Aeschylus
Work(s)
Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, Eumenides, Prometheus Bound
St. John’s Reading List: A Great Books Curriculum
St. John’s College is best known for its reading list and the Great Books curriculum that was adopted in 1937. While the list of books has evolved over the last century, the tradition of all students reading foundational texts of Western civilization remains. The reading list at St. John’s includes classic works in philosophy, literature, political science, psychology, history, religion, economics, math, chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, music, language, and more. Learn more about classes at St. John’s and the subjects students study.
The reading list presented on this page may not accurately reflect the current reading list due to recent changes, works that are read only on one campus, works that are read in part, and works that are read by some students as junior and senior elective classes.
Year of Study
Freshman
Archimedes
Work(s)
“On the Equilibrium of Planes,” “On Floating Bodies”
Aristophanes
Work(s)
Clouds
Aristotle
Work(s)
Poetics, Physics, Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, On Generation and Corruption, Politics, Parts of Animals, Generation of Animals
Amedeo Avogadro
Work(s)
“Essay on a Manner of Determining the Relative Masses of the Elementary Molecules of Bodies”
Subject(s)
Claude Berthollet
Work(s)
“Excerpt from Essai de Statique Chimique”
Subject(s)
Joseph Black
Work(s)
“Extracts from Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry”
Subject(s)
Stanislao Cannizzaro
Work(s)
“Letter to Professor S. De Luca”
Subject(s)
John Dalton
Work(s)
“Extracts from A New System of Chemical Philosophy”
Subject(s)
Hans Driesch
Work(s)
“The Science and Philosophy of the Organism”
Subject(s)
Euclid
Work(s)
Elements
Subject(s)
Euripides
Work(s)
Hippolytus, Bacchae
Daniel Fahrenheit
Work(s)
“The Fahrenheit Scale”
Subject(s)
Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac
Work(s)
“On the Expansion of Gases by Heat,” “Memoir on the Combination of Gaseous Substances with Each Other”
Subject(s)
William Harvey
Work(s)
On The Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
Subject(s)
Herodotus
Work(s)
Histories
Homer
Work(s)
Iliad, Odyssey
Antoine Lavoisier
Work(s)
Elements of Chemistry
Subject(s)
Lucretius
Work(s)
On the Nature of Things
Subject(s)
Edme Mariotte
Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
Dmitri Mendeleev
Work(s)
“The Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements”
Subject(s)
Nicomachus
Work(s)
Arithmetic
Subject(s)
Blaise Pascal
Work(s)
Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids
Subject(s)
Plato
Work(s)
Meno, Gorgias, Republic, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, Phaedrus
Plutarch
Work(s)
“Lycurgus,” “Solon”
J.L. Proust
Work(s)
“Excerpt from Sur Les Oxidations Metalliques”
Subject(s)
Ptolemy
Work(s)
Almagest
Sappho
Work(s)
Poems 1 and 31
Subject(s)
Sophocles
Work(s)
Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Philoctetes, Ajax
Hans Spemann
Work(s)
“The Organizer-Effect in Embryonic Development” (Nobel Lecture 1935), “Embryonic Development and Induction”
Subject(s)
J.J. Thomson
Work(s)
“Extracts from System of Chemistry”
Subject(s)
Thucydides
Work(s)
The History of the Peloponnesian War
Rudolf Virchow
Work(s)
“Cellular Pathology Lectures”
Subject(s)
Virginia Woolf
Work(s)
On Not Knowing Greek
Subject(s)
Year of Study
Sophomore
Hebrew Bible
Subject(s)
New Testament
Subject(s)
Dante Alighieri
Work(s)
Divine Comedy
Subject(s)
Anselm
Work(s)
Proslogium
Subject(s)
Apollonius
Work(s)
Conics
Subject(s)
Thomas Aquinas
Work(s)
Summa Theologiae
Subject(s)
Aristotle
Work(s)
