“On the Origin of Species” as a Great Book

by Dr. Warren Allmon

First posted February 12, 2024. An earlier version of this essay was presented at a session on “Great Books in Geology” at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America.

Although it may seem tame by the standards of recent controversies that have roiled academia, there was a time not so long ago when what was frequently called the issue of “great books” was a topic of intense debate in American colleges and universities. The larger discussion included many subsidiary and sometimes only distantly related questions, perhaps the more incendiary of which involved the potentially problematic role of a curriculum dominated by readings mostly by “dead white European males” in a country whose population is not only slightly more than half non-male, but increasingly made up of people from many other places besides Europe. A version of the controversy was dubbed the “Canon wars”, because it centered around the nature and value of the “Western Canon” – generally understood as a set of books that contained points of view central to Western culture. Many authors and commentators generally viewed as “conservatives” championed the Canon, while others generally viewed as “liberal” or “progressive” criticized it.[1] More broadly, there were also debates about lists, about what constitutes “great” and who should decide, and about whether there should be lists at all of what students should read to be “educated”.

These questions and debates are still with us, swirling like burning leaves. They inevitably come to mind whenever I talk to students – or anyone else – about reading Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, first published in 1859. I have led discussions of the book with undergraduates in three universities. I mention it in almost every class I teach, and frequently in just “regular conversation” in and out of educational settings. And in all of these settings I tell almost anyone who will listen that it is one of the most important books ever written, and that all “educated people”, especially those with any interest in biology or the natural world more broadly, should read.

Those who hear me say this have a variety of reactions. A few have told me that they are motivated to read (or try to read) the book. More seem puzzled or amused that I am so insistent that a single book – any book – could be that important. Some fellow scientists nod general agreement, and then admit with varying degrees of sheepishness that they haven’t read it. Mostly, I have the sense that modern life – even the “life of the mind” that supposedly is pursued in higher education – is so crowded and so overstimulated by so much competing noise that there is just not the space to realistically expect very many people to read a 500-page book more than 160 years old about science cover-to-cover. There is just too much other stuff to do.

Yet I persist in believing that the Origin is unique among books about science – and perhaps books in general. Why? Why is the Origin of Species not just a “great book”, but a book so great that you simply should not feel your life is complete until you have read it? 

— — —

Lists of recommended books (“greatness” explicit or implied) have been around for a long time. Thomas Jefferson is known on several occasions to have offered recommendations for reading to his correspondents. In July 1771, for example, Robert Skipwith, the husband of his wife’s half-sister, wrote to Jefferson asking for suggestions for his personal library. “I would.” Skipwith wrote to Jefferson, “have them suited to the capacity of a common reader who understands but little of the classicks [sic] and who has not leisure for any intricate or tedious study. Let them be improving as well as amusing ...”. Jefferson responded with a list of more than 100 titles, including fiction and nonfiction, with the latter ranging across fine arts, history, religion, politics, trade, and natural philosophy. In the accompanying letter, Jefferson said that “everything is useful which contributes to the principles and practices of virtue”.[2] Jefferson may have had a wider agenda: in this and other similar lists, says historian H. Trevor Colbourn, Jefferson “wanted others to be suitably educated so that their reason would be free to recognize the merit of his [Jefferson’s] ideals”.[3]

The word “classic” is sometimes used as a substitute for “great”. The great French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869) answered the question “What is a classic?” by saying that “The idea of a classic implies something that has continuance and consistence, and which produces unity and tradition, fashions and transmits itself, and endures….”. It is written by

“an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time.”[4]

In January 1886 Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913), historian, archaeologist, member of the British Parliament, and close friend of Charles Darwin, addressed the members of the London Working Men’s College on “Books and Reading,” and recommended a list of a “hundred good books”. The Pall Mall Gazette reported on the address, calling the list “the hundred best books”. (The use of the word “best” here has been called “a small but significant revision” of an idea that “has as its ultimate reference” the English literary critic Matthew Arnold’s influential statement that criticism “obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best”.[5]) Lubbock’s list may have been the first time that a finite number of such books had been put forth so publicly. Publishers soon picked up on this notion of a quantifiable list, despite public debate over what it ought to contain, and began selling sets of listed books.[6]

Are there books that if you don’t read them you should not be considered truly “educated”? My graduate advisor, who would surely not have described himself as “conservative”, seemed to think so. He frequently said that there was a group of books that if you haven’t read them you were not (fully) educated. I eventually got up the courage to ask him what that list included. He paused uncharacteristically and then said, as though it was obvious, that it would include the King James Bible, the Qur’an, “several by Shakespeare”, the Iliad and the Odyssey, something by Dostoyevsky, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, A Treatise of Human Nature or Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume, Plato’s Dialogues, and (the reason for the topic to begin with) Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

