The Iliad (c. 8th century BC, Homer) : The Iliad in English
The histories (5th century BC, Herodotus) : true lies
The analects (5th century BC, Confucius) : Confucius goes global
The republic (4th century BC, Plato) : into the light
The Bible (2nd century BC - 2nd century AD) : The King James Bible
Geographia (c. AD 100-170, Ptolemy) : the Almagest
Kama sutra (2nd or 3rd century AD, Mallanaga Vatsyayana) : Eroticism in stone
The Qur'an (7th century) : translating the Qur'an
Canon of medicine (1025, Avicenna) : fathers of medicine
The Canterbury tales (1380's-90's, Geoffrey Chaucer) : Chaucer's 24 pilgrims' tales
The prince (1532, Niccolo Machiavelli) : banned books
Atlas, or, Cosmographic meditations (1585-95, Gerard Mercator) : the Mercator projection
Don Quixote (1605-15, Miguel de Cervantes) : the legacy of Don Quixote
First folio (1623, William Shakespeare) : comedies, histories and tragedies
An anatomical study of the motion of the heart and blood in animals (1628, William Harvey) : the University of Padua
Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems (1632, Galileo Galilei) : Galileo and the telescope
Principia mathematica (1687, Isaac Newton)
A dictionary of the English language (1756, Samuel Johnson) : Johnsonisms
The sorrows of young Werther (1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) : Goethe and Ossian
The wealth of nations (1776, Adam Smith) : the industrial revolution
Common sense (1776, Thomas Paine) : a tale of two revolutions
Lyrical ballads (1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) : two modern romantics
Pride and prejudice (1813, Jane Austen) : two literary traditions
A Christmas carol (1843, Charles Dickens) : rescuing Christmas
The Communist manifesto (1848, Karl Marx) : a ten-point plan
Moby-Dick (1881, Herman Melville) : "the great American novel"
Uncle Tom's cabin (1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe) : the slaves' own stories
Madame Bovary (1857, Gustave Flaubert) : romanticism, realism and naturalism
On the origin of species ( 1859, Charles Darwin)
On liberty (1859, John Stuart Mill) : utilitarianism
War and peace (1869, Leo Tolstoy) : Tolstoy the soldier
The telephone directory (1878, New Haven District Telephone Company) : the first telephone
The thousand and one nights (1885, translated by Sir Richard Burton)
A study in scarlet (1888, Arthur Conan Doyle) : Holmes's predecessors
The interpretation of dreams (1899, Sigmund Freud) : Freud and surrealism
The protocols of the elders of Zion (1905) : Mein Kampf
Poems (1920, Wilfred Owen) : the Somme
Relativity: the special and the general theory (1920, Albert Einstein) : Einstein and the bomb
Ulysses (1922, James Joyce) : a modernist poem
Lady Chatterley's lover (1928, D.H. Lawrence) : obscenity trials
The general theory of employment, interest, and money (1936, John Maynard Keynes) : the Great Depression
If this is a man (1947, Primo Levi) : Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag Archipelago
Nineteen eighty-four (1949, George Orwell) : George Orwell meets Big Brother
The second sex (1949, Simone de Beauvoir) : Mary Wollstonecraft
The catcher in the rye (1951, J.D. Salinger) : the ducks in Central Park
Things fall apart (1958, Chinua Achebe) : the dark continent
Silent spring (1962, Rachel Carson) : the environmental movement
Quotations from Chairman Mao (1964, Mao Zedong) : the cult of personality
Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone (1997, J.K. Rowling) : school fiction
