The project for the
Great Books of the Western World began at the
University of Chicago, where the president,
Robert Hutchins, worked with
Mortimer Adler to develop there a course of a type originated by
John Erskine at Columbia University in 1921, with the innovation of a "round table" approach to reading and discussing great books among professors and undergraduates.—generally aimed at businessmen. The purposes they had in mind were for filling the gaps in their
liberal arts education (including Hutchins' own, self-confessed gaps) and to render the reader an
intellectually rounded man or woman familiar with the
Great Books of the
Western canon and knowledgeable of the Great Ideas visited in the "Great Conversation" over the course of three millennia. An original student of the project was
William Benton, who at the time was the chief executive officer of the Encyclopædia Britannica publishing company and later was a United States senator. In 1943, he proposed selecting the greatest books of the Western canon, and that Hutchins and Adler produce unabridged editions for publication by Encyclopædia Britannica. Hutchins was wary at first, fearing that commodifying the books would devalue them as cultural artifacts; but he agreed to the business deal and was paid $60,000 for his work on the project. Benton at first refused the deal on the basis that the set of works selected would be just that, artifacts, never to be read. By chance, Adler was re-reading a source he was using for a book he was writing at the time,
How to Think about War and Peace. He noted to the person who had provided the book for him that he had missed the instructive passage that this person was pointing out to him and wondered why that had happened. They realized that Adler had read the book focusing on one idea about war and peace. Adler struck on the idea of making an index for the whole set for Hutchins, so that readers could have "random access" to the works, with the desired result that they would develop a greater interest in the works.
Failure to come to terms After deciding what subjects and authors to include, and how to present the materials, the indexing part of the project was begun, with a budget of another $60,000. Adler began compiling what his group called the "Greek index" bearing on the works selected from ancient Greece, expecting completion of the entire project within six months. After two years, the Greek index was declared to be a resounding failure. The inferior terms under the Great Ideas across the centuries in which the Greek-language works were written had shifted in their significance, and the preliminary index reflected that, the ideas presented not having "come to terms" with each other. During those times, Adler had a flash of insight. He set his group re-reading each work preliminarily with a single assigned subordinate idea in mind in the form of a fairly elaborate phrase. If any instances of the idea appeared, they could collate them with co-ordinate ideas of a similar type collected the same way, use the material thus noted to better re-frame the larger idea structure and then finally start re-reading the work in its entirety with revised phrasing to do the complete indexing, of
ideas.
Eventual popular success In 1945, Adler began writing the initial forms of the essays for the Great Ideas and six years and $940,000 more later, on April 15, 1952, the
Great Books of the Western World were presented at a publication party in the
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in New York City. In his speech, Hutchins said, "This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education.
Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the West. This is its meaning for mankind." The first two sets of books were given to
Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, and to
Harry S. Truman, the incumbent U.S. president. Adler appeared on the cover of
Time for a story about the set of works and its idea index and inventory of Western topics of thought at large, of sorts. The initial sales of the book sets were poor, with only 1,863 sets sold in 1952, and less than one-tenth of that number of book sets were sold in 1953. A financial debacle loomed until Encyclopædia Britannica altered the sales strategy, and sold the book set through experienced door-to-door encyclopædia-salesmen, as Hutchins had feared; but, through that method, 50,000 sets were sold in 1961. In 1963 the editors published
Gateway to the Great Books, a ten-volume set of readings meant to introduce the authors and the subjects of the
Great Books. Each year, from 1961 to 1998, the editors published
The Great Ideas Today, an annual updating about the applicability of the
Great Books to contemporary life. According to Alex Beam,
Great Books of the Western World eventually sold a million sets. The Internet and the
E-book reader have made available some of the
Great Books of the Western World in an on-line format. ==Volumes==