A week or so ago, our buddy Renaissance Guy  mentioned in one of his comments that he’d like to read some more about mythology and its archetypal content and influence. At least, that’s the intention I’m going to project bestow upon him. I’ve been wanting to write about this, and now I have the best possible reason to plunge in: a reader’s request.

I have someplace I’d like to go, and I hope you’ll come with me. This will be a long journey; it may take weeks or even the whole month to post. But if you stick with me until the end, I think each of us will discover treasures and have adventures that we can’t even imagine now, as we begin. I don’t even know quite where we’re going, but I have a compass and a rucksack, and a heart full of intentions.

What I hope to do is complete my series of essays about the Quest, the Monomyth, the Heroic Journey of every hero (and the non-journey of every anti-hero), flesh them out and do a good job of it, so that from now on, whenever you read a story or see a movie, or hear a tale, you’ll say, “Aha! That’s what Eve was telling us about quest mythology. . . I see it right now! There’s that archetypal figure she said would appear to guide the hero!”

After I’ve fully reviewed the quest pattern, I’ll delve into an actual myth. Now, don’t worry: I’ll keep this to manageable blog proportions. You’re all probably much like me: busy, with children or spouses, work to do, groceries to buy, errands to be run, and books to be read. You don’t have time to read 3000 words a day on this one blog. That’s fine, because I won’t be posting 3000 words a day. I promise to keep the posts to manageable proportions so that you’ll get something pithy and meaningful, chaff cut out and the fine wheat left. Maybe not the finest of wheat, as I’m no great writer, but fine enough for Third Eve. I’ll do my best to keep it manageable and useful to you.

Once we can communicate in the common language of Jungian archetypes, then I’m going to re-tell the myth of Venus. Yes, Venus. Of course you know why–she’s been in my header from the birth of this blog. I chose her because I think that Boticelli’s Venus is an archetype of beautiful, radiant virginity. His Venus, arising from the sea on that clam shell is glorious, isn’t she? Lately, as I’ve become more and more aware of my own individuation process, his painting appeals to me in so many ways. Every figure seems bursting with meaning.

I’ve meant to study the myths of Venus (there are two) and Boticelli’s painting for some time now. I’ve learned some fascinating things that I think will surprise and fascinate you, too. For example, Boticelli painted The Birth of Venus in the late 1400s during a time when much secular work arising out of pagan myths, such as his painting, was being burned or destroyed by some nutjobs from the Roman Catholic Church. Boticelli had the Medici family as his patrons, and they protected him and his work, which is how this amazing painting survived.

Many people don’t know that The Birth of Venus was one of two paintings that were meant to hang together. After painting The Birth of Venus, Boticelli painted another large piece called Spring. It depicts Venus after she’s come up out of the sea on the clam shell. She’s fully clothed and her head is covered; she’s quite regal and queenly, as a mature woman ought to be. The same dark woods serve as the backdrop for the scene of her fulfillment, and she is surrounded by even more mythological creatures.

I’ve never studied the myth of Venus or Boticelli’s two paintings before, so this will be an adventure for me, too. You’ll get to see me work and reach for symbols and meanings that have been part of this art and these myths for thousands of years. The last time I did anything like this was when I wrote a paper on Van Gogh’s Field of Wheat with Crows. Studying this painting and several others of his, and reading about him, changed my life. I fell so in love with Van Gogh that I bought the expensive three-volume set of his letters (mostly to his brother). Van Gogh was a devout Christian with a deep faith in God. Like many artists, he was passionate and was regarded as crazy from time to time in his life. Some say it was the absinthe that did it; others say it was God. Whatever the case, when I learned about Van Gogh I came to regard him as a brother and an example of a person who did his best to honor his gifts, and God.

My experience with Van Gogh and his art is what excites me about studying the two Boticellis and reading the myth of Venus. Boticelli researched his painting before he ever painted it; and we’ll research it, too, by reading the myth and thinking about the archetype of wholeness: the Bride and Groom, the Divine Couple, the Syzygy (Jung’s funny word indicating an integrated wholeness, from the Greek σύζυγος (syzygos),  meaning “yoked together”).

My intention in starting this blog has been to write about myths and symbols of wholeness and individuation with a view to the ultimate in being “yoked together,” which is the wedding supper of the Lamb of God. You don’t have to be a Christian to have this imagery; the Divine Marriage exists in every culture in every time among every single people who has ever lived on the planet, as far as we know. There is always a hero; there is always a quest; there is always a shadow type; always a trickster, always a Wise Old Man or Wise Old Woman, always an anima and animus, and always, at the end, a death and a resurrection, a treasure or elixir, and a Divine Marriage and wedding feast.

It’s as inescapable as death, and so we might as well write and talk and think about it.

And, while I’m thinking about it today, let me just say “God bless you” to all you fiction writers out there who keep working away at your art. I hope you never stop. I hope you don’t lose heart. This goes for the artists and musicians too, and for people who dance or beat drums or otherwise create things–even new recipes and wonders from food. Our world needs all the creative magic it can get. We’ve been losing it since the Reformation as we’ve lost our religious symbols and slammed the door on religion. We’re going to have to find them and find our way back home again, and I think we can as long as we keep the home fires burning by being creative and never losing our wonder.

So, come with me. Are you ready? Are you coming with me?

Good. I’m excited!

I heard yesterday that Harry Potter series author J. K. Rowling announced that Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts School, is gay. A friend of mine sent me a text message giving me the head’s up.

I found the news story at ABC News, and it’s true: Dumbledore is gay. I was disappointed to hear the news, but eventually my disappointment became curiosity. Why should I feel disappointed? What did it matter, Dumbledore’s sexual orientation? Why did I feel a sense of loss, together with a bit of exasperation with Rowling? Why did I also feel aggravated, even angry, after reading how Rowling characterized her intentions? I knew it wasn’t an issue of personal tolerance, for my lesbian sister-in-law and late gay brother-in-law certainly taught me something about tolerance. Why did I feel Rowling’s actions and words were somehow wrong, then?

Later in the evening, after pondering these questions, I had some definite ideas about my feelings. In no particular order, here they are:

First, she’s messing with my magic. The Harry Potter novels are fantasy novels that take the reader into wonderful, magical realms. This sort of magic isn’t to be trifled with or sullied through sex, religion, or politics. I’m reading for the magic, dammit, not the sex. I don’t want to hear about Dumbledore being gay, or about Harry and Hermione having sex, even if they are married. I don’t want to know when they lost their virginity. I don’t want to even think about the two of them, being all steamy. I don’t want to think about teenage boys and their sexual drivenness, or teenage girls and their overbearing hormones, either. I don’t want to know when Ginny got her first period. I don’t want to know about McGonigal’s hysterectomy, or Snape’s closet porn addiction. I don’t care about their mundane sexual activities, their secretions, their body odors, or their secret compulsions. If I wanted to have more of that stuff in my life, I’d live in the real world and watch reality TV or soap operas or Grey’s Anatomy. We all know this is the stuff the world is made of; and we all hope for something more.

That something more is the magic. It’s the ethereal, mysterious stuff of longing, daydreams, nightmares, fantasy and great books such as The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, and, yes, Harry Potter. We never had to hear about Gandalf’s sexual preferences or Aragorn’s sex life, or whether King Peter was gay or straight; why in the name of all that’s magical do we need to know anything sexual about Dumbledore? You’re ruining my magic, Rowling. Stop it.

Second, I smell something neurotic. Rowling’s announcement seems self-destructive and self-abandoning. It appears to be more of a self-defeating trick of the unconscious than the noble act she would like to fashion it. According to ABC News Rowling “considers her novels as a ‘prolonged argument for tolerance,’ and urged her fans to ‘question authority.’” What authority? Whose authority? The authority of some bygone era when we didn’t have entire television shows produced by, for, and with gay men? The authority of a place where laws prosecuting hate crimes don’t exist, and where parents don’t regularly tell their boys to stop saying “you’re gay” as if “gay” is an insult? What place is that, J. K. Rowling? Because I thought that authoritarian voice that really had any power or respect at all went out with those Farrah Fawcett haircuts with wings.

Or maybe she meant that her readers ought to defy the authority of the life of the transcendant, glorious spirit that pre-dates Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling and will outlive them both? That deep life of the underworld, underground, undertow and misunderstood, the one that drives people to transcendence and ecstasy; the one from which our archetypes and great myths and universal symbols arise? Question and defy that authority? Pardon me while I burst out laughing.