From 2001 to 2011, Cornell University attempted to have the entire entering class (freshmen and other new students) read a single book.[20] Although early years of the project were well-received, it eventually ended for, among several reasons, the inability of the faculty to agree on a book that everyone “should read”.[21] No one I know expects anything like this project to happen again any time soon.[22]

— — —

What, if anything, does all this tell us? It tells us that it is clearly incredibly difficult to get agreement by more than a very small group of people on a list of books that constitute “what one should read” to be a well-educated person, and that consensus on this is getting harder every day. Consensus seems elusive to us for many reasons, perhaps in the end because there are just too many books out there, and any realistic recommendations would exclude too much. More broadly, perhaps there should be no such recommendations in principle. Or perhaps the world is so polarized that no one will accept recommendations from anyone outside of their own narrow socio-cultural circle.[23]

Perhaps the problem is the aspiration of a “list” instead of evaluation of individual books. Which brings us back to the Origin. If we cannot agree on what else should be read, then let us focus on whether or why – in our noisy, crowded, fractious world – it might be worth devoting one’s precious time and attention to this one volume. Is the Origin a “great book”? Do we need to read it to consider ourselves “educated”?

First, as already alluded to, there is no shortage of endorsements for the Origin of Species as objectively one of the most influential and consequential books ever written, and for that reason alone it would seem to deserve our attention. It has been described (among many other effusive characterizations) as “a book that shook the world”[24], “one of very few books that have changed the world”[25], “surely one of the greatest scientific books ever written”[26], “the most important book of science ever written” and even “the most important book in any category”[27], “one of humanity’s crowning achievements”[28], “a major event in the history of Western civilization”[29], and to have ushered in a revolution that is “widely considered the most important event in the entire history of the human intellect”[30]. And such statements don’t just come from scientists and historians. The Origin, said a writer for the Guardian

“…is part of the literary canon: Darwin joins Aristotle and St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Milton and Stuart Mill, Dickens, Dostoevsky and Balzac in that pantheon of texts that provide the foundations of western culture. Origin meets the test of a great book: it mattered then, and it matters now. Its publication changed the world, and yet it can be read again and again, even in that changed world.”[31]

Importantly, however, these laudatory judgements about The Origin fall into two categories: reflections on the impact of evolution and natural selection, and reflections on the book itself. These two are closely connected. The book began a process of transformation of human thought which continues right up to the present time. As the quotes above suggest, that transformation — Darwinian evolution — is one of the most consequential in human history. The Origin was the beginning of an epochal shift in our conception of ourselves and the world we live in. Few ideas have been so impactful. From biology to language to medicine to philosophy to literature to religion, we live in a world that Darwin made.

But do you have to read the Origin to understand that world? No. As biologist David Reznick says, the basics of evolutionary biology “can be gained from reading any general biology textbook. They are not an argument for reading the Origin”.[32]

So why read the Origin?

I think there are at least three categories of answers.

As a historical event.

If all you know about evolution or Darwin is some pop-culture references to “man and monkeys”, it may be a complete surprise to learn what a major literary and intellectual event the publication of the Origin actually was. It wasn’t just another book. It was eagerly anticipated and extraordinarily popular when it appeared, it has been continuously in print since then, and it is still a “best-seller”.

The Origin was published on November 22, 1859. It is frequently said that the book “sold out” on the day of publication. In fact, of the 1,250 that were printed, only 1,192 were available for sale, the rest being author, review, and copyright copies. The publisher, John Murray, was short 250 copies of the number needed to fulfill presales and subscriptions. Of these, around 500 copies were purchased by Mudie’s Subscription Library, the UK’s largest commercial lending library, which speaks to the demand that was anticipated. Only about 600 copies were available for sale to the general public on November 24, and these appear to have been sold out at bookshops soon after. Murray wrote immediately to Darwin asking that he start work on a revision.[33]

The second edition was published on January 7, 1860, with three thousand copies printed. The sixth edition, usually regarded as the last, appeared in February 1872.[34] Historians believe that between 18,000 and 24,000 copies of the book were printed in Britain during Darwin’s lifetime. The book was translated before Darwin’s death into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish and Swedish, and has appeared in at least 33 more languages since. This total is apparently higher than any other scientific work, possibly except for the first books of Euclid’s geometry, and Darwin may be the most translated of any author originally published in English. There were more than 150 reprints in English in the twentieth century and already more than 20 in the twenty-first. It has been estimated that “approximately 75,000 to 100,000 copies of the Origin are now sold in many languages throughout the world each year”[35].

