Books of the Western Canon, Kindle edition

This collection is based on the lists of "great books and essential authors" in the appendixes of "The Western Canon" by Harold Bloom. You can buy Bloom's book at Amazon  

Here we provide the full-text of many of the books he recommends, from the Theocratic, Aristocratic, and Democratic Ages (from the dawn of civilization up through the end of World War I), organized the way he presents them: 798 books by 204 authors. Many of these books would be very hard to find and very costly in printed form.

Books originally written in languages other than English appear here in English translation, but not the translations mentioned by Bloom, which, for the most part, are still protected by copyright. (Original-language versions of many of these appear in other CD collections of ours; as well as original-language versions of "western canon" books for which public domain translations are not available).

The books themselves are in the public domain and and are provided here in .prc format. You can copy them to your Amazon Kindle over the USB cable. They do not need to be converted to read them on your Kindle. (NB -- this is the Kindle edition of this CD. If you would like the regular edition, with books in plain text form, please go here.)

You can also read these books on your PC using free Mobipocket Reader software. If you have a Windows PC and read your books on your computer screen, you should download the free Mobipocket Reader and give it a try. This is software designed for portable gadgets like Blackberry and Palm and those that use Windows Mobile. But there’s a version that works great on Windows PCs, presenting the text on your screen in a very easy to read format. Just go to http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsReader.asp  and click the red download button in the right column. After you’ve installed it, try moving some of your plain text books (like the ones I email you). Just open the reader software, click on Import (from the selections at the top of the screen), then in the drop-down menu that appears click on Text document, then navigate to select the file you want. In a few seconds, the software creates a copy in its special format (.prc) and puts that copy in a new folder (My Ebooks, under My Documents). The book appears on your screen ready to read, in a format that lets you flip pages (left to right), rather than scroll down

You can copy the books to your hard drive for convenience, or make an archival copy of the CD, as backup in case of damage to the original. But the collection and its indexes, created for your convenience, are under copyright. Please contact us first if you are interested in making copies of this CD for commercial purposes. seltzer@samizdat.com

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Questions? If Richard Seltzer, who created this CD, is online now, you can chat with him immediately by clicking on his photo (below). If he is offline, you can send him an email by clicking on his photo.

Table of Contents

The Theocratic Age

The Ancient Near East

• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• The Egyptian Book of the Dead
• The Bible (King James Version)
• The Apocrypha
• Saying of the Fathers (Pirke Aboth)

Ancient India (Sanskrit)

• The Mahabharata
• The Bhagavad-Gita
• The Ramayana

The Ancient Greeks

• Homer
• The Iliad translated by Andrew Lang
• The Odyssey translated by S.H. Butcher and Andrew Lang
• Hesiod
• Works of Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica
• Sappho
• One Hundred Lyrics by Bliss Carman
• Pindar
• The Extant Odes of Pindar, translated by Ernest Myers
• Aeschylus
• Four Plays by Aeschylus (Suppliant Maidens, Persians, Seven Against Thebes, and Prometheus Bound) translated by E.D.a. Morshead
• The House of Atreus (Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Furies) translated by E.D.A. Morshead
• Sophocles
• Oedipus Trilogy (Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus) translated by F. Storr
• Seven Plays in English Verse (Antigone, Aias, King Oedipus, Electra Trachinian Maidens, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonos) translated by Lewis Campbell
• Euripides
• Tragedies of Euripides volume 1 (Hecuba, Orestes, Phoenissae, Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis, Bacchae, Heraclidae, Iphigenia in Alide, and Iphigenia in Tauris) translated by Theodore Alois Buckley
• Aristophanes
• The Eleven Comedies
• volume 1 (Knights, Acharnians, Peace, Lysistrata, Clouds)
• volume 2 (Wasps, Birds, Frogs, Thesmophoriazusae, Ecclesiazusae, Plutus)
• Herodotus
• The History of Herodotus, translated by G.C. Macaulay
• volume 1
• volume 2
• Thucydides
• The History of the Peolponnesian War, translated by Richard Cawley
• Plato
• Dialogues translated by Benjamin Jowett
• Alcibiades
• Apology
• Charmides (and preface to the collection)
• Cratylus
• Critias
• Crito
• Euthydemus
• Euthyphro
• Gorgias
• Ion
• Laches
• Laws
• Lesser Hippias
• Lysis
• Menexus
• Meno
• Parmenides
• Phaedo
• Phaedrus
• Philebus
• Protagoras
• Republic
• Sophist
• Statesman
• Symposium
• Theaetetus
• Timaeus
• Aristotle
• Poetics translated by S.H. Butcher
• Ethics