I suspect Rowling has some inner authority telling her to shut up and be a good girl, and she finally came out with something shocking and devilish that means, to her, a defiance of some inner authority she carries. And I think that she projected her crap onto the ‘authority’ she imagines, rather like setting up a straw man argument and then feeling all full of oneself after knocking him down. I think so, because there’s a difference between theatrical noble acts and real ones. I don’t think Rowling is being truly noble; perhaps she is, but based on what I’ve read of her quotes, if they’re accurate quotes, something is fishy in Denmark.

A noble act, in my thinking, would have been to openly portray Dumbledore as gay long before now. In a truly noble act, she might have “outed” him in the second novel if her knees were knocking over the idea, and flown in the face of potentially destructive media attention. A truly noble act is one that involves sacrifice of something valuable. Certainly, the millions of dollars she has earned are valuable. It sure seems odd to me that she waited until after the very last book was published before revealing that Dumbledore is gay. Poor Dumbledore, in the closet all that time. Why, she even had him die with his secret. What kind of a god is she, anyway?

So she didn’t out him in the first, second, or even fourth novels. She wrote all those novels and she pretended that he was heterosexual by letting all of us think so. We didn’t even consider the possibility that this grand old bachelor might be gay. He was sexless, timeless, and ageless as his sort of archetypal character ought to be. We didn’t have to worry about him being too friendly with our girls or our boys.  Throughout the entire seven books, Rowling let us believe that Dumbledore was either celibate and as sexless as a priest, or else straight. In fact, she said in the ABC interview that the issue of Dumbledore’s sexuality didn’t come up until the filming of the sixth Harry Potter movie, and even then it was supposedly only conveyed through her marginal, handwritten note in the script. We’re supposed to believe that the same Hollywood that sensationalizes everything sexual and prides itself on tolerance kept quiet about Dumbledore’s deep, dark secret? Riiiiight. I do believe in magic, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do!

I think that Rowling’s inner orphan hasn’t quite found her home yet, and she’s having problems with some of her upstart inner archetype committee members since she’s not writing Potter books any more. What otherwise would have been dealt with through the creative process has been temporarily gagged and had to find a way to overcome the gag order. This is the way she chose to do it, and it doesn’t look real to me. It looks worse than contrived; it appears somewhat neurotic.

Third, I’m sad about the loss of Dumbledore as a Wise Old Man archetype. In Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Jung wrote about this archetype, indicating that the whole archetype arises from the animus (the male aspect), and  involves both dark and light aspects. Thus, a myth will have a dark lord and a light lord, such as Gandalf and Sauron, or Dumbledore and Voldemort, or Obi Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader. Both characters together are used to represent aspects of the wise old man. The archetypal idea being communicated is that the same character who heals may also wound; that no one, even the wise old man, is entirely good. Jung described the function and appearance of the archetype thus:

The frequency with which the spirit-type appears as an old man is about the same in fairytales as in dreams. The old man always appears when the hero is in a hopeless and desperate situation from which only profound reflection or a lucky idea–in otherwords, a spiritual function or an endopsychic automatism of some kind–can extricate him. But since, for internal and external reasons, the hero cannot accomplish this himself, the knowledge needed to compensate the deficiency comes in the form of a personified thought, i.e., in the shape of this sagacious and helpful old man (Archetypes 218-219).

The wise old man has a spiritual character built on moral qualities; he represents knowledge, reflection, insight, wisdom, cleverness, and intuition. Certainly, Dumbledore might embody all those qualities and still be gay. Even the love he had for the Dark Lord’s predecessor, Grindlewald, might be forgiven if, from his error in character judgment, Dumbledore learned wisdom. Even so, by using a fictional character as a soap box for tolerance for homosexuality, Rowling has ruined the magic for lots of us.  She has ruined it by subverting a male function and feminizing it by injecting gayness. Who wants to imagine Dumbledore together with Grindelwald any more than we want to imagine Harry and Hermione having sex on their honeymoon?

And is this what we’ve come to, our culture, when an entire generation of boys and girls has a gay wise old man who will come to point the way when the hero has lost his? Now the wise old man aspect of the animus–of all that is masculine, creative, and energetic within a human being–is to be portrayed by a symbol of emasculation, whereby men become more of a better best girlfriend than a real man?

Rowling took something awesome, a modern expression of some of the deepest, most long-lived, and most profound archetypal material we have seen in recent decades, and she trivialized it by ruining the magic, tearing down an archetypal symbol, making a fool of herself and her readers, and expecting us to clap happily like children hurrah’ing a lit birthday cake, all in the name of tolerance.