As a founding scientific document and methodological essay.

The Origin is still one of the best summaries of the evidence for and scope of evolution as the uniting principle of biology (even if it conspicuously lacks any understanding of the mechanism of inheritance, which would not come until the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work in the early twentieth century). Its breadth is breath-taking. It is also exemplary in its style of argument, its relentless testing of hypotheses, and its obsessive focus on attempting to address potential difficulties with its conclusions, what anthropologist Kenneth Korey calls its “self-corrective dialectic”.[36] It is also an intellectual love letter to the power of careful observation and compilation of data, one that any empirical scientist can still read today with profit. The book is thus a scientific how-to guide. “Reading the Origin,” says Reznick, “as opposed to turning to some other source, … provides a basis for understanding how science evolves and how we define the important unanswered questions to be addressed with future research. This is why we continue to include the Origin in our graduate classes…”.[37]

For its style, tone, and language.

Although its prose is definitely in the style of earlier times (see below), the Origin is also filled with great language. As Darwin’s most recent major biographer Janet Browne says:

“Few scientific tests have been so closely woven, so packed with factual information and studded with richly inventive metaphor. Darwin’s literary technique has long been noted for its resemblance to Great Expectations or Middlemarch in the complexity of its interlacing themes and his ability to handle so many continuous threads at the same time… His voice was in turn dazzling, persuasive, friendly, humble and dark.”[38]

The Origin contains numerous innovative and lyrical phrases and passages, many of which continue to not just to adorn, but to be actively part of, modern biological writing. These of course include “natural selection”, “sexual selection”, and “tree of life”, but also “propinquity of descent”, “entangled bank”, “polity of nature”, “struggle for existence”, “correlation of growth”, “rudimentary organs”, “divergence of character”, and many more, culminating in the book’s final glorious sentence, which is one of the most beautiful and memorable passages ever to appear in a scientific publication:

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”[39]

Beyond its word choices, Darwin’s overall tone in the Origin is notably polite and low-key, which is striking given that he was proposing (and knew that he was proposing) an idea that would overturn thousands of years of human thought. As Browne notes, Darwin’s son Francis “said this pleasant style of writing was characteristic of his father in ‘its simplicity, bordering on naivete, and in its absence of pretense… His courteous and conciliatory tone towards his reader is remarkable, and it must be partly this quality which revealed his personal sweetness of character to so many who had never seen him’.”[40] Darwin, says Browne,

“appeared in his book just as he appeared in life: as a reputable scientific gentleman, courteous, trustworthy and friendly, a man who did not speak lightly of the momentous questions coming under his gaze, a champion of common sense, honest to his data, and scornful of ‘mere conjecture’. This humane style of writing was one of his greatest gifts, immensely appealing to British readers who saw in it all the best qualities of their ancient literary tradition and contemporary Victorian values.”[41]

Having thus enthusiastically endorsed the Origin, however, it is necessary to acknowledge that it can be a difficult book to actually read cover-to-cover, especially for a non-biologist in the early twenty-first century.[42] This is a widespread opinion among biologists and Darwin scholars alike. Despite their praise for the book, biologists frequently note that it also contains obstacles for the modern general reader, and some admit their own initial difficulties with the book. In my experience, David Reznick’s story is not unusual:

“I first read the Origin during the summer break between completing my bachelor’s degree… and beginning my PhD studies… I cannot recall much about what I learned from that first reading. I do recall finding it very hard going. I finished it out of a sense of obligation.”[43]

Stated obstacles for the modern reader in the Origin usually start with the language, variously described as “Victorian” or “of the nineteenth century”. (This is of course a complaint familiar to any instructor who has tried to lead a class through the work of any pre-twentieth century author writing in English, from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Hawthorne.) Many of Darwin’s paragraphs and sentences are long; the adjectives and adverbs are abundant; and the syntax can be convoluted. Beyond just the words, Darwin also mentions a lot of people and organisms that are unfamiliar to most modern readers, usually without identifying them, and this can further lend a sense of unfamiliarity to the text.

