Prefaces And Prologues to Famous Books

Large Format for easy reading. Dr Eliot had stated in speeches that the elements of a liberal education could be obtained by spending fifteen minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf. The publisher P. F. Collier and Son saw an opportunity, and challenged him to make good on this statement by selecting an appropriate collection of works; the Harvard Classics (1909) was the result. They are a fifty-volume anthology of works which he selected and were intended at the time to suggest a foundation for informed discourse. Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books (1909) includes works by Spenser, Raleigh, Bacon, Newton, Dryden, Fielding, Johnson, Wordsworth, Hugo and Whitman.