you or I can read Plato and get ten per cent of his content we're doing well enough. But if you do read all or most of these books with care and enjoyment your mind will then be far better furnished than is the case with 99 out of 100 college graduates.

Finally, and most important: these books are there for your enjoyment. There's nothing solemn about feeling your mind stretch. It's the most rewarding feeling in the world. These books are not a "course." They are an adventure. Read­ing is not a passive experience, unless you're reading trash. It can be one of the most vigorous forms of living. A good book, like healthy exercise, can give you that pleasant sense of fatigue which comes of having stretched your mental muscles.

The motto of National Library Week is Wake Up and Read! The reader who spends part of his life traveling through these continents of thought and imagination is far more awake than the mental stay-at-home content with a petty knowledge of his own small time and space.

The Lifetime Reading Plan

100 Books selected by Clifton Fadiman

A note on the list: Most of these titles are available in a tremendously wide selection, ranging from de luxe leather-bound editions for the collector's library to paperbacks, with many standard hard-cover editions in between. Any good public library should have all the titles.

The Beginning

1. homer: The Iliad (translated Rouse)
2. homer: The Odyssey (translated Rouse)
3. herodotus: The Histories (translated by de Selincourt)
4. thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
5. plato: Many editions available. For beginners, the selections  edited by Scott Buchanan are excellent.
6. aristotle: Ethics; Politics
7. aeschylus: The Oresteia (tr. Lattimore)
8. sophocles: The Oedipus Cycle (tr. Fitts & Fitzgerald)
9. euripides: Alcestis, Medea, Herachidai Hippolytus (ed. by Grene and Lattimore)
10. virgil: Aeneid (tr. Lewis or Humphries)
11. Lucretius: The Nature of the Universe (tr. Latham)
12. marcus aurelius: Meditations
    
    
    The Middle Ages
13. The Confessions of St. Augustine
14. dante: The Divine Comedy
15. chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (tr. Coghill)
    
    
    Plays
16. Shakespeare: Complete works
17. moliere: The edition translated by Morris Bishop
18. goethe: Faust (tr. Louis MacNeice)
19. ibsen: Six Plays (tr. Le Gallienne)
20. GEORGE Bernard shaw: Shaw's plays are avail­able in many forms,  including a one-volume edition of seven plays
    
    
    Narratives
21. Jonathan swift:   Gulliver's Travels and other works
22. daniel defoe: Robinson Crusoe
23. Laurence sterne: Tristram Shandy
24. henry fielding: Tom Jones
25. john bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress
26. jane austen:   Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (1 vol.)
27. emily bronte: Wuthering Heights
28. charles dickens: David Copperfield
29. w. M. thackeray:  Vanity Fair
30. george eliot: The Mill on the Floss
31. lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (1 vol.)
32. thomas hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge
33. Joseph conrad: Lord Jim
34. D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
35. james JOYCE: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
36. james joyce:  Ulysses
37. thomas mann: The Magic Mountain
38. rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (tr. Cohen)
39. voltaire:  Candide and other works
40. stendhal: The Red and the Black
41. balzac: Pere Godot and Eugenie Grandet
42. flaubert: Madame Bovary (tr. Steegmuller)
43. PROUST: Remembrance of Things Past (2 vols.)
44. edgar allan poe: Tales
45. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
46. Herman melville : Moby Dick
47. mark twain: Huckleberry Finn
48. henry james: The Ambassadors
49. cervantes: Don Quixote (tr. Cohen)
50. nikolai gogol: Dead Souls
51. ivan turgenev: Fathers and Sons
52. leo tolstoy: War and Peace (tr. Edmonds)
53. fyodor dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov (tr. Magarshack)
54. fyodor dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
    (tr. Magarshack)
    
    
    Essays, Philosophy, etc.
55. thomas hobbes: Leviathan
56. rene descartes: Philosophical Works (2 vols.)
57. david hume: Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
58. john locke : The Second Treatise of Government
59. JOHN stuart mill: On Liberty
60. friedrich nietzche: Thus Spake Zarathustra, Twilight of the Gods
61. karl marx: The Communist Manifesto
62. niccolo machiavelli: The Prince
63. Montaigne: Essays (tr. Cohen)
64. alexis de tocqueville : Democracy in America (2 vols.)
65. henry thoreau: Walden and other works
66. ralph waldo emerson: Essays
67. william james: The Principles of Psychology (2 vols.)
68. william james: Pragmatism and Four Essays from the Meaning of Truth
69. JOHN dewey: Human Nature and Conduct
70. george santayana:  Skepticism and Animal Faith
71. Alfred north whitehead: Science and the Modern World
72. sigmund freud: A General Selection from the Works of Freud (Ed. Rickman)
    
    
    Poetry
73. Poets of the English Language, edited by Auden and Pearson, 5 vols.
74. An Anthology of World Poetry, edited by Mark Van Doren
75. JOHN milton: Paradise Lost and Other Poems
76. JOHN donne: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (Ed. Coffin)
77. william blake: Poems
78. william wordsworth: Selected Poetry
79. s. T. coleridge: Poems and Prose (Ed. Kathleen Raine)
80. william butler yeats: Collected Poems
81. WALT whitman: Leaves of Grass or selected works
    
    
    History, Biography, etc.
82. will durant: The Story of Civilization (7 vols.)
83. G. M. trevelyan: History of England (3 vols.)
84. ALLAN NEVINS and HENRY STEELE COMMAGER: Pocket History of the United States
85. Basic Documents in American History (Ed. Morris)
86. jean jacques rousseau: Confessions (tr. Cohen)
87. james boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson
88. henry adams: The Education of Henry Adams
    
    
    Some Contemporaries
89. Robert frost: Collected Poems
90. ernest Hemingway: The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
91. william Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying
92. T. s. eliot: Collected Poems and Plays
93. somerset maugham: Of Human Bondage
94. aldous huxley: Brave New World
95. andre malraux: Man s Fate
    
    
    Miscellaneous
96. Helen Gardner: Art Through the Ages
97. whitehead: An Introduction to Mathematics
98. Lincoln barnett: The Universe and Dr. Einstein
99. Mortimer J. adler: How  To Read a Book
100. he American Treasury: (Ed. Clifton Fadiman, assisted by Charles Van Doren)

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