I thought it might be enjoyable to create a list of history’s most influential texts. Anyone game?
Here are my starting contributions:
The Bible
The Qu’ran
The Republic, by Plato
The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels
The Complete Works of Shakespeare (not necessarily as published in a single volume)
Gilgamesh
The Code of Hammurabi
The Magna Carta
The Declaration of Independence
The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights
Dante’s Inferno
Darwin’s Origins of Species.
Nitpick: I’d argue that the Epic of Gilgamesh likely had its greatest cultural impact as an oral tradition. It was compiled and written down precisely because it had already become so important that someone thought it was worth doing. For this reason, I’d question the importance of the text.
Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica”
Quibble: R before apostrophe - Qur’an.
If you’re not sure, ditch the apostrophe, or just spell it Koran.
Euclid’s Elements.
Why just the Inferno—why not the whole Comedy?
The Analects of Confucius
Tao Te Ching
The Art of War (Sun Tzu)
The Nicomachean Ethics
The Metaphysics
The Iliad by Homer
The Odyssey by Homer
The City of God by St. Augustine
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
Politics by Aristotle
Hegel’s Phenomenology
Kant’s Critiques
Lyrical Ballads
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Darwin’s The Origin of Species
This seems like more of an IMHO kinda question, given that many of the texts cited are putatively nonfiction.
Here’s some non-fiction for ya:
Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book
Mein Kampf
Profiles in Courage
The Diary of Anne Frank
Silent Spring
The Feminist Mystique
Couple fiction:
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Thucydides “History of the Peloponnessian War”
Upton Sinclair “The Jungle”
Clausewitz “On War”
Cervantes “Don Quixote”
I’d add Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male/Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in their somewhere.
The Straight Dope: A Compendium of Human Knowledge. C. Adams
Andreas Vesalius’s “De humani corporis fabrica” – a ground breaking work of human anatomy that stressed the importance of dissection. This seems obvious now, but it was a basic distinction without which medical progress could only stumble along. It shattered revered authorities like Aristotle and Galen.
It’s also a beautiful book.
Off the top of my head…
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America
The Federalist Papers
The Apology of Socrates
Machiavelli’s The Prince
The Autobiography of Frederick Douglas
The Histories of Herodotus
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Euclid’s Elements
Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes
The Confessions, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau