Gateway to the Great Books is a 10-volume series of books originally published by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. in 1963 and edited by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins. The set was designed as an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World, published by the same organization and editors in 1952. The set included selections - short stories, plays, essays, letters, and extracts from longer works - by more than one hundred authors. The selections were generally shorter and in some ways simpler than the full-length books included in the Great Books. (Source: Wikipedia) Contents Virginia Woolf: How Should One Read a Book? Matthew Arnold: The Study of Poetry. Sweetness and Light Charles Augustin Sainte-Beauve: What is a Classic? Montaigne Sir Francis Bacon: Of Beauty Of Discourse Of Studies David Hume: Of the Standard of Taste Arthur Schopenhauer: On Style On Some Forms of Literature On the Comparative Place of Interest and Beauty in Works of Art Friedrich Schiller: On Simple and Sentimental Poetry Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Defence of Poetry Walt Whitman: Preface to Leaves of Grass William Hazlitt: My First Acquaintance with Poets On Swift Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen Charles Lamb: My First Play Dream Children, a Reverie Sanity of True Genius Samuel Johnson: Preface to Shakespeare Thomas De Quincey: Literature of Knowledge and Literature of Power On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth Thomas Stearns Eliot: Dante Tradition and the Individual Talent