Originally curated by Harvard President Charles W. Eliot as a complete liberal education in fifty volumes, the Harvard Classics gathers philosophy, science, literature, and history into a single indispensable library. Plato's dialogues and Marcus Aurelius's meditations sit alongside Dante's Divine Comedy, Francis Bacon's essays, Charles Darwin's scientific writing, and Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, tracing the foundations of Western thought from ancient Greece to the modern age. Homer, Cervantes, Milton, Adam Smith, and dozens more join this sweeping survey of the ideas and stories that built a civilization. Known for generations as "the Five-Foot Shelf," this collection remains one of the most ambitious reading programs ever assembled. This Chronicle Vault edition presents the complete, unabridged texts in a clean, fully reflowable format for all e-readers.



Seventy-nine great minds, one complete education in world thought