Charlotte BrontΓ« - Jane Eyre, Oscar Wilde - Picture of Dorian Gray, Steinbeck - East of Eden, MacIntyre - After Virtue, Camus - The Plague, Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited, Norman Maclean - A River Runs Through It
all books that fit the category. All of these are better than 95% of books exist, all worth reading once, but none are really impactful on the world historical scale in the way that the Great Books are
Others I can think of: Willa Cather - My Γntonia, any Cormac McCarthy, most Dickens (perhaps Bleak House can make a run for a great books list, but it's a stretch), Xenophon, Juvenal, Ibsen, Berkeley, Simone Weil, Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. Maybe the Book of Common Prayer?
They are all astounding works, but they are missing something that makes them wellsprings in the same way that, say, Dante, Don Quixote, or the Greek Tragedies are (just to name a few examples). They are all simply top-tier excellent versions of something that was already established. That, or the ideas in them were either perfected elsewhere or they just didn't have the kind of impact that is required for the higher level of status.
These were definitely all (including your additions) impactful on the "world-historical scale"--as much as literature can be alone, anyway! I would absolutely put almost all of these on any Great Books list. They aren't all to my taste, but they fit in by any coherent canon-making standards
So: my feeling is that we need to make our criteria very clear. My criteria for "almost-great" books would definitely not be "do they appear on Great Books lists?" - there are lots of books which don't appear on Great Books lists for reasons other than their greatness. I teach a Great Books course for which Middlemarch would be perfect - but I don't include it, simply because it is too long, not because it isn't "great" enough.
Nor can it plausibly be "are they widely read" - because most people don't read all sorts of great books, either through lack of knowledge, or because they don't have access to them, or because the existing translations aren't very good.
So my criteria for "greatness" vs. "almost greatness" would have to be something along the lines of "would people knowledgeable about the literary tradition in question think these were central parts of the canon?" So (say) Ibn Khaldun would unquestionably be "great" rather than "almost great", even though relatively few people outside the Arab world have heard of him. Cicero, who has been mentioned a number of times, would surely count as "great" - there is really no more important Latin writer apart from Virgil. But some of his (numerous) works might well fall in the "almost great" category: I doubt that any Latinist would make a stand on behalf of Pro Caecina or Pro Balbo or De Fato. Among Greek tragedies, Medea or the Trojan Women could be "great", but The Children of Heracles or Andromache would be "almost great".
I recently read Henry Esmond: that strikes me as "almost great" - interesting enough, but one wouldn't put it on a par with the great Victorian novels, including Vanity Fair. New Grub Street and The Egoist would fall in the same category for me; also Villette. All of Disraeli. Most of Trollope (I'd make exceptions for The Last Chronicle of Barset, Can You Forgive Her, and a couple of others). All of Fennimore Cooper. Poetry: James Thomson, Rupert Brooke, Walter Savage Landor, Longfellow.
The interesting question comes with the "unjustly neglected": works that I personally think are hugely underrated, even by specialists - I would advocate for them as "great", but I recognize that might be a minority opinion, and they might count as "almost great" in most people's eyes. So, for example, Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy - won the Nobel Prize, then fell from favor, partly because of the terrible English translation, but is slowly reaching a new audience thanks to a new translation. Tamburlaine The Great - overshadowed by Shakespeare for so long, but an astonishing work. Winston Churchill's biography of Marlborough - a stupendous literary artwork, even if one is doubtful about its value by the standards of academic history.
All that off the top of my head: I could probably come up with a few thousand more "almost great" works by these criteria, given time ...
I read Sartor Resartus at university and really loved it! (I have not dared to pick it up since, however.)
A few books popped into my head β most would have been required reading not so long ago, I think. Gibbon; The Faerie Queene; Milton's prose; Sidney's Arcadia; Don Juan; The Stones of Venice - or perhaps Unto This Last; Boethius; Thomas a Kempis; Malory; Defoe.
First thought: Shepherdβs Calendar, Peacock, Hazlitt, eg on boxing, Geo Macdonaldβs secular novels and fantasies, Congreveβs 2 best comedies, John OβHara Sermons and sodawater, Cranford, Pym, so much else.
Would Cicero's writing be the best writing about a worldview that lost? If so, didn't that worldview more or less win in the end, it just took 2,000 years?
Including history books is cheating. Anyway, Humeβs History of England, Spenglerβs The Decline of the West, and Toynbee are all good candidates. As for Maitland, his Lectures on Equity is a better choice. I would add Henry Maineβs Ancient Law too.