Another hurdle is, interestingly, one of the very attributes of the book that made it so successful: the huge amount of evidence presented from such a breadth of examples. As Reznick notes, “Darwin draws on a breadth of scientific expertise that exceeds that of virtually any layman but also most scientists”. When seemingly one example will do, Darwin gives many more. It can seem a bit much.

Another difficulty is the structure of the book. In the Origin, Darwin had two separate but related goals. First, he sought to convince the reader that evolution – meaning change within an ancestral-descendant relationship of organisms – was an adequate explanation for the appearance of living things. Second, he wanted to show that one particular process, which he called natural selection, was the cause of this evolutionary change. In the Origin he intermingled these two topics in a way that can confuse a reader who doesn’t know in advance what Darwin is trying to say.

For more than a century, two solutions have been presented to these barriers and difficulties: introductions and condensed/abridged editions. Introductions by leading scholars, scientists, and other notables have variously tried to summarize Darwin’s argument, the background of the book, and/or its greater significance. Introducers have included Sir Arthur Keith, Julian Huxley, Leonard Darwin (Charles’ son), Ernst Mayr, Sir Gavin de Beer, George Gaylord Simpson, James Watson, E.O. Wilson, Richard Leakey, Walter Cronkite, and James Michener.

Editors of condensed/abridged editions have had various agendas beyond simply shortening the original 500 or so pages. Most have focused on reducing the plethora of examples (while leaving enough “to preserve the form of argument Darwin employed”[44]). Others have added explanatory notes identifying people, places, and/or organisms, or explaining what Darwin did not know compared to modern research.[45] Still others have been more ambitious, and entirely re-written the text to make it more readable.[46]

Some Modest Conclusions

The Origin of Species, writes biologist James Costa,

“is a living document that has, in many respects, even greater currency today than when it was first published in 1859. It is at once a founding treatise of a major scientific discipline, a philosophical argument for a novel worldview, and a masterly piece of scientific writing. A close reading throws open a window on a time and place, giving us insight into the cultural context in which its ideas were fermented and debated.”[47]

By any definition, the Origin is indeed a “great book”. It had and continues to have enormous significance, in both science and throughout many other areas of human life and thought. It speaks to many of humanity’s largest and most persistent questions, about our “place in nature”, the meaning and direction of life, and how we can go about understanding such enormous topics. The Origin is itself a major part of human history; it changed the world, and for that reason alone is important. The Origin is also surely inexhaustible. Between its soaring view of life and its catalog of particulars, there is much to (re)discover with every reading. It is also – most of it anyway – beautiful and moving as literature.

Our species does a lot of things really badly, like getting along with each other or taking care of our own environment. But we do some things really well, like thinking about and studying the universe of which we are a part, and creating works of elegance and beauty that reflect that thought and study. Great works of art are valued, in part, because they provide the opportunity to pause and ponder these unique human capabilities in their most excellent form. Great books are no different.

Some of us are fortunate enough to have had opportunities to read (or at least try to read) the works of Shakespeare in the original. We know the difference between that experience and reading about Shakespeare, or a quick summary of the play in the theater program. I know that I appreciate a little plot review before I go to a Shakespeare performance. But I also know that it is the performance – including a lot of the language that goes past me – that makes me realize the magnificence of the Bard’s accomplishment.

So: if you are not a biologist, find and read a “popular” or “non-technical” summary of evolution, or The Origin, or Darwin’s life, and then try – try really hard – to read as much of the Origin (in the original or one of the admirable recent abridgements) as you can. If you are a biologist (of any kind), this is simply a must-have part of your professional development. If you’re just a regular person, do it anyway. No matter your background, I predict it will open for you a world – of both natural reality and human understanding — more marvelous than you can imagine. It is not the only “great book” that will do so, but it is surely one of the best.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Glenn Altschuler for discussion and Jennifer Tegan and Rob Ross for comments on previous drafts.

Footnotes

[1] For some accounts of these battles, see, e.g., Bloom (1994), Denby (1996), and Donadio (2007).

[2] Jefferson to Skipwith, August 3, 1771, reprinted in Thomas Jefferson. Writings. The Library of America (1984), pp. 740-745.

[3] Colbourn (1960).

[4] Sainte-Beuve (1850: 128-129).

[5] Arnold (1865; 1918 reprint, p. 33).

[6] Hammond (2006:93); Hutton (2011).

[7] Lacy (2008).

[8] Eliot (1910: 3).

[9] Lacy (2008).

[10] Hutchins (1952: xi).

[11] Downs (1978: 26-27).

[12] See, e.g., Schlesinger (1998) and Smith (1999).

