Volume 1
Franklin, Woolman, and Penn
Autobiography, conscience, and the habits by which a person tries to shape a life.
Week 1: Benjamin Franklin, John Woolman, and William PennDialogue published
The guided path / 51 volumes
Reading Order
A guided path through the Harvard Classics and its companion lecture volume. Follow the published conversations in order, or browse the collection by volume.
Browse the collection
The volumes
Choose a volume to open its published dialogue.
Volume 2
Plato
Socrates on trial, in prison, and at dinner: what justice asks of a person.
Week 2: Plato, Apology, Crito, and PhaedoWeek 3: Epictetus and Marcus AureliusDialogue published
Volume 3
Bacon, Milton, and Browne
A new confidence in inquiry meets poetry, faith, and the limits of what we can know.
Week 4: Francis Bacon, John Milton, and Thomas BrowneDialogue published
Volume 4
The English Poets: Milton
Milton’s shorter poems and Paradise Lost ask what freedom means after rebellion.
Week 5: John Milton, Paradise LostDialogue published
Volume 5
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-reliance, nature, and the difficult work of thinking for oneself.
Week 6: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance and The Over-SoulDialogue published
Volume 6
Robert Burns
Poems that give ordinary people, common speech, and daily feeling full dignity.
Week 7: Robert Burns: To a Mouse, To a Louse, and A Man's a Man for a' ThatDialogue published
Volume 7
Augustine and Thomas à Kempis
Confession, desire, humility, and the inward search for a life rightly ordered.
Week 8: Augustine, Confessions; Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of ChristDialogue published
Volume 8
Nine Greek Dramas
Tragedy and comedy test fate, justice, power, grief, and the limits of civic life.
Week 9: Aeschylus and Sophocles: the Oresteia, Oedipus the King, and AntigoneWeek 10: Euripides, Hippolytus and The Bacchae; Aristophanes, The FrogsDialogue published
Volume 9
Cicero and Pliny
Letters on friendship, aging, public duty, and the texture of Roman life.
Week 11: Cicero, On Friendship and On Old Age; letters of Cicero and Pliny the YoungerDialogue published
Volume 10
Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations asks how labor, exchange, self-interest, and social trust shape prosperity.
Week 12: Adam Smith, The Wealth of NationsDialogue published
Volume 11
Charles Darwin
The Origin of Species follows the evidence for change, adaptation, and the branching history of life.
Week 13: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of SpeciesDialogue published
Volume 12
Plutarch
Parallel lives turn biography into a study of character, ambition, and political consequence.
Week 14: Plutarch, Lives of Pericles and Alcibiades; Demosthenes and CiceroDialogue published
Volume 13
Virgil
The Aeneid follows a refugee’s duty to found a future while carrying the costs of war.
Week 15: Virgil, The AeneidDialogue published
Volume 14
Cervantes
Don Quixote tests the distance between the worlds we imagine and the world that resists us.
Week 16: Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part IDialogue published
Volume 15
Bunyan and Walton
Pilgrimage, faith, and friendship become paths through uncertainty and ordinary life.
Week 17: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress; Izaak Walton, Lives of Donne and HerbertDialogue published
Volume 16
The Thousand and One Nights
Stories nested inside stories explore survival, wonder, power, and the force of telling.
Week 18: Stories from The Thousand and One NightsDialogue published
Volume 17
Aesop, Grimm, and Andersen
Fables and fairy tales make moral choices vivid, strange, and often unsettling.
Week 19: Aesop, The Wolf and the Lamb; Grimm, Cinderella; Andersen, The Emperor's New Clothes and The Ugly DucklingDialogue published
Volume 18
Modern English Drama
From Restoration wit to Romantic revolt, these plays stage love, reputation, and social constraint.
Week 20: Sheridan, The School for Scandal; Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer; Browning, A Blot in the 'ScutcheonDialogue published
Volume 19
Goethe and Marlowe
Faustian bargains turn knowledge, ambition, and desire into questions about the soul.
Week 21: Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus; Goethe, Faust, Part IDialogue published
Volume 20
Dante
The Divine Comedy imagines moral life as a journey through consequence, love, and hope.
Week 22: Dante Alighieri, The Divine ComedyDialogue published
Volume 21
Alessandro Manzoni
The Betrothed places private love inside plague, power, violence, and providence.
Week 23: Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed)Dialogue published
Volume 22
Homer
The Odyssey asks what homecoming costs and how hospitality shapes a civilization.
Week 24: Homer, The OdysseyDialogue published
Volume 23
Richard Henry Dana
Two Years Before the Mast records labor, authority, and endurance at sea.
Week 25: Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years Before the Mast and Twenty-Four Years AfterDialogue published
Volume 24
Edmund Burke
Taste, beauty, revolution, and political judgment collide in Burke’s essays and speeches.
Week 26: Edmund Burke, On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and A Letter to a Noble LordDialogue published
Volume 25
John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle
Liberty and individuality meet Carlyle’s searching portraits of character and leadership.
Week 27: John Stuart Mill, Autobiography and On Liberty; Thomas Carlyle, Characteristics, Inaugural Address at Edinburgh, and Sir Walter ScottDialogue published
Volume 26
Continental Drama
Spanish, French, and German plays test honor, duty, faith, and political freedom.
Week 28: Calderón, Life Is a Dream; Corneille, Polyeucte; Racine, Phædra; Molière, Tartuffe; Lessing, Minna von Barnhelm; Schiller, William TellDialogue published
Volume 27
English Essays
Writers from Sidney to Macaulay debate poetry, taste, education, and public life.
Week 29: Sidney, The Defense of Poesy; Defoe, The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters and The Education of Women; Hume, Of the Standard of Taste; Sydney Smith, Fallacies of Anti-ReformersDialogue published
Volume 28
Essays, English and American
A wide-ranging conversation about culture, science, work, democracy, and the self.
Week 30: Newman, The Idea of a University; Huxley, Science and Culture; Channing, On the Elevation of the Laboring Classes; Thoreau, Walking; Lowell, DemocracyDialogue published
Volume 29
Charles Darwin
The Voyage of the Beagle joins careful observation to questions about nature and human perspective.
Week 31: Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the BeagleDialogue published
Volume 30
Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin, and Newcomb
Accessible scientific lectures make forces, light, tides, the universe, and deep time tangible.
Week 32: Faraday, The Chemical History of a Candle; Helmholtz, On the Conservation of Force; Kelvin, The Tides; Geikie, Geographical EvolutionDialogue published
Volume 31
Benvenuto Cellini
A vivid autobiography asks how self-invention, artistic genius, and violence coexist.
Week 33: Benvenuto Cellini, AutobiographyDialogue published
Volume 32
Montaigne and His Readers
Essays on custom, education, morality, and judgment meet later reflections on what makes a classic.
Week 34: Montaigne, Of the Institution and Education of Children and Of Friendship; Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals; Schiller, Letters Upon the Æsthetic Education of Man; Sainte-Beuve, What Is a Classic?Dialogue published
Volume 33
Voyages and Travels
Accounts of exploration reveal curiosity, empire, danger, and the viewpoint of the traveler.
Week 35: Herodotus, An Account of Egypt; Tacitus, Germany; Raleigh, The Discovery of GuianaDialogue published
Volume 34
Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Hobbes
Reason, authority, inequality, and the social contract shape competing accounts of human life.
Week 36: Descartes, Discourse on Method; Voltaire, Letters on the English; Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality; Hobbes, Leviathan, Part IDialogue published
Volume 35
Froissart, Malory, and Harrison
Chronicle and romance preserve ideals of chivalry while exposing the worlds that produced them.
Week 37: Froissart, selected Chronicles; Malory, The Holy Grail; Harrison, A Description of Elizabethan EnglandDialogue published
Volume 36
Machiavelli, More, and Luther
Power, utopia, conscience, and reform press on the boundary between principle and survival.
Week 38: Machiavelli, The Prince; Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More; More, Utopia; Luther, selected reform writingsDialogue published
Volume 37
Locke, Berkeley, and Hume
Education, perception, and knowledge are tested through sharply different philosophical arguments.
