Harvard Classics

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

The work is Benjamin Franklin’s own autobiography, a self‑written portrait of a man who rose from a modest…

Life Is a Dream

Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Life Is a Dream is a seventeenth‑century Spanish drama by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, whose prolific career…

The Golden Sayings of Epictetus, with the Hymn of Cleanthes

Epictetus

The work presents a collection of Epictetus’s sayings, framed as a series of discourses that blend devotional…

The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter presents itself as a richly layered work that weaves together themes of adultery, revenge,…

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus From the Quarto of 1616

Christopher Marlowe

The work is Christopher Marlowe’s early‑modern tragedy The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, taken from the…

The Poetical Works of John Milton

John Milton

The volume gathers the complete poetic output of John Milton, presenting his early “Minor Poems” as they…

Two Years Before the Mast

Richard Henry Dana

The work is a first‑person memoir of Richard Henry Dana Jr., a Harvard‑educated lawyer who, after a bout of…

The Æneid of Virgil, Translated into English Verse

Virgil

Virgil’s Æneid, rendered here in English verse, is a scholarly effort to bring the Roman poet’s national epic…

Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend

Sir Thomas Browne

The volume brings together three of Sir Thomas Browne’s most celebrated writings, Religio Medici, a…

The Odyssey of Homer

Homer

The volume presents a scholarly overview of the many English renderings of Homer’s Odyssey, tracing how each…

Autobiography

John Stuart Mill

This work is the autobiographical sketch of John Stuart Mill, the eminent 19th‑century English philosopher,…

Notre-Dame de Paris

Victor Hugo

Ce roman historique, signé Victor Hugo, s’ouvre sur une méditation acerbe à propos des dégradations subies…

Areopagitica A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England

John Milton

This work is John Milton’s 1644 parliamentary address defending the freedom to print without prior licensing.

Phaedra

Jean Racine

Jean Racine’s Phaedra is a French classical tragedy that re‑imagines the Greek myth of Phaedra, wife of…

Treatises on Friendship and Old Age

Marcus Tullius Cicero

This volume gathers two of Cicero’s most celebrated philosophical essays, the treatise on Old Age and the…

The World's Greatest Books — Volume 13 — Religion and Philosophy

The volume opens with a scholarly overview of the Apocrypha, tracing the term’s Greek origin and its shifting…

Discours de la méthode

René Descartes

Ce texte est une introduction monumentale à la pensée de René Descartes, placée dans le contexte historique…

Guy Mannering; or, The Astrologer — Complete

Walter Scott

Guy Mannering is a sprawling historical romance that weaves together inheritance, disinheritance, and the…

Divine Comedy, Cary's Translation, Complete

Dante Alighieri

This volume presents Dante Alighieri’s three‑part epic, rendered in full by Henry Francis Cary.

The Koran (Al-Qur'an)

The work before you is an English translation of the Qur’an produced by the eighteenth‑century scholar George…

Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists

George Berkeley

Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous is a philosophical tract by George Berkeley that takes the form…

Crito

Plato

Plato’s Crito is a short philosophical dialogue that opens in the early morning of Socrates’ final days, when…

The Frogs

Aristophanes

Wilhelm Tell

Friedrich Schiller