Shortly after I moved to New York at the age of 19, a friend bought a set of the Great Books of the Western World, published by the Encyclopedia Britannica. It's a wonderful set.

Great Books of the Western World was born. The program had a good run before sales “fell off the cliff” in the 1980s. Beam marvels that Britannica and Adler, ...

The Great Books of the Western World were ostentatiously launched on April 15, 1952, at a glittering black-tie affair in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York.

Born and schooled in France, JACQUES came to this country in 1919. He was naturalized in 1933 and is now Professor of History at Columbia University. He is the author of several books , >among ...

Mortimer J. Adler, the iconoclastic encyclopedist and progenitor of the “Great Books” collection of notable writers and thinkers, died Thursday at his home in San Mateo. He was 98.

The Great Books and the Aspen Institute’s seminars nourished a vibrant reading community in Aspen. Publication of Great Books of the Western World coincided with the creation of the Institute’s ...

The 54-volume series of classics, so popular in the midcentury, says a lot about Chicago, the city of its birth.

When I was growing up, Mortimer J. Adler championed “The Great Books of the Western World,” Clifton Fadiman promoted “The Lifetime Reading Plan” and every thrift store worth its salt ...

ON JUNE 28, MORTIMER J. ADLER, propagandist for the reading of great books, indexer extraordinaire, and the world’s highest-salaried philosopher, died at the age of ninety-eight. I worked for ...