Squeeze Plato, Shakespeare and Dante a little closer on the bookshelf. It's time to make room for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and even Virginia Woolf - new additions to the canon of the Great Books of the Western World.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, its publisher, and philospher Mortimer J. Adler, one of its creators, have announced the first expansion and revision of the set of books whose uniform editions have graced living rooms and studies since 1952 and that have come to symbolize "the best thought" in the history of Western culture.The new, second edition of the Great Books series will grow to 60 volumes, including 517 works, from the current 54 volumes and 443 works, and jump to 37,000 pages from the pres-ent 31,000 pages.
Instead of 74 authors, the new, second edition of the Great Books, will include 130 authors and some old favorites - the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, as well Virgil, Dante and Cervantes - appear in new translations.
The new writers and their works include:
Henry James, "The Beast in the Jungle"; George Bernard Shaw, "St. Joan"; Joseph Conrad, "Heart of Darkness"; Anton Chekov, "Uncle Vanya"; Marcel Proust, "Swann's Way"; Willa Cather, "A Lost Lady"; Thomas Mann, "Death in Venice"; James Joyce, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"; Virginia Woolf, "To the Lighthouse."
Franz Kafka, "The Metamorphosis"; D.H. Lawrence, "The Prussian Officer"; T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"; Eugene O'Neill, "Mourning Becomes Electra"; F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Great Gatsby"; William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily"; Bertolt Brecht, "Mother Courage and Her Children"; Ernest Hemingway, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"; George Orwell, "Animal Farm"; and Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot."