This canon gathers the most foundational, influential, and culturally iconic texts that have shaped Western—and especially American—thought. It traces the arc of our intellectual tradition from ancient epics to contemporary reckonings, offering 100 Core works, 86 Companion texts for deeper exploration, and an Emergent List of 25 recent works that could achieve future canonical status. I originally assembled it as a personal reading plan, but I hope it serves others as a guide, reference, or shared resource for reading in community. Most entries are works of literature; where a text falls outside that category, I’ve noted its genre in parentheses.

Also see my American Canon (understanding the U.S. from many perspectives).

The Core List (100 Essential Works)

Stage 1: Origins of Western Thought and the Human Condition (Ancient to Early Modern)

1. The Iliad – Homer (c. 750 BC)
2. The Odyssey – Homer (c. 725 BC)
3. Antigone – Sophocles (441 BC)
4. The Histories (History) – Herodotus (c. 430 BC)
5. Oedipus Rex – Sophocles (c. 429 BC)
6. History of the Peloponnesian War (History) – Thucydides (c. 411 BC)
7. The Apology of Socrates – Plato (399 BC)
8. The Republic (Political Science) – Plato (c. 380 BC)
9. Nicomachean Ethics (Philosophy) – Aristotle (c. 340 BC)
10. Politics (Political Science) – Aristotle (c. 340 BC)
11. On the Nature of Things – Lucretius (c. 99 BC – 55 BC)
12. The Bible (esp. Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, the Gospels, Romans) (Religion)
13. Meditations (Philosophy) – Marcus Aurelius (c. 180 AD)
14. Confessions (Religion) – Augustine (398)
15. The City of God (Religion) – Augustine (426)
16. The Consolation of Philosophy (Philosophy) – Boethius (523)
17. The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri (1320)
18. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer (1400)
19. The Prince (Political Science) – Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
20. Essays – Michel de Montaigne (1580)
21. Hamlet – William Shakespeare (1603)
22. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
23. Macbeth – William Shakespeare (1606)
24. King Lear – William Shakespeare (1606)
25. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy (Philosophy) – René Descartes (1637)
26. Leviathan (Political Science) – Thomas Hobbes (1651)
27. Paradise Lost – John Milton (1667)

Stage 2: Political Philosophy, Social Upheaval, and Reform  (Enlightenment to Industrial Age)

1. Second Treatise of Government (Political Science) – John Locke (1689)
2. The Social Contract (Political Science) – Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)
3. Common Sense (Political Science) – Thomas Paine (1776)
4. Declaration of Independence (American History) – Thomas Jefferson (1776)
5. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Philosophy) – Immanuel Kant (1785)
6. The Federalist Papers (Political Science) (also on my American Canon) – Hamilton, Madison, Jay (1788) (see my modernization project)
7. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (American History) – Benjamin Franklin (1791)
8. The Rights of Man (Political Science) – Thomas Paine (1791)
9. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Political Science) – Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
10. Democracy in America (Political Science) (also American Canon) – Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)
11. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (American History) (also American Canon) (1845)
12. Civil Disobedience (Social Sciences) – Henry David Thoreau (1849)
13. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
14. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (also American Canon) – Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
15. Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman (1855)
16. On Liberty (Political Science) – John Stuart Mill (1859)
17. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (1861)
18. Middlemarch – George Eliot (1871)
19. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (also American Canon) – Mark Twain (1884)

Stage 3: The Ascent of the Modern Self (19th to Mid-20th Century)

1. Lyrical Ballads – Wordsworth & Coleridge (1798)
2. The Phenomenology of Spirit (Selections) (Philosophy) – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1807)
3. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (1813)
4. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley (1818)
5. Moby-Dick (also American Canon) – Herman Melville (1851)
6. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
7. Selected Poems – Emily Dickinson (1890)
8. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (1899)
9. The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot (1922)
10. The Great Gatsby (also American Canon) – F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
11. Selected Poems – Langston Hughes (1926)
12. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
13. The Grapes of Wrath (also American Canon) – John Steinbeck (1939)
14. Native Son – Richard Wright (1940)
15. Invisible Man (also American Canon) – Ralph Ellison (1952)
16. To Kill a Mockingbird (also American Canon) – Harper Lee (1960)

Stage 4: The Fragmented Self and the Modernist Break

1. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (1869)
2. The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
3. Beyond Good and Evil (Philosophy) – Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)
4. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust (1913)
5. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka (1915)
6. The Trial – Franz Kafka (written 1914; published 1925)
7. Ulysses – James Joyce (1922)
8. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf (1925)
9. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf (1927)
10. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner (1929)
11. A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf (1929)
12. The Stranger – Albert Camus (1942)
13. Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett (1953)
14. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Stage 5: Ideology, Resistance, and the Dystopian Imagination

1. The Communist Manifesto (Social Sciences) – Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848)
2. On the Origin of Species (Science) – Charles Darwin (1859)
3. The Souls of Black Folk (American History) (also American Canon) – W.E.B. Du Bois (1903)
4. Civilization and Its Discontents (Psychology) – Sigmund Freud (1930)
5. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (1932)
6. Animal Farm – George Orwell (1945)
7. 1984 – George Orwell (1949)
8. The Second Sex (Social Sciences) – Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
9. The Origins of Totalitarianism (Political Science) – Hannah Arendt (1951)
10. The Wretched of the Earth (African History) – Frantz Fanon (1961)
11. Silent Spring (Science) (also American Canon) – Rachel Carson (1962)
12. Letter from Birmingham Jail (American History) – Martin Luther King Jr. (1963)
13. The Fire Next Time (American History) – James Baldwin (1963)
14. The Gulag Archipelago (Social Sciences) – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
15. Discipline and Punish (Social Sciences) – Michel Foucault (1975)
16. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (1985)
17. Beloved (also American Canon) – Toni Morrison (1987)

Stage 6: National Myths and Imperial Legacies

1. All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
2. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien (1955)
3. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (1958)
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez (1967)

Stage 7: Contemporary Identity, Globalization, and Cultural Reckonings

1. On the Road – Jack Kerouac (1957)
2. Between the World and Me (American History) – Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)
3. The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead (2016)

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The Companion List (86 Additional Works)

These works offer further depth and breadth, complementing the Core List.

Stage 1: Origins of Western Thought and the Human Condition (Ancient to Early Modern)

1. Beowulf (c. 1000)
2. Summa Theologica (Selections–perhaps shorter summa) (Religion) – Thomas Aquinas (1265–1274)

Stage 2: Political Philosophy, Social Upheaval, and Reform  (Enlightenment to Industrial Age)

1. Pensées (Philosophy) – Blaise Pascal (1670)
2. Ethics (Philosophy) – Baruch Spinoza (1677)
3. The Persian Letters – Montesquieu (1736)
4. Candide – Voltaire (1759)
5. Rousseau: Emile, or On Education (Education) – Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)
6. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Selections) (History) – Edward Gibbon (1776)
7. Emma – Jane Austen (1815)
8. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (1846)
9. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë (1847)
10. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)
11. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (1850)
12. Walden – Henry David Thoreau (1854)
13. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert (1856)
14. Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev (1862)
15. Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain (1876)
16. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (1877)
17. A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen (1879)
18. Germinal – Émile Zola (1885)
19. Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (1891)

Stage 3: The Ascent of the Modern Self (19th to Mid-20th Century)

1. The Red and the Black – Stendhal (1830)
2. Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac (1835)
3. Fear and Trembling (Religion) – Søren Kierkegaard (1843)
4. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë (1847)
5. The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James (1881)
6. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde (1890)
7. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway (1926)
8. A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennessee Williams (1947)
9. East of Eden – John Steinbeck (1952)
10. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway (1952)

Stage 4: The Fragmented Self and the Modernist Break

1. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence (1913)
2. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton (1920)
3. Six Characters in Search of an Author – Luigi Pirandello (1921)
4. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster (1924)
5. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann (1924)
6. The Myth of Sisyphus – Albert Camus (1942)
7. The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene (1948)
8. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
9. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak (1957)
10. Endgame – Samuel Beckett (1957)
11. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (1961)
12. The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing (1962)
13. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (1963)
14. Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee (1999)

Stage 5: Ideology, Resistance, and the Dystopian Imagination

1. Relativity: The Special and General Theory (Science) – Albert Einstein (1916)
2. The Road to Serfdom (Social Sciences) (also American Canon) – F.A. Hayek (1944)
3. The Diary of a Young Girl (History) – Anne Frank (1947)
4. The Need for Roots (Social Sciences) – Simone Weil (1949)
5. Natural Right and History (Political Science) – Leo Strauss (1950)
6. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury (1953)
7. Go Tell It on the Mountain – James Baldwin (1953)
8. Lord of the Flies – William Golding (1954)
9. Notes of a Native Son (American History) – James Baldwin (1955)
10. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess (1962)
11. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey (1962)
12. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Science) – Thomas Kuhn (1962)
13. Eichmann in Jerusalem (History) – Hannah Arendt (1963)
14. I Have a Dream (American History) – Martin Luther King Jr. (1963)
15. Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy (1985)
16. Survival in Auschwitz (History) – Primo Levi (1986)
17. Imagined Communities (Political Science) – Benedict Anderson (1991)
18. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (American History) (also American Canon) – Annette Gordon-Reed (2008)

Stage 6: National Myths and Imperial Legacies

1. Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse (1922)
2. The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958)
3. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys (1966)
4. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
5. Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison (1977)
6. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco (1980)
7. The Salt Eaters – Toni Cade Bambara (1980)
8. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (1981)
9. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera (1984)
10. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez (1985)
11. The Known World – Edward P. Jones (2003)
12. Gilead (also American Canon) – Marilynne Robinson (2004)
13. The Road (also American Canon) – Cormac McCarthy (2006)
14. Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel (2009)

Stage 7: Contemporary Identity, Globalization, and Cultural Reckonings

1. Dune – Frank Herbert (1965)
2. The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles (1969)
3. A Theory of Justice (Political Science) – John Rawls (1971)
4. Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon (1973)
5. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole (1980)
6. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
7. Angels in America – Tony Kushner (1991)
8. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje (1992)
9. Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace (1996)
10. American Pastoral (also American Canon) – Philip Roth (1997)
11. Underworld – Don DeLillo (1997)
12. Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi (2000)
13. Atonement – Ian McEwan (2001)
14. On Beauty – Zadie Smith (2005)
15. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
16. Americanah (also American Canon) – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2013)
17. Citizen: An American Lyric – Claudia Rankine (2014)

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The Emergent List (25 that could become canonical)

These recent books haven’t yet become canonical, but they show strong potential to shape Western—and especially American—thought through their foundational insight, influence, or cultural impact

1. The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen (2001)
2. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (Social Sciences) – Samantha Power (2002)
3. The Plot Against America – Philip Roth (2004)
4. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Díaz (2007)
5. The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Social Sciences) – Michelle Alexander (2009)
6. The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty (Social Sciences) – Peter Singer (2009)
7. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (American History) (also American Canon)– Isabel Wilkerson (2010)
8. A Visit from the Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan (2010)
9. Thinking, Fast and Slow (Psychology) – Daniel Kahneman (2013)
10. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (American Law) – Bryan Stevenson (2014)
11. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Science) – Elizabeth Kolbert (2014)
12. The Sympathizer – Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015)
13. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (History of Civilization) – Yuval Noah Harari (2015)
14. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Social Sciences) (also American Canon) – Matthew Desmond (2016)
15. Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi (2016)
16. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (American History) – David Grann (2017)
17. The Overstory – Richard Powers (2018)
18. Educated: A Memoir (Biography) – Tara Westover (2018)
19. Why Liberalism Failed (Political Science) (also American Canon) – Patrick Deneen (2018)
20. The Nickel Boys – Colson Whitehead (2019)
21. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Social Sciences) (also American Canon) – Isabel Wilkerson (2020)
22. The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (History of Civilization) – Ross Douthat (2020)
23. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Social Sciences) – Carl Trueman (2020)
24. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (History of Civilization) – David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021)
25. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (Social Sciences) – Patrick Radden Keefe (2021)