Lectures on the Classics from the Five Foot Shelf
Lectures on the Classics from the Five Foot Shelf

Author: Charles W. Eliot

Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 161640177X

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Originally published between 1909 and 1917 under the name "Harvard Classics," this stupendous 51-volume set-a collection of the greatest writings from literature, philosophy, history, and mythology-was assembled by American academic CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926), Harvard University's longest-serving president. Also known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," it represented Eliot's belief that a basic liberal education could be gleaned by reading from an anthology of works that could fit on five feet of bookshelf. Volume LI, the final volume, features 60 fascinating lectures on the wide range of knowledge the series covers-history, poetry, natural science, philosophy, biography, prose fiction, criticism and the essay, education, political science, drama, voyages and travel, and religion-that put this extraordinary survey of human knowledge in context. They are the collective capstone on a bookshelf reading course unparalleled in comprehensiveness and authority.

The Whole Five Feet
The Whole Five Feet

Author: Christopher R. Beha

Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

Published: 2010-05-11

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0802199909

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This unique memoir of reading the classics to find strength and wisdom “makes an elegant case for literature as an everyday companion” (The New York Times Book Review). While undergoing a series of personal and family crises, Christopher R. Beha discovered that his grandmother had used the Harvard Classics—the renowned “five foot shelf” of great world literature compiled in the early twentieth century by Charles William Eliot—to educate herself during the Great Depression. He decided to follow her example and turn to this series of great books for answers—and recounts the experience here in a smart, big-hearted, and inspirational mix of memoir and intellectual excursion that “deftly illustrates how books can save one’s life” (Helen Schulman). “As he grapples with the death of his beloved grandmother, a debilitating bout with Lyme disease and other major and minor calamities, Beha finds that writers as diverse as Wordsworth, Pascal, Kant and Mill had been there before, and that the results of their struggles to find meaning in life could inform his own.” —The Seattle Times “An important book [and] a sheer blast to read.” —Heidi Julavits