Books to Read Before You Die

Thu, 21 May 2026 06:00:00 -0500

In the summer of 1952, the Encyclopaedia Britannica published “Great Books of the Western World,” fifty-four volumes, leather-bound, the kind of set designed to sit impressively on a shelf and communicate, wordlessly, that the owner had serious intellectual intentions. Mortimer Adler, the philosopher who organized the project alongside the University of Chicago’s president Robert Maynard Hutchins, had spent years arguing that there was a specific body of literature every educated American ought to absorb before they died. He called it “the great conversation.” These were the texts, he believed, that contained the essential arguments of Western civilization.

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Books to Read Before You Die