J. K. Rowling, you can take your straw man and light him on fire and do a shaman dance while chanting voo-doo incantations and sticking him full of pins if you want, but there is no way you’re going to get me to believe that this is all about tolerance and creating a kinder, gentler world. Someone with your gifts and place in the world ought to be going out there and creating a better Harry Potter series, if tolerance and understanding are your real goals, with a gay main character on a quest for wholeness. You might have endured his anguish, loneliness, rejection, and bewilderment through seven or eight different novels, and really showed people what it’s like to be gay in this world or the world of the past. And you could have written that character to be vibrantly alive, spiritual, and ultimately whole.

But you didn’t do that. You tricked us, you lied to us, and then you lied to us again and made us accept that load of crap and expected us to be quiet about it because it would be oh so politically incorrect and rabidly wrong for anyone to write what I’m writing.

Well, guess what, J. K. Rowling? I just did.

Our classics reading group will have our last discussion about Saint Augustine’s Confessions tomorrow. I feel sorry to leave St. Augustine behind, for he has become an honest, passionate and true Christian friend. I think that Renaissance Guy would understand if I dared to write that I had literally fallen in love with Saint Augustine.

My ideas about Augustine before reading the Confessions this time were based on a cursory reading during my undergraduate years. The manner in which I read Augustine all those years ago indicates to me how really shallow I was during that time of my life, for how can anyone skim through his Confessions?

Witness this:

Lord, before whose eyes the abyss of man’s conscience lies naked, what thing within me could be hidden from you, even if I would not confess it to you? I would be hiding you from yself, not myself from you. But now, since my groans bear witness that I am a thing displeasing to myself, you shine forth, and you are pleasing to me, and you are loved and longed for, so that I may feel shame for myself, and renounce myself, and choose you, and please neither you nor myself except because of you.

Therefore, before you, O Lord, am I manifest, whatever I may be. With what profit I may confess to you, I have already said. [. . .] When I am evil, to confess toyou is naught else but to be displeased with myself; when I am upright of life, naugh else is it to confess to you but to attribute this in no wise to myself. For you bless the just man, O Lord, but first you justify him as one who has been ungodly. Hence my confession is made in silence before you, my God, and yet not in silence. As to sound, it is silent, but it cries aloud with love. Nor do I say any good thing to men except what you have first heard from me; nor do you hear any such thing from me but what you have first spoken to me (229-230).

And then, as if Augustine has been reading a proliferation of blogs:

What have I to do with men, that they should hear my confessions, as if they were to “heal all my diseases?” I race eager to know about another man’s life, but slothful to correct their own! Why do they seek to hear from me what I am, men who do not want to hear from you what they themselves are?

When they hear me speak about myself, how do they know if I speak the truth, since none among men knows “what goes on within a man but the spirit of man which is in him?” But if they should hear about themselves from you, they cannot say, “The Lord lies!” What else is it for them to hear from you about themselves except to know themselves? Who knows anything and yet says, “It is false,” unless he is a liar? But because “charity believes all things” among them whom it unites by binding them to itself, I too, O Lord, will confess to you in such manner that men may hear, although I cannot prove to them that I confess truly.

But those men whose ears charity opens to me believe me (230).

So beautiful, so well put. I especially like, “But those men whose ears charity opens believe me,” for I’m familiar with the feeling or idea that I know another person whom I’ve just met. My father used to say, “Birds of a feather flock together,” and “Water seeks its own level.” These sayings annoyed me when I was younger. I thought that he meant to comment on people’s narrow-mindedness, whereas the issue for me was my own narrow-mindedness at age 20-something. I was so narrow that I couldn’t recognize myself; I therefore also couldn’t recognize believability in another person.

The issue isn’t so much, in my way of thinking, whether another person is truthful about him- or herself; the issue is whether I can recognize authenticity because I’ve done the work to become, and be, authentic. Then I’ll see it sure enough in another person.

The Confessions of St. Augustine, John K. Ryan, Trans.

Following is the list of books we’re reading in our Classics Reading Group.

Our current selection is in bold-faced red.

Prehistory to 3500 B.C.: The First Humans

• Visual arts: study Paleolithic cave art, megaliths
• Neanderthal flute is the earliest human instrument; the 43,000-82,000 year old cave bear femur bone segment with four holes, matches Do-Re-Mi scale.
• 1300 B.C., the Ten Commandments
• c. 1035-972 B.C. David, King of Israel

3500 to 500 B.C.: Asia and Egypt

• The Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Deborah; Ruth, Psalms, Song of Solomon, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes; the minor Prophets; Esther, Malachi; Job.
• 1780 B.C., The Code of Hammurabi (Mesopotamia).
• 700 B.C., The Epic of Gilgamesh

3000 B.C. to 500 A.D.: The East

• 638-713 B.C. Hui-Neng, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
• 604-521 B.C. Lao-Tze, Tao Te Ch’ing
• 551-479 B.C. Confucius, The Analects of Confucius
• 500-477 B.C. Buddha
  • The Pali Canon TipiTaka
  • The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, Thich Nhat Hanh
  • The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh
  • Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thich Nhat Hanh
• 450-380 B.C., Sun-Tzu, The Art of War
• 400 B.C. Kalidasa, The Cloud Messenger and Sakuntala
• 372-289 B.C. Mencius, The Book of Mencius (aka Meng-Tze, Ment the Sage)
• 300 B.C. Valmiki, The Ramayana
• 200 B.C. Vyasa, The Mahabharata
• 200 B.C. The Bhagavad Gita

1900 B.C. to 133 B.C.: The Gifts of Greece

• 800 B.C. Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey
• 525-456 B.C. Aeschylus, The Oresteia, Dramas
• 494-425 B.C. Herodotus, The Histories
• 496-406 B.C. Sophocles, Dramas; Oedipus Rex, Oedipus of Colonus, Antigone
• 469-399 B.C. Socrates, in Plato and Xenophon (see Plato)
• 480-406 B.C. Euripedes, Alcestis, Medea, Hippolytus, The Trojan Women, Electra
• 460-400 B.C., Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
• 448-388 B.C. Aristophanes, The Frogs, Lysistrata
• 428-348 B.C. Plato, Apology, Crito, Dialogues
• 384-322 B.C. Aristotle, Ethics, Politics, Poetics
• 150-216 B.C. Clement of Alexandria, The One Who Knows God

600 B.C. to 500 A.D.: The Roman World

• 538 B.C., Cyrus of Persia decrees the return of the Jews: Ezra (458 B.C.) and Nehemiah (444 B.C.)
• 100-50 B.C. Lucretius, Of the Nature of Things
• 70-19 B.C. Virgil, The Aeneid
• 68 A.D. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers
• 55-135 A.D., Epictetus, Golden Thoughts
• 60-100 A.D. The Didache
• 95-97 A.D., Clement, “The Letter of the Romans to the Corinthians”
• 98-117 A.D. Ignatius, “The Letters of Ignatius”
• 121-180 A.D. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
• 480-525 A.D. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

4 B.C. to A.D. 900: The Rise of Christendom

• 6 B.C. to 30 A.D., Jesus Christ; read the Gospels of Matthew and Luke
• 5 B.C. to 64 A.D., St. Paul, the letters of St. Paul, New Testament Bible
• 64 A.D. (d.), St. Peter, 1 and 2 Peter, the Gospel of Mark
• 101 A.D. St. John the Apostle, The Gospel of John (John the Theologian); The First Epistle of John (John the Evangelist); 2 and 3 Epistles of John (John the Presbyter); The Book of Revelation (John of Patmos)
• 47-120 A.D. Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives
• 100-165 A.D. St Justin the Martyr, Apologies
• 354-430 A.D., Saint Augustine, Confessions
• 673-735 A.D., The Venerable Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation
• 949-1022 A.D., St. Symeon the New Theologian, The First Created Man; On the Priesthood and Eucharist

A.D. 400 to 1500: The Islamic World

• Cornell University: Islamic Literature
• 650 A.D. Muhammad, The Koran

A.D. 400 to 1500: The Golden Age of the East

• 976-1015, Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji
• 1048, Omar Khayyamm, The Rubaiyat
• 1330-1400, Luo Kuan-chung, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms

1000 to 1500: The Middle Ages

• 1033-1109, Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works
• 1098-1179, Hildegard von Bingen, Secrets of God; listen to her music CD, Canticles of Ecstasy, Vision
• 1100-1173, Richard of St. Victor, The 12 Patriarchs, The Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity
• 1181-1226, The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assissi
• 1225-1274, Thomas Aquinas, The Light of Faith
• 1260-1427, Master Eckhart, Writings
• 1265-1321, Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
• 1293-1381, Jan van Ruysbroeck, The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage
• 1303-1373, Birgitta (Bridget) of Sweden, Life and Revelations
• 1342-1400, Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
• 1342-1416, Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
• 1485, Sir Thomas Malory, The Holy Grail
• (c. 1800s) Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Morte d’Arthur and Galahad