[13] Schlesinger (1998).

[14] Downs (2004: 26, 27, 29).

[15] Browne (2006). Other books in the series include the Bible, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Paine’s Rights of Man, the Qur’an, the Iliad and Odyssey, The Wealth of Nations, Clausewitz’s On War, and Marx’s Das Kapital.

[16] Denby (1996: 11).

[17] Kirsch (2001).

[18] The reference is to Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Living Beings) (1628) by William Harvey (1578-1657). The full passage is (p. 20):

“Finally, if any use or benefit to this department of the republic of letters should accrue from my labours, it will, perhaps, be allowed that I have not lived idly, and, as the old man in the comedy says:

For never yet hath any one attained

To such perfection, but that time, and place,

And use, have brought addition to his knowledge;

Or made correction, or admonished him,

That he was ignorant of much which he

Had thought he knew; or led him to reject

What he had once esteemed of highest price.”

[19] Kirsch (2001). The reference is to Snow (1958).

[20] https://blogs.cornell.edu/reading/

[21] Other reasons included difficulties in getting faculty to volunteer their time leading discussions, differences in agendas of senior administration, waning interest and involvement on the part of students, and lack of either “matching” student interests to the reading or structured follow-up. Various changes were made to the program over the years. Some of these, such as assembling an interdisciplinary group of faculty to teach a formal “great books” course, were not seriously pursued. (I am grateful to Glenn Altschuler for discussion, and directing me to various sources – who wished to remain anonymous – on this topic.)

[22] And yet the burning leaves still swirl. A recent essay in The New York Times by David Brooks was not entitled “a defense of great books”, but it might as well have been. Brooks writes that

“we consume culture to enlarge our hearts and minds. We start with the tiny circle of our own experience, but gradually we acquire more expansive ways of seeing the world. Peer pressure and convention may try to hem us in, but the humanistic mind expands outward to wider and wider circles of awareness.

I went to college at a time and in a place where many people believed that the great books, poems, paintings and pieces of music really did hold the keys to the kingdom. If you studied them carefully and thought about them deeply, they would improve your taste, your judgments, your conduct… The teachers welcomed us into a great conversation … They introduced us to the range of moral ecologies that have been built over the centuries and come down as sets of values by which we can choose to live … The message was that all of us could improve our taste and judgment by becoming familiar with what was best — the greatest art, philosophy, literature and history. And this journey toward wisdom was a lifelong affair.” (Brooks, 2024)

[23] And I have intentionally avoided wading back into the Canon and other battles of the culture wars. Most of the books populating the various lists, as well as most of commentaries, discussed above were written by white male authors, and agreement seems elusive. Diversifying the authorship of commentators (which is surely a good thing) would reduce agreement even further, and therefore supports my conclusion.

[24] Buchsbaum (1958).

[25] Simpson (1982: 111).

[26] Browne (2006:1).

[27] Wilson (2009: xv).

[28] Costa (2009: xx).

[29] Ruse and Richards (2009: xvii).

[30] Ghiselin (2008).

[31] Radford, T., 2008, The book that changed the world. The Guardian, 8 February https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/feb/09/darwin.bestseller

[32] Reznick (2010: xi-xii).

[33] These details come from a fascinating (OK, perhaps only to extreme Darwin fans) paper by Kohler and Kohler (2009).

[34] Darwin did, however, also make small changes to a later printing of this edition in 1876, which is therefore the final text as Darwin left it. This edition is the source of many later reprints.

[35] Kohler and Kohler (2009: 344).

[36] Korey (1984: ix). In his Autobiography, Darwin famously wrote: “I had, also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer.” (Barlow, 1958: 123) This approach in the Origin was, says Janet Browne, “carefully thought out” and “an adroit step” (2006: 69, 75).

[37] Reznick (2010: xi-xii).

[38] Browne (2006: 66).

[39] Darwin (1859: 490).

[40] Francis Darwin (1887, v. I, p. 155; quoted in Browne, 2006: 67-68).

[41] Browne (2006: 67-68).

[42] This is ironic given that one reason frequently given for the Origin’s success (i.e., a lot of people from many backgrounds read it and understood at least its major points) is that it was much shorter and more accessible than the book Darwin had intended to write. As the familiar story goes, Darwin had been working on a much larger work, to be called Natural Selection, when he received a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace in June 1858 describing ideas very close to his own. This shocked him into rushing to complete a much shorter “abstract” of the larger work, which was the Origin, completed in about 13 months. Most historians agree that had Darwin continued on his anticipated path without Wallace’s interruption, the result would have been a ponderous multi-volume work that few would have had the inclination to read.