De Anima, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Categories
Augustine
Work(s)
Confessions
Johann Sebastian Bach
Work(s)
St. Matthew Passion, Inventions
Subject(s)
Francis Bacon
Work(s)
Novum Organum
Aphra Behn
Work(s)
“The Disappointment”
Subject(s)
Anne Bradstreet
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Geoffrey Chaucer
Work(s)
Canterbury Tales
Subject(s)
Nicolaus Copernicus
Work(s)
On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres
Subject(s)
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Work(s)
Missa Papae Marcelli
Subject(s)
Michel de Montaigne
Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
René Descartes
Work(s)
Geometry, Discourse on Method
John Donne
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Princess Elisabeth
Work(s)
The Correspondence Between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes
Subject(s)
Epictetus
Work(s)
Discourses, Manual
Joseph Haydn
Work(s)
Quartets
Subject(s)
Johannes Kepler
Work(s)
Astronomia Nova
Subject(s)
Livy
Work(s)
Early History of Rome
Anne Locke
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Niccolò Machiavelli
Work(s)
The Prince, Discourses
Maimonides
Work(s)
Guide for the Perplexed
Subject(s)
Andrew Marvell
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Claudio Monteverdi
Work(s)
L’Orfeo
Subject(s)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Work(s)
Operas
Subject(s)
Albert Murray
Work(s)
Stomping the Blues
Subject(s)
Blaise Pascal
Work(s)
Generation of Conic Sections
Subject(s)
Plotinus
Work(s)
The Enneads
Plutarch
Work(s)
“Caesar,” “Cato the Younger,” “Antony,” “Brutus”
Ptolemy
Work(s)
Almagest
Sappho
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Franz Schubert
Work(s)
Songs
Subject(s)
William Shakespeare
Work(s)
Richard II, Henry IV, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, and Sonnets
Subject(s)
Igor Stravinsky
Work(s)
Symphony of Psalms
Subject(s)
Tacitus
Work(s)
Annals
Ludwig van Beethoven
Work(s)
Third Symphony
Subject(s)
François Viète
Work(s)
Introduction to the Analytical Art
Subject(s)
Virgil
Work(s)
Aeneid
Lady Mary Wroth
Work(s)
“A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love”
Subject(s)
Year of Study
Junior
United States Historical Documents
Work(s)
Articles of Confederation, Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States of America
Subject(s)
André-Marie Ampère
Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
Jane Austen
Work(s)
Pride and Prejudice, Emma
Subject(s)
Daniel Bernoulli
Work(s)
“On the Vibrating String”
Subject(s)
Miguel de Cervantes
Work(s)
Don Quixote
Subject(s)
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
Work(s)
“Excerpts from Coulomb’s Mémoires sur l’électricité et le magnétisme”
Subject(s)
Madame de La Fayette
Work(s)
Princess of Clèves
Subject(s)
Jean de La Fontaine
Work(s)
Fables
Subjects
François de La Rochefoucauld
Work(s)
Maxims
Subject(s)
Richard Dedekind
Work(s)
Essays on the Theory of Numbers
Subject(s)
René Descartes
Work(s)
Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind
George Eliot
Work(s)
Middlemarch
Subject(s)
Leonhard Euler
Work(s)
“Remarks on the Preceding Papers by Mr. Bernoulli”
Subject(s)
Michael Faraday
Work(s)
“Experimental Researches in Electricity”
Subject(s)
Benjamin Franklin
Work(s)
“Excerpt from several letters to Peter Collinson on the nature of electricity”
Subject(s)
Galileo Galilei
Work(s)
Two New Sciences
Subject(s)
William Gilbert
Work(s)
“De Magnete”
Subject(s)
Hamilton, Jay, and Madison
Work(s)
The Federalist
Subject(s)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Work(s)
The Scarlet Letter
Subject(s)
Thomas Hobbes
Work(s)
Leviathan
David Hume
Work(s)
Treatise of Human Nature
Christiaan Huygens
Work(s)
Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact
Subject(s)
Immanuel Kant
Work(s)
Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Work(s)
Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Essay on Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace
John Locke
Work(s)
Second Treatise of Government
James Clerk Maxwell
Work(s)
“On Faraday’s Lines of Force,” “On Physical Lines of Force,” “A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field”
Subject(s)
John Milton
Work(s)
Paradise Lost
Molière
Work(s)
Le Misanthrope
Subject(s)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Work(s)
Don Giovanni
Elective Work(s)
The Marriage of Figaro
Subject(s)
Isaac Newton
Work(s)
Principia Mathematica
Subject(s)
Jean-Antoine Nollet
Work(s)
“Observations on Several New Electrical Phenomena”
Subject(s)
Hans Christian Ørsted
Work(s)
“Experiments concerning the efficacy of electric conflict on the magnetic needle”
Subject(s)
Blaise Pascal
Work(s)
Pensées
Subject(s)
Jean Racine
Work(s)
Phèdre
Subject(s)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Work(s)
Social Contract, The Origin of Inequality
Adam Smith
Work(s)
Wealth of Nations
Subject(s)
Baruch Spinoza
Work(s)
Theologico-Political Treatise, Ethics
Subject(s)
Jonathan Swift
Work(s)
Gulliver’s Travels
Subject(s)
Brook Taylor
Work(s)
“On the motion of the stretched string”
Subject(s)
Mark Twain
Work(s)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Subject(s)
Alessandro Volta
Work(s)
“On the Electricity excited by the mere contact of conducting substances of different kinds”
Subject(s)
William Wordsworth
Work(s)
The Two-Part Prelude of 1799
Subject(s)
Richard Wagner
Work(s)
Tristan and Isolde
Subject(s)
Thomas Young
Work(s)
“On the Nature of Light and Colors”
Subject(s)
Hannah Arendt
Elective Work(s)
The Human Condition
Samuel Beckett
Elective Work(s)
Waiting for Godot
The Bhagavad Gita
Elective Work(s)
Subject(s)
Albert Camus
Elective Work(s)
The Stranger
Subject(s)
Daode jing
Elective Work(s)
Subject(s)
Madame de Sévigne
Elective Work(s)
Letters
Subject(s)
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Elective Work(s)
The Devils
Subject(s)
Marcel Duchamp
Elective Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
Ralph Ellison
Elective Work(s)
Invisible Man
Euripides
Elective Work(s)
Alcestis; Medea; Hecuba; The Trojan Women
Richard Feynman
Elective Work(s)
QED
Subject(s)
Gustave Flaubert
Elective Work(s)
Madame Bovary
Subject(s)
Michel Foucault
Elective Work(s)
Discipline and Punish; Security, Territory, and Population
Gabriel García Márquez
Elective Work(s)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Subject(s)
Edward Gibbon
Elective Work(s)
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
G. H. Hardy
Elective Work(s)
A Course of Pure Mathematics
Subject(s)
Georg Hegel
Elective Work(s)
Philosophy of Nature, Elements of Philosophy of Right
Martin Heidegger
Elective Work(s)
What is Metaphysics?
Subject(s)
Alfred Hitchcock
Elective Work(s)
Selected movies
Subject(s)
Henry James
Elective Work(s)
The Portrait of a Lady
Subject(s)
James Joyce
Elective Work(s)
Ulysses
Subject(s)
Soren Kierkegaard
Elective Work(s)
Either/Or
Subject(s)
Laozi
Elective Work(s)
Dao De Jing
Subject(s)
Halldór Laxness
Elective Work(s)
Independent People
Subject(s)
Emmanuel Levinas
Elective Work(s)
Totality and Infinity
Subject(s)
Konrad Lorenz
Elective Work(s)
Studies in Animal and Human Behavior
Subject(s)
Jorge Luis Borges
Elective Work(s)
Ficciones
Subject(s)
Ibn Mājah
Elective Work(s)
The Sunan
Subject(s)
Édouard Manet
Elective Work(s)
Art
Subject(s)
Herman Melville
Elective Work(s)
Moby Dick
Subject(s)
Arthur Miller
Elective Work(s)
Death of a Salesman
Toni Morrison
Elective Work(s)
Beloved