1400 to 1600: European Renaissance & Reformation

• 1469-1527, Machiavelli, The Prince
• 1517, Martin Luther posts The Ninety-Five Theses; read Address to the German Nobility and Concerning Christian Liberty
• 1478-1535, St. Thomas More, Utopia
• 1483-1553, Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel
• 1509-1564, John Calvin, Dedication to the Institution of the Christian Religion
• 1513-1572, John Knox, Preface to the History of the Reformation
• 1515-1582, St. Theresa of Avila, Interior Castle
• 1553-1592, Michel de Montaigne, Essays
• c. 1540, St. Ignatius, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius
• 1542-1592, St. John of the Cross, Collected Works of St. John of the Cross; The Ascent of Mount Carmel
• 1547-1616, Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
• 1561-1626, Sir Francis Bacon, Essays
• 1564-1616, William Shakespeare, Complete Works
• 1573-1631, John Donne, Selected Works
• 1575-1624, Jacob Boehme, Writings
• 1596-1650, Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method
• 1588-1679, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
• 1608-1674, John Milton, Paradise Lost
• c. 1600, St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
• 1605-1691, Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
• Supplementals:
  • 1412-1431, Joan of Arc. See The Messenger (1999) DVD
  • See Luther (2003) DVD

1450 to 1800: The Age of Expansion

• 1454-1512, Amerigo Vespucci, Account of His First Voyage
• c. 1500, The Thousand and One Nights
• 1500-1582, Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West
• 1618, Chin P’ing Mei, The Plum in the Golden Vase
• 1685, Madame Jean Guyon, Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ
• 1689, Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North
• 1651-1715, St. John Maximovitch of Tobolsk, The Orthodox Veneration of Mary the Birthgiver of God

1550 to 1815: The Age of Enlightenment & Revolution

• 1574-1630, Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems
• 1590-1697, William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation
• Early American Poets, Slave Poetry by Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), Jupiter Hammon (1720-1800) and Phillis Wheatley
• 1600-1681, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Life is a Dream
• 1623-1662, Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (Pensees)
• 1628-1688, John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
• 1660-1731, Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
• 1667-1745, Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal
• 1694-1773, Voltaire, Candide
• 1706-1790, Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• 1707-1754, Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
• 1711-1776, David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
• 1713-1795, Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
• 1712-1778, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (the first modern autobiography)
• 1724-1804, Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
• 1737-1809, Thomas Paine, “Common Sense”
• 1740-1795, James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (the first modern biography)
• 1723-1790, Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
• 1789-1859, Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• 1789-1851, James Fenimore Cooper, Leather Stocking Tales
• 1787, Hamilton, Madison and Jay, The Federalist Papers
• 1797, Hannah Foster, The Coquette
• 1819-1892, Walt Whitman, War Poems, Pioneers, and Poems on the Death of Lincoln
• American Diaries
  • Samuel Sewall (1674-1729)
  • Cotton Mather (1663-1728)
  • William Byrd (1674-1744), History of the Dividing Line
  • Robert Beverley (1673-1722)
  • Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) (1745-1797), The Interesting Narrative of…Olauda Equiano, Slave
• Literary Criticism
  • Hume, On the Standard of Taste
  • Burke, On Taste and On the Sublime and Beautiful
  • Thackeray, Jonathan Swift
• Essays
  • 1690, John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government“
  • 1690, John Locke, “Some Thoughts on Education“
  • Jonathan Swift, “Treatise on Good Manners and Good Breeding“
  • Daniel Defoe, “The Shortest Way with Dissenters“
  • Daniel Defoe, “Education of Women“