Week 39: Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education; Berkeley, Three Dialogues; Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human UnderstandingDialogue published
Volume 38
Medicine: Hippocrates to Pasteur
Medical writing traces changing ideas of care, evidence, disease, and the ethics of practice.
Week 40: Harvey, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood; Jenner, vaccination papers; Holmes, The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever; Lister, On the Antiseptic Principle; Pasteur, germ-theory papersDialogue published
Volume 39
Famous Prefaces
Writers introduce their work and reveal how authors explain, defend, and frame new ideas.
Week 41: Copernicus's dedication; Heminges and Condell's First Folio preface; Johnson's Dictionary preface; Wordsworth's poetry preface; Whitman's Leaves of Grass prefaceDialogue published
Volume 40
English Poetry I: Chaucer to Gray
A long poetic conversation moves from medieval tales and ballads toward eighteenth-century reflection.
Week 42: Chaucer, Canterbury Tales Prologue; Sir Patrick Spence; Shakespeare, Sonnet 73; Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning; Gray, Elegy Written in a Country ChurchyardDialogue published
Volume 41
English Poetry II: Collins to Fitzgerald
Poetry turns toward memory, nature, song, social change, and the claims of the imagination.
Week 43: Collins, To Evening; Goldsmith, The Deserted Village; Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey; Keats, To Autumn; FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar KhayyámDialogue published
Volume 42
English Poetry III: Tennyson to Whitman
Poetry moves through Victorian doubt and memory toward American voices on democracy, grief, and national life.
Week 44: Tennyson, Ulysses; Browning, My Last Duchess; Arnold, Dover Beach; Whitman, The Wound-DresserDialogue published
Volume 43
American Historical Documents
Founding charters, treaties, speeches, and emancipation documents show a nation debating its promises and contradictions.
Week 45: Declaration of Independence; United States Constitution; Treaty with the Six Nations; Fugitive Slave Act; Emancipation ProclamationDialogue published
Volume 44
Sacred Writings I
Confucius, Job, the Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Luke, and Acts invite comparison across wisdom, suffering, and faith.
Week 46: Sayings of Confucius; Job; Ecclesiastes; Luke 10; Acts 10Dialogue published
Volume 45
Sacred Writings II
Paul’s letters and Christian hymns sit beside Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic writings on duty, suffering, and the good life.
Week 47: 1 Corinthians 12–13; Buddhist Questions Which Tend Not to Edification and There Is No Ego; Bhagavad-Gita, chapters 2–3; Qur'an, The Chapter of UnityDialogue published
Volume 46
Elizabethan Drama I
Marlowe and Shakespeare put ambition, conscience, power, and human limits on stage.
Week 48: Marlowe, Edward II; Shakespeare, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The TempestDialogue published
Volume 47
Elizabethan Drama II
Comedy and tragedy expose appetite, status, deception, and the fragility of social order.
Week 49: Dekker, The Shoemaker's Holiday; Jonson, The Alchemist; Webster, The Duchess of Malfi; Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old DebtsDialogue published
Volume 48
Blaise Pascal
Thoughts, letters, and shorter works hold reason, faith, uncertainty, and human dignity in tension.
Week 50: Pascal, Thoughts; selected letters; Of the Geometrical Spirit; New Fragment of the Treatise on VacuumDialogue published
Volume 49
Epic and Saga
Beowulf, Roland, and northern sagas imagine courage, loyalty, fame, and the cost of heroic life.
Week 51: Beowulf; The Song of Roland; The Destruction of Dá Derga's Hostel; The Story of the Volsungs; NibelungenliedDialogue published
Volume 50
Introduction, Reader’s Guide, and Indexes
Eliot’s introduction and reading plans offer ways into the collection, with indexes to connect its many voices.
Week 52: Charles W. Eliot's Introduction; the Reader's Guide, indexes, and selections for young readers in Volume 50Dialogue published
Companion · Volume 51
Lectures on The Harvard Classics
A companion volume of lectures introduces the fields and works gathered across the Five-Foot Shelf.
Week 53: Lectures on The Harvard Classics, including history, natural science, criticism, political science, and voyages and travelDialogue published