Subject(s)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Elective Work(s)
Gay Science
Subject(s)
Flannery O’Connor
Elective Work(s)
Wise Blood
Subject(s)
Thomas Piketty
Elective Work(s)
Capital
Subject(s)
Marcel Proust
Elective Work(s)
Swann’s Way, Remembrance of Things Past
Subject(s)
Ranier Maria Rilke
Elective Work(s)
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Subject(s)
The Rise and Decline of the Roman Republic
Elective Work(s)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Elective Work(s)
Emile
Subject(s)
Bertrand Russell
Elective Work(s)
An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
Subject(s)
William Shakespeare
Elective Work(s)
Measure for Measure
Subject(s)
Oswald Spengler
Elective Work(s)
The Decline of the West
Subject(s)
Igor Stravinsky
Elective Work(s)
Music
Subject(s)
Voltaire
Elective Work(s)
Candide
Subject(s)
Eudora Welty
Elective Work(s)
Short stories
Subject(s)
Tennesee Williams
Elective Work(s)
A Streetcar Named Desire
Zhuangzi
Elective Work(s)
The Works of Zhuangzi
Subject(s)
Virginia Woolf
Elective Work(s)
The Waves
Subject(s)
James Joyce
Elective Work(s)
Finnegans Wake
Subject(s)
Kate Chopin
Elective Work(s)
The Awakening
Subject(s)
Zora Neale Hurston
Elective Work(s)
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Subject(s)
V.S. Naipaul
Elective Work(s)
A House for Mr. Biswas
Subject(s)
William Gaddis
Elective Work(s)
The Recognitions
Subject(s)
Neuroscience
Elective Work(s)
Subject(s)
Year of Study
Senior
United States Supreme Court Decisions
Subject(s)
James Baldwin
Work(s)
Stranger in the Village, The Fire Next Time
Charles Baudelaire
Work(s)
Les Fleurs du Mal
Subject(s)
George Beadle & Edward Tatum
Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
Elizabeth Bishop
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Niels Bohr
Work(s)
“On the Spectrum of Hydrogen”
Subject(s)
Theodor Boveri
Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
Gwendolyn Brooks
Work(s)
Sonnets from Children of the Poor
Subject(s)
Joseph Conrad
Work(s)
Heart of Darkness
Subject(s)
Charles Darwin
Work(s)
Origin of Species
Clinton Davisson
Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
Simone de Beauvoir
Work(s)
The Second Sex
Louis de Broglie
Work(s)
“Matter Waves”
Subject(s)
Alexis de Tocqueville
Work(s)
Democracy in America
Subject(s)
Emily Dickinson
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Work(s)
Brothers Karamazov
Elective Work(s)
The Devils
Subject(s)
Frederick Douglass
Work(s)
Selected speeches
Subject(s)
W. E. B. Du Bois
Work(s)
The Souls of Black Folk
Albert Einstein
Work(s)
“Relativity,” “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” “On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light,” “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity,” “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy Content?”
Elective Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
T. S. Eliot
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Michael Faraday
Work(s)
“On the Absolute Quantity of Electricity Associated with the Particles or Atoms of Matter”
Subject(s)
William Faulkner
Work(s)
Go Down, Moses
Gustave Flaubert
Work(s)
Un Coeur Simple
Elective Work(s)
Madame Bovary
Subject(s)
Sigmund Freud
Work(s)
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Mourning and Melancholia, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Subject(s)
Hamilton, Jay, and Madison
Work(s)
The Federalist Papers
Subject(s)
G. H. Hardy
Work(s)
“Mendelian Proportions in a Mixed Population”
Subject(s)
Georg Hegel
Work(s)
Phenomenology of Mind
Martin Heidegger
Work(s)
Basic Writings, The Word of Nietzsche: God is Dead, Introduction to Metaphysics
Elective Work(s)
What is Metaphysics?
Subject(s)
Werner Karl Heisenberg
Work(s)
“Critique of the Physical Concepts of the Particle Picture”
Subject(s)
Edmund Husserl
Work(s)
The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
François Jacob & Jacques Monod
Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
Søren Kierkegaard
Work(s)
Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling
Subject(s)
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Work(s)
“Zoological Philosophy”
Subject(s)
Abraham Lincoln
Work(s)
Selected speeches
Subject(s)
Nikolai Lobachevsky
Work(s)
Theory of Parallels
Subject(s)
Karl Marx
Work(s)
Capital, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology
Herman Melville
Work(s)
Benito Cereno
Elective Work(s)
Moby Dick
Subject(s)
Gregor Mendel
Work(s)
“Experiments with Plant Hybridization”
Subject(s)
Hermann Minkowski
Work(s)
“Space and Time”
Subject(s)
Robert Andrews Millikan
Work(s)
“The Electron”
Subject(s)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Work(s)
Don Giovanni
Elective Work(s)
The Marriage of Figaro
Subject(s)
Thomas Morgan
Work(s)
Evolution and Genetics, “The Chromosomes and Mendel’s Two Laws,” “The Linkage Groups and the Chromosomes,” “Sex-Linked Inheritance,” “Crossing-Over”
Subject(s)
Toni Morrison
Work(s)
Song of Solomon
Elective Work(s)
Beloved
Subject(s)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Work(s)
Beyond Good and Evil
Elective Work(s)
Gay Science
Subject(s)
Flannery O’Connor
Work(s)
Good Country People, Revelation, The Displaced Person
Elective Work(s)
Wise Blood
Subject(s)
Sylvia Plath
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Max Planck
Work(s)
“The Quantum Hypothesis”
Subject(s)
Plato
Work(s)
Phaedrus
Arthur Rimbaud
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Ernest Rutherford
Work(s)
“The Scattering of α & β Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom”
Subject(s)
Erwin Schrödinger
Work(s)
“Four Lectures of Wave Mechanics—First Lecture”
Subject(s)
Wallace Stevens
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Joel Sussman
Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
Walter Sutton
Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
J. J. Thomson
Work(s)
“Cathode Rays”
Subject(s)
Leo Tolstoy
Work(s)
War and Peace
Subject(s)
Paul Valéry
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Work(s)
Faust
Subject(s)
Richard Wagner
Work(s)
Tristan and Isolde
Subject(s)
Booker T. Washington
Work(s)
“Atlanta Exposition Address,” “Our New Citizen,” “Democracy and Education”
Subject(s)
Virginia Woolf
Work(s)
Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own
Subject(s)
James Watson & Francis Crick
Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
William Wordsworth
Work(s)
The Two-Part Prelude of 1799
Subject(s)
William Butler Yeats
Work(s)
Poems
Subject(s)
Hannah Arendt
Elective Work(s)
The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Albert Camus
Elective Work(s)
The Stranger
Subject(s)
Madame de Sévigné
Elective Work(s)
Letters
Subject(s)
Marcel Duchamp
Elective Work(s)
Essays
Subject(s)
Richard Feynman
Elective Work(s)
QED
Subject(s)
Gabriel García Márquez
Elective Work(s)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Subject(s)
Edward Gibbon
Elective Work(s)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
G. H. Hardy
Elective Work(s)
A Course of Pure Mathematics
Subject(s)
Henry James
Elective Work(s)
The Portrait of a Lady
Subject(s)
Laozi
Elective Work(s)
Dao De Jing
Subject(s)
Halldór Laxness
Elective Work(s)
Independent People
Subject(s)
Konrad Lorenz
Elective Work(s)
Studies in Animal and Human Behavior
Subject(s)
Jorge Luis Borges
Elective Work(s)
Ficciones
Subject(s)
Ibn Mājah
Elective Work(s)
The Sunan
Subject(s)
Édouard Manet
Elective Work(s)
Art
Subject(s)
Thomas Piketty
Elective Work(s)
Capital
Subject(s)
Marcel Proust
Elective Work(s)
Remembrance of Things Past
Subject(s)
Ranier Maria Rilke
Elective Work(s)
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Subject(s)
Bertrand Russell
Elective Work(s)
An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
Subject(s)
William Shakespeare
Elective Work(s)
Measure for Measure
Subject(s)
Oswald Spengler
Elective Work(s)
The Decline of the West
Subject(s)
Igor Stravinsky
Elective Work(s)
Music
Subject(s)
Voltaire
Elective Work(s)
Candide
Subject(s)
Zhuangzi
Elective Work(s)
The Works of Zhuangzi
Subject(s)
Virginia Woolf
Elective Work(s)
The Waves
Subject(s)
James Joyce
Elective Work(s)
Finnegans Wake
Subject(s)
Kate Chopin
Elective Work(s)
The Awakening
Subject(s)
Zora Neale Hurston
Elective Work(s)
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Subject(s)
V.S. Naipaul
Elective Work(s)
A House for Mr. Biswas
Subject(s)
William Gaddis
Elective Work(s)
The Recognitions
Subject(s)
Neuroscience
Elective Work(s)
Subject(s)