1800 to 1870: Industrialization & Nationalism

• European Authors
  • 1749-1832, Johann Wolfgang von Goethë, Faust
  • 1757-1827, William Blake, Selected Works
  • 1770-1850, William Wordsworth, Poems
  • 1772-1834, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan
  • 1775-1817, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Emma
  • 1783-1842, Stendhal, The Red and the Black
  • 1799-1850, Honoré de Balzac, Peré Goriot, Eugenie Grandet, Cousin Bette
  • 1811-1863, William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
  • 1812-1882, Anthony Trollope, The Warden, The Last Chronicle of Barset, The Way We Live Now
  • 1816-1855, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
  • 1818-1848, Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
  • 1821-1880, Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
• Russian Authors
  • 1809-1852, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, Dead Souls
  • 1818-1883, Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
  • 1821-1881, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamozov
  • 1828-1910, Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
• American Authors
  • 1803-1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Works, including “Self Reliance” (essay); Poems; and literary criticism (The Poet, Beauty, Literature)
  • 1804-1864, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
  • 1809-1849, Edgar Allan Poe, Short Stories
  • 1811-1896, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
  • 1817-1862, Henry David Thoreau, Walden
  • 1819-1891, Herman Melville, Moby Dick
  • 1819-1892, Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
  • 1835-1910, Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
  • 1807-1882, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Evangeline,” “Song of Hiawatha”
  • 1830-1886, Emily Dickinson, Collected Poems
  • 1835-1894, Celia Thaxter, Collected Poems
• Autobiographies & Political
  • 1797-1883, Autobiography of Sojourner Truth
  • 1817-1895, Autobiography of Frederick Douglass
  • 1818-1896, Autobiography of Harriet Jacobs
  • 1818-1883, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
  • 1861-1865, American Civil War; Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863)
• Music: The Romantic Period
  • 1797-1828, Franz Schubert, Erlkonig (The Erlking), Die Forelle (The Trout)
  • 1810-1856, Robert Schumann, Carnival
  • 1810-1849, Frederic Chopin, Nocturne in E Flat Major (1830), Etude in C Minor (1831), Polonaise in A Flat Major, Op. 53 (1842)
  • 1811-1886, Franz Liszt, Transcendental Etude No. 10 in F Minor (1851)
  • 1813-1901, Giuseppe Verdi, Rigoletto (1851)
  • 1809-1847, Felix Mendelssohn, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in E Minor, Op. 54 (1844)
  • 1803-1869, Hector Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique (1830)
  • 1813-1883, Richard Wagner, The Valkyrie (1856)
  • 1824-1884, Bedrich Smetana, The Moldau (1874)
  • 1833-1897, Johannes Brahms, Symphony No. 4; A German Requiem (1868)
  • 1839-1881, Modest Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition (arr. by Maurice Ravel, 1922)
  • 1840-1893, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Romeo and Juliet (1869)
  • 1841-1904, Antonin Dvorak, Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, From the New World (1893)
  • 1844-1908, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherezade, Op. 35 (1888)

1870-1914: Mass Society and the National State in the West

• European Literature
  • 1819-1880, George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch
  • 1828-1906, Henrik Ibsen, Plays
  • 1840-1928, Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure
  • 1865-1939, William Butler Yeats, Collected Poems
  • 1867-1916, Natsume Soseki, Kokoro
  • 1879-1970, E. M. Forster, A Passage to India; A Room With a View; Howard’s End
• American Literature
  • 1832-1898, Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass
  • 1895, Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
  • 1903, Jack London, The Call of the Wild
  • 1903, Henry James, The Ambassadors
  • 1911, Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
  • 1856-1915, Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery
  • 1871-1938, James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man
  • 1868-1963, W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
• Politics and War
  • 1805-1859, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
  • 1806-1873, John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, The Subjection of Woman
  • 1817-1862, Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
  • 1838-1918, Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams
  • 1878-1968, Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
• Philosophy, Religion, Science, and Psychology
  • 1809-1882, Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, The Origin of the Species
  • 1844-1900, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morality, The Anti-Christ, Ecco Homo
  • 1842-1910, William James, The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism, essays from The Meaning of Truth, The Varieties of Religious Experience
  • 1873-1897, Saint Therese of Lisieux, Story of a Soul
  • 1880, Thomas H. Huxley, Science and Culture
• Visual Arts
  • 1830-1926, Claude Monet
  • 1841-1919, Auguste Renoir
  • 1830-1903, Camille Pissarro
  • 1881-1973, Pablo Picasso
  • 1882, Childe Hassam
• Music
  • 1862-1918, Claude Debussy
  • 1858-1924, Giacomo Puccini, La Boheme
  • 1868-1917, Scott Joplin (American Jazz), Maple Leaf Rag

