[EP] Easton Press’s 100 Greatest Books Ever Written

Easton Press’s 100 Greatest Books Ever Written [EP]

Originally published in the 1970s

The Easton Press publishes those leather-bound instant collectables with gilded page edges and satin bookmarks. We had nearly a full set in my house growing up. This, along with the list I got from an English teacher in high school [MUM], were my first introduction to the canon. When my mother died from cancer in 2005 , she left me the family’s collection of Easton Press classics. I set about reading every one of them in her memory.

The Easton Press is a publishing house and so it is restricted in what it can publish—and what it thinks it can make a profit on. That makes for a quirky “Greatest Books Ever Written” list, which combines safe, out-of-copyright classics like Austen and Dickens with some populist entries. (The books that only got one vote are old adventure tales by Scott, Verne, and London.) However, the Easton Press’s list deserves kudos since it is open in its definition of what a book is. There are poetry collections, plays, novels, and short stories to be found here. The title “100 Greatest Books Ever Written” is also a misnomer since the current list is 125 books long, with those additions brought in several years ago to fill out some holes.

To see the full list from the Easton Press, click here or read below. Works marked in RED appeared on at least one other of the twenty-four “Great Works” lists I’ve compiled, and so made the Master List.

1. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne
2. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
4. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
5. Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift
6. Moby Dick, or The Whale by Herman Melville
7. A Farewell To Arms by Ernest Hemingway
8. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
9. The Jungle Books by Rudyard Kipling
10. The Odyssey by Homer
11. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
12. A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce
13. Paradise Lost by John Milton
14. Tales From The Arabian Nights by Richard Burton
15. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
16. Candide by Voltaire
17. Oedipus The King by Sophocles
18. The Hunchback Of Notre Dame [Notre-Dame De Paris] by Victor Hugo
19. The Last Of The Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
20. The Sea Wolf by Jack London
21. Cyrano De Bergerac by Edmund Rostand
22. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
23. Collected Poems by Robert Browning
24. The Essays Of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Ralph Waldo Emerson
25. The Portrait Of A Lady by Henry James
26. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
27. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
28. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
29. Collected Poems by John Keats
30. On The Origin Of Species by Charles Darwin
31. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
32. Collected Poems by Robert Frost
33. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving
34. Animal Farm by George Orwell
35. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
36. She Stoops To Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith
37. Of Mice And Men by John Steinbeck
38. Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen
39. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
40. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
41. The Iliad by Homer
42. Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
43. The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
44. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
45. Aesop’s Fables by Aesop
46. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
47. The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
48. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
49. Politics And The Poetics by Aristotle
50. The Aeneid by Virgil
51. Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
52. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
53. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
54. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
55. Pygmalion And Candida by George Bernard Shaw
56. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
57. Romeo And Juliet by William Shakespeare
58. The Cherry Orchard And The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
59. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
60. The Analects of Confucius by Confucius
61. A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
62. Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats
63. The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
64. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
65. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
66. Beowulf
67. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
68. The Neclace And Other Tales by Guy de Maupassant
69. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
70. Fathers And Sons by Ivan Turgenev
71. Heart Of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
72. War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy
73. The History of Early Rome by Livy
74. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
75. The Talisman by Sir Walter Scott
76. Tess Of The D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
77. Alice’s Adventure In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
78. Dracula by Bram Stoker
79. The Rubáiyát Of Omar Khayyám by Omar Khayyám
80. The Red And The Black by Stendhal
81. A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickins
82. The Republic by Plato
83. Collected Poems by Emily Dickinson
84. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
85. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
86. The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
87. Silas Marner by George Eliot
88. The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
89. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
90. Billy Budd by Herman Melville
91. The Confessions by St. Augustine
92. Tales of Mystery And Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
93. Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
94. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
95. The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner
96. Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
97. Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
98. Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
99. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
100. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
101. Alhambra by Washington Irving
102. Plays by Aristophanes
103. Confessions by Jean  Rousseau
104. Descent of Man by Charles Darwin
105. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
106. Plague Year by Daniel Defoe
107. Plays by Aeschylus
108. Plays by Henrik Ibsen
109. Symposium by Plato
110. Holy Bible
111. Middlemarch by George Eliot
112. Comedies by Shakespeare
113. Tragedies by Shakespeare
114. Histories by Shakespeare
115. Plays by Euripides
116. Essayes by Sir Francis Bacon
117. Two Plays for Puritans by George Bernard Shaw
118. Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
119. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
120. Short Stories of Oscar Wilde
121. Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
122. Short Stories of Charles Dickens
123. Two Plays by Moliere