Hellenistic Greeks

• Longinus
• On the Sublime, translated by H.L. Havell
• Theocritus
• Idylls translated by C.S. Calverley
• Plutarch
• Lives (complete), translated by A.H. Clough
• Essays and Miscellanies (Complete Works, volume 3)
• Aesop
• Fables, translated by V.S. Jones
• Lucian of Samosata
• Works
• volume 1
• volume 2
• volume 3

The Romans

• Plautus
• Works, volume 1 (Amphitryon, Comedy of Asses, Pot of Gold, Two Bacchises, Captives)
• Terence
• The Comedies of Terence, translated by Henry Thomas Riley and George Colman (Andrian, Eunuch, Self-Tormentor, Brothers, Step-Mother, Phormio)
• Lucretius
• Of the Nature of Things, translated by William Ellery Leonard
• Cicero
• On Friendship and Old Age, translated by E.S. Shuckburgh
• Horace
• Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry, translated by John Conington
• The Odes and Carmen Saeculare, translated by John Conington
• Works of Horace, translated by C.Smart
• Catullus
• The Poems and Gragments of Catullus, translated by Robinson Ellis
• Virgil
• The Aeneid
• Eclogues
• Georgics
• Lucan
• Pharsalia
• Ovid
• Metamorphoses, volume 1, books 1-7, translated by Henry T. Tiley
• Petronius
• The Satyricon, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff
• Apuleius
• The Golden Asse, translated by William Adlington

The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante

• Saint Augustine
• Confessions, translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey
• City of God, translated by Marcus Dods
• The Koran
• Three Translations, side-by-side (Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Marmaduke Pickthall, Mohammad Habib Shakir)
• The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, translated by Richard F. Burton
• volume 1
• volume 2
• volume 3
• volume 4
• volume 5
• volume 6
• volume 7
• volume 8
• volume 9
• volume 10
• supplemental volume 1
• supplemental volume 2
• supplemental volume 3
• supplemental volume 4
• supplemental volume 5
• supplemental volume 6
• The Eddas
• The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfussioin translated by Benjamin Thorpe, and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson, translated by I.A. Blackwell
• The Younger Edda or Prose Edda edited by Rasmus B. Anderson
• The Nibelungenlied, translated by George Henry Needler
• Chretien DeTroyes
• Four Arthurian Romances (Erec and Enide, Cliges, Yvain, and Lancelot)
• Beowulf, translated by Lessllie Hall
• Lay of the Cid, translated by R. Selden Rose and Leonard Bacon

The Aristocratic Age

Italy

• Dante
• The Divine Comedy, translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Petrarch
• Poems of Petrarch,
• Giovanni Boccaccio
• The Decameron, translated by J.M. Rigg
• volume 1
• volume 2
• Ludovico Aristo
• Orland Furioso
• Michael Angelo Buonarroti
• The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella, translated by John Addington Symonds
• Niccolo Machiavelli
• The Prince, translated by W.K. Marriott
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Notebooks
• Baldassare Castiglione
• The Book of the Courtier, translated by Thomas Hoby
• Benvenuto Cellini
• Autobiography, translated by John Addington Symonds
• Toquato Tasso
• Jerusalem Delivered, translated by Edward Fairfax
• Tommaso Campanella
• The City of the Sun
• The Sonnets of Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Tommaso Campanella, translated by John Addington Symonds

Spain

• Miguel de Cervantes
• Don Quixote, translated by John Ormsby
• The Exemplary Novels, translated by Walter K. Kelly
• Pedro Calderon de la Barca
• Life is a Dream, translated by Denis Florence MacCarthy
• The Wonder-Working Magician, translated by Denis Floence MacCarthy

England and Scotland

• Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Canterbury Tales, edited by D. Laing Purves
• Sir Thomas Malory
• Le Morte Darthur (King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table)
• volume 1
• volume 2
• Sir Thomas More
• Utopia
• Sir Philip Sidney
• Astrophel and Stella
• Defence of Poesie
• Edmund Spenser
• The Faerie Queene
• Amoretti
• Astrophel
• Shephearde's Calender
• Sonnets
• Christopher Marlowe
• Dr. Faustus
• Edward the Second
• Hero and Leander and Other Poems
• Jew of Malta
• Massacre at Paris
• Tamburlaine the Great
• part 1
• part 2
• Tragedy of Dido Queen of Cathage
• Works of Christopher Marlowe, volume 3 (Hero and Leander, Ovid's Elegies, Epigrams, First Book of Lucan, The Passioante Shepherd to His Love, Fragment, Dialogue in Verse)
• Michael Drayton
• Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles
• Edimion and Phoebe
• Minor Poems of Michael Drayton
• Samuel Daniel
• Delia
• Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles by Daiel and Constable
• Defence of Ryme
• Thomas Nashe
• The Unfortunate Traveller
• William Shakespeare
• plays -- the Mobey electronic edition
• All's Well that Ends Well
• Antony and Cleopatra
• As You Like It
• Comedy of Errors
• Coriolanus
• Cymbeline
• Hamlet
• Henry IV Part 1
• Henry IV Part 2
• Henry V
• Henry VI Part 1
• Henry VI Part 2
• Henry VI Part 3
• Henry VIII
• Julius Caesar
• King John
• King Lear
• Love's Labor's Lost
• Macbeth
• Measure for Measure
• Merchant of Venice
• Merry Wives of Windsor
• Midsummer Night's Dream
• Much Ado About Nothing
• Othello
• Pericles Prince of Tyre
• Richard II
• Richard III
• Romeo and Juliet
• Taming of the Shrew
• Tempest
• Timon of Athens
• Titus Andronicus
• Troilus and Cressida
• Twelfth Night
• Two Gentlemen of Verona
• Winter's Tale
• plays -- the first folio (35 plays in a single document)
• glossary
• poetry
• Lover's Complaint
• Passionate Pilgrim
• Rape of Lucrece
• Sonnets
• Venus and Adonis
• Ben Jonson
• The Alchemist
• Cynthia's Revels
• Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter and Some Poems
• Epicoene
• Every Man in His Humor
• Every Man Out of His Humor
• Masque of Beauty
• Masque of Blacknesse
• Poetaster
• Sejanus
• Volpone
• Francis Bacon
• Essays
• Robert Burton
• The Anatomy of Melancholy
• Sir Thomas Browne
• Religio Medici, Hydriotphia, and The Letter to a Friend
• Thomas Hobbes
• Leviathan
• Robert Herrick
• Lyrical Poems
• Web of Life
• Richard Lovelace
• Lucasta
• Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
• Beggar's Bush
• Custom of the Country
• Elder Brother
• Faithful Shepherdess
• False One
• Humorous Lieutenant
• King and No King
• Laws of Candy
• Maid's Tragedy
• Philaster
• Rule a Wife and Have a Wife
• Scornful Lady
• Spanish Curate
• Wit Without Money
• George Chapman
• Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois
• John Webster
• The White Devel
• The Duchess of Malfi
• John Bunyan
• Pilgrim's Progress
• Izaak Walton
• The Compleat Angler