1914-1919: World War I

• 1857-1924, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo
• 1856-1950, George Bernard Shaw, Selected Plays
• 1856-1939, Sigmund Freud, Selected Works, incl. The Interpretation of Dreams, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Civilization and Its Discontents
• 1860-1904, Anton Chekhov, short stories, Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard
• 1862-1937, Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country, The Age of Innocence
• 1871-1922, Marcel Proust, Remembrances of Things Past
• 1875-1926, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elegies
• 1882-1941, Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves
• 1882-1941, James Joyce, Ulysses
• 1883-1924, Franz Kafka, The Trial, The Castle, selected short stories
• 1885-1930, D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love
• 1899-1961, Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
• 1894-1961, James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times
• 1916, Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

1919 to 1939: Between the World Wars

• 1868-1950, Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
• 1874-1963, Robert Frost, Collected Poems
• 1878-1967, Carl Sandburg, Collected Poems
• 1879-1955, Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems
• 1883-1963, William Carlos Wiliams, Collected Poems
• 1885-1972, Ezra Pound, Collected Poems
• 1888-1965, T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, Collected Plays
• 1888-1953, Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night
• 1894-1963, Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
• 1896-1966, John of Shanghai, The Orthodox Veneration of Mary, the Birthgiver of God
• 1902-1968, John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men
• 1903-1960, Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
• 1930, Albert Einstein, “Religion and Science“
• 1938, St. Maria Faustine Kowalska, Diary
• Music Between the World Wars:
  • 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, 1926, 1927, 1928, 1930, 1932, 1934, 1936, 1938

1939-1945: World War II

• 1874-1963, Robert Frost, Collected Poems
• 1875-1955, Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
• 1885-1951, Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925, Pulitzer Prize), Elmer Gantry (1927)
• 1886-1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• 1892-1973, J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954-1956)
• 1897-1962, William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying
• 1897-1975, Thornton Wilder, Our Town
• 1899-1961, Ernest Hemingway, Short Stories
• 1902-1967, Langston Hughes, Poems
• 1903-1950, George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1984, Burmese Days
• 1906, R. K. Narayan, The English Teacher, The Vendor of Sweets
• 1908-1960, Richard Wright, Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945)
• 1911-1983, Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie (1945), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

1945-1970: The Cold War

• The 1950s
• The 1960s
• 1893-1963, Mao Tse-Tung, Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung (The Little Red Book)
• 1897-1963, A. W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (1957), The Knowledge of the Holy (1961)
• 1919-., J. D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye (1951)
• 1932-1963, Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, The Bell Jar (1963)
• 1928-1974, Anne Sexton, Collected Poems
• 1923-1997, James Dickey, Deliverance (1970)
• 1914-1993, John Hersey, A Bell for Adano (1944), Hiroshima (1946)
• 1929-., Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems
• 1922-1907, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
• 1905-1989, Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (1946)
• 1924-1987, James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
• 1914-1994, Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
• 1925-1964, Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
• 1931-1989, Donald Barthelme, Short Stories
• 1944-., Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1983, Pulitzer Prize)
• 1941-., Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons
• 1922-1969, Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957)
• 1924-1984, Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966); Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958)
• 1876-1941, Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
• 1899-1986, Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Dreamtigers
• 1899-1977, Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita; Speak, Memory
• 1906-1989, Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape
• 1907-1973, W. H. Auden, Collected Poems
• 1913-1960, Albert Camus, The Plague, The Stranger
• 1915-., Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, Herzog
• 1918-., Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), The Gulag Archipelago (1973), The First Circle (1968), Harvard Commencement Speech (8 June 1978)
• 1925-1970, Mishima Yukio, Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
• 1928-., Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
• 1930-., Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

1970 to the Present

• Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth (1931)
• Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
• Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us (1951), Silent Spring (1962)
• William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)
• Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
• John LeCarre, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963)
• Richard Adams, Watership Down (1972)
• Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter (1973)
• Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon (1977)
• John Irving, The World According to Garp (1978)
• John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever (1978)
• Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song (1980)
• John Updike, Rabbit is Rich (1982), Rabbit at Rest (1991)
• William Kennedy, Ironweed (1984)
• Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
• Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove (1986)
• Robert Olen Butler, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1993)
• E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News (1994)
• Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (1994)
• Richard Ford, Independence Day (1996)
• Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1998)
• Michael Cunningham, The Hours (1999)
• Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies (2000)
• Joyce Carol Oates, Blonde (2000)
• Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier & Clay (2001)
• Julia Glass, Three Junes (2002)
• Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire (2003)
• Lily Tuck, The News from Paraguay (2004)
• William T. Vollman, Europe Central (2005)
• Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (2006)