[43] Reznick (2010: ix). My own personal experience is similar. I first tried to read the Origin when I was 14, because I had heard or read (I don’t remember where) that it was an important book. I recall having no idea what Darwin was trying to say, and being completely lost, in both the language and the subject material. I think I made it through a chapter or two. I did not attempt it again until graduate school, in preparation for leading a discussion of it with undergraduates, and I read it every year thereafter for perhaps a decade.

[44] Korey (1984: x).

[45] Some recent abridged editions include those edited by Leakey (1978), Korey (1984), Costa (2009), Reznick (2010), and Pechenik (2023).

[46] Most recently, distinguished invertebrate biologist Jan Pechenik, who also teaches scientific writing, has produced a version in which he based most of his editing “on the various rules from my Short Guide to Writing About Biology (ninth edition)”. He continues, “Indeed, I like to think that this is how Darwin would have written The Origin had he read my Short Guide first!” (Pechenik, 2023: xi).

[47] Costa (2009: ix).

References and Further Reading

Arnold, M., 1865, The function of criticism at the present time. In Essays in Criticism. (Reprinted 1918, Oxford University Press, pp. 9-36.)

Barlow, N., editor, 1958, The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882. With the original omissions restored. Collins, London,1 253 p.

Bloom, H., 1994, The Western Canon: The books and school of the ages. Harcourt Brace & Company, New York, 578 p.

Brooks, D., 2024, How to save a sad, lonely, angry and mean society. The New York Times, January 25

Browne, J., 2006, Darwin’s Origin of Species. A biography. Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 174 p.

Buchsbaum, R., editor, 1958, A book that shook the world. University of Pittsburgh Press, 60 p. [The editor’s name was inadvertently omitted from the first printing, but was added in later printings.]

Colbourn, H.T., 1960, The reading of Joseph Carrington Cabell. Studies in Bibliography, 13: 180-188.

Costa, J.T., 2009, The annotated Origin. A facsimile of the first edition of On the Origin of Species. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 537 p.

Darwin, C., 1859, On the origin of species. John Murray, London, 502 p.

Darwin, F., editor, 1887, The life and letters of Charles Darwin. 3 vols. John Murray, London.

Denby, D., 1996, Great books. My adventures with Homer, Rosseau, Woolf, and other indestructible writers of the western world. Simon and Schuster, New York, 496 p.

Donadio, R., 2007, Revisiting the canon wars. The New York Times, Sept. 16

Downs, R.B., 1978, Books that changed the world. 2nd edition. American Library Association, Chicago, 400 p. (1st edition, 1956)

Eliot, C.W., 1910, The editor’s introduction to the Harvard Classics. In The Harvard Classics, C.W. Eliot, ed., vol. 50, P.F. Collier & Son, New York, pp. 3-14.

Ghiselin, M., 2008, Preface, in On the tendency of species to form varieties, and On the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural means of selection (1858), by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. California Academy of Sciences http://course.sdu.edu.cn/Download/2956c236-feef-4b7f-ba49-c89350155b86.pdf

Hammond, M., 2006, Reading, publishing and the formation of literary taste in England 1880-1914. Ashgate, Burlington, VT, 222 p.

Hutchins, R.M., 1952, The great conversation. Vol. I of Great Books of the Western World. Encyclopedia Britanica and the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, xxvii+131 p.

Hutton, C., 2011, “The promise of literature in the coming days”: The best hundred Irish books controversy of 1886. Victorian Literature and Culture, 39: 581 - 592. 

Kirsch, A., 2001, The “Five-foot shelf” reconsidered. Harvard Magazine, 103(2) (November-December). https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2001/11/eliots-elect-the-harvard-html

Kohler, M., and C. Kohler, 2009, The Origin of Species as a book. In The Cambridge companion to “The origin of species”. M. Ruse and R.J. Richards, eds., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 333-352.

Korey, K.A., 1984, The essential Darwin. Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 327 p.

Lacy, T., 2008, Dreams of a democratic culture: Revising the origins of the Great Books idea, 1869-1921. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 7(4): 397-441.

Leakey, R.E., 1979, The illustrated Origin of Species. Abridged Edition. Hill & Wang, New York, 240 p.

Pechenik, J.A., 2023, The readable Darwin. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, New York, 493 p.

Reznick, D.N., 2010, The Origin then and now. An interpretive guide to the Origin of Species. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 432 p.

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