They are excellent, but like his History of English Law, they are quite outdated. A dream of mine is to make a modern annotated version, but alas my own abilities fall so far short of Maitlandβs erudition and eloquence that it would be presumptuous to attempt it.
The classics of Celtic and Norse literature come to mind: The TΓ‘in, The Mabinogion, The Poetic Edda. Some of the biblical apocrypha. Islamic classics like Ibn Khaldun's history and Tufail's αΈ€ayy ibn YaqαΊΔn. All of these are very influential in western history and elude most Great Books lists.
Also, Aristotle's biological texts, agree with others on Cicero, Hume's essays, Leopardi's poems and diary.
I am quite late to this discourse but I would like to champion *The Heptameron* by Marguerite de Navarre as the second-place finisher to *The Canterbury Tales.* I think it's just as good an exemplar of the "pilgrim tales" form while being just as fun, witty, and almost as naughty (while having even more entertaining historical context--the author was satirizing real people at her court!!)
A whole lot of George Bernard Shaw, apart from PygmalionβMan and Superman; Saint Joan; Major Barbara. Etc.
Van Wyck Brooks 5-volume Makers and Finders (unrivaled, majestic, novelistic history of American literature to 1915; completely out of print).
Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly.
Colin Wilson's The Outsider.
Meville's Typee.
The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus by Washington Irving. (Biographies are too easyβvirtually every really famous person has multiple once-regnant biographies that are now completely superseded.)
Jack London's The Iron Heel. Maybe Martin Eden, but perhaps that's more of a cult classic.
A bunch of stuff by Herbert Spencer.
D.F. Strauss's Life of Jesus.
Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine.
H.G. Wells's non-science fiction novels, and his nonfiction book The Outline of History.
Democritus! Wrote a bunch. Cicero thought he rivaled Plato as a stylist. Nothing but a few fragments remain to us.
And now I've got to stop, because this is getting me too excited and I'll just keep going forever.
One more. Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. Should be considered a classic, but somehow isn't quite (at least among people I've discussed it with).
Thinking about the top 5% of books while excluding the top 1%. People, myself included, will err too far backward in time and too far toward literary works; the top 5% will include contemporary works as well as some "genre" fiction.
Hermann Hesse - "Glass Bead Game" and "Siddhartha," Thomas Mann - "The Magic Mountain," Albert Camus - "The Plague" and "The Stranger," Joan Didion - "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and others, Ursula K. Le Guin - "The Dispossessed," Joseph Heller - "Catch 22," David Lindsay - "A Voyage to Arcturus," Dan Simmons - "Hyperion," Camille Paglia - "Sexual Personae," as others have suggested - "The Anti-Federalist Papers," Raymond Carver - "Fires," Clausewitz - "On War," Jack Kerouac - "On the Road."
We should include Knausgaard's "My Struggle," maybe not all of it, but definitely the first two volumes. Biographies should take up room here. I loved Agassi's "Open," but is it in the 95th percentile? Philosophical treatises: Parfit's 'Reasons and Persons' ranks in the top 5%, but probably not the top 1%.
I think some of the works of the early Nobel Prize winners might qualify. You don't hear much about 'Jean-Christophe' by Romain Rolland or Henryk Sienkiewicz's Trilogy these days.
In fact, browsing public domain book repositories like Project Gutenberg or Standard eBooks and checking the Wikipedia pages of the books there gives me the impression that there are a lot of works that were once the talk of the town but are now gone from the public consciousness.
Epicurus, who lost to the Stoicism bros? Xenophon? The Anti-Federalist Papers?
@hollisrobbins would agree about the Anti-Federalist!
There is an entire tradition of Southern political thought that has been almost entirely ignored since 1865. Well worth exploring.
I second the Anti-Federalist Papers.
Charlotte BrontΓ« - Jane Eyre, Oscar Wilde - Picture of Dorian Gray, Steinbeck - East of Eden, MacIntyre - After Virtue, Camus - The Plague, Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited, Norman Maclean - A River Runs Through It
all books that fit the category. All of these are better than 95% of books exist, all worth reading once, but none are really impactful on the world historical scale in the way that the Great Books are
Others I can think of: Willa Cather - My Γntonia, any Cormac McCarthy, most Dickens (perhaps Bleak House can make a run for a great books list, but it's a stretch), Xenophon, Juvenal, Ibsen, Berkeley, Simone Weil, Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. Maybe the Book of Common Prayer?
I would have put most of those on a Great Books list without the βalmostβ qualifier
They are all astounding works, but they are missing something that makes them wellsprings in the same way that, say, Dante, Don Quixote, or the Greek Tragedies are (just to name a few examples). They are all simply top-tier excellent versions of something that was already established. That, or the ideas in them were either perfected elsewhere or they just didn't have the kind of impact that is required for the higher level of status.
These were definitely all (including your additions) impactful on the "world-historical scale"--as much as literature can be alone, anyway! I would absolutely put almost all of these on any Great Books list. They aren't all to my taste, but they fit in by any coherent canon-making standards
Stendhal, The Red and the Black.
No. That is a Great Book.
So: my feeling is that we need to make our criteria very clear. My criteria for "almost-great" books would definitely not be "do they appear on Great Books lists?" - there are lots of books which don't appear on Great Books lists for reasons other than their greatness. I teach a Great Books course for which Middlemarch would be perfect - but I don't include it, simply because it is too long, not because it isn't "great" enough.
Nor can it plausibly be "are they widely read" - because most people don't read all sorts of great books, either through lack of knowledge, or because they don't have access to them, or because the existing translations aren't very good.
So my criteria for "greatness" vs. "almost greatness" would have to be something along the lines of "would people knowledgeable about the literary tradition in question think these were central parts of the canon?" So (say) Ibn Khaldun would unquestionably be "great" rather than "almost great", even though relatively few people outside the Arab world have heard of him. Cicero, who has been mentioned a number of times, would surely count as "great" - there is really no more important Latin writer apart from Virgil. But some of his (numerous) works might well fall in the "almost great" category: I doubt that any Latinist would make a stand on behalf of Pro Caecina or Pro Balbo or De Fato. Among Greek tragedies, Medea or the Trojan Women could be "great", but The Children of Heracles or Andromache would be "almost great".
I recently read Henry Esmond: that strikes me as "almost great" - interesting enough, but one wouldn't put it on a par with the great Victorian novels, including Vanity Fair. New Grub Street and The Egoist would fall in the same category for me; also Villette. All of Disraeli. Most of Trollope (I'd make exceptions for The Last Chronicle of Barset, Can You Forgive Her, and a couple of others). All of Fennimore Cooper. Poetry: James Thomson, Rupert Brooke, Walter Savage Landor, Longfellow.
The interesting question comes with the "unjustly neglected": works that I personally think are hugely underrated, even by specialists - I would advocate for them as "great", but I recognize that might be a minority opinion, and they might count as "almost great" in most people's eyes. So, for example, Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy - won the Nobel Prize, then fell from favor, partly because of the terrible English translation, but is slowly reaching a new audience thanks to a new translation. Tamburlaine The Great - overshadowed by Shakespeare for so long, but an astonishing work. Winston Churchill's biography of Marlborough - a stupendous literary artwork, even if one is doubtful about its value by the standards of academic history.
All that off the top of my head: I could probably come up with a few thousand more "almost great" works by these criteria, given time ...
I could never stand Thomson or Landor. Agree v much about Marlowe. I have only sampled the Marlborough but I can see that.
I read Sartor Resartus at university and really loved it! (I have not dared to pick it up since, however.)
A few books popped into my head β most would have been required reading not so long ago, I think. Gibbon; The Faerie Queene; Milton's prose; Sidney's Arcadia; Don Juan; The Stones of Venice - or perhaps Unto This Last; Boethius; Thomas a Kempis; Malory; Defoe.
First thought: Shepherdβs Calendar, Peacock, Hazlitt, eg on boxing, Geo Macdonaldβs secular novels and fantasies, Congreveβs 2 best comedies, John OβHara Sermons and sodawater, Cranford, Pym, so much else.
Congreve is one I forgot, and Spenser too
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
All of Cicero's writings
Would Cicero's writing be the best writing about a worldview that lost? If so, didn't that worldview more or less win in the end, it just took 2,000 years?
In the English Language, Thomas Babbington Macaulay. He was a Titan and now he is largely forgotten.
If you read his essays you may find his point of view old-fashioned but you will think that he is a brilliant writer.
Including history books is cheating. Anyway, Humeβs History of England, Spenglerβs The Decline of the West, and Toynbee are all good candidates. As for Maitland, his Lectures on Equity is a better choice. I would add Henry Maineβs Ancient Law too.
I still need to read the Lectures on Equity
They are excellent, but like his History of English Law, they are quite outdated. A dream of mine is to make a modern annotated version, but alas my own abilities fall so far short of Maitlandβs erudition and eloquence that it would be presumptuous to attempt it.
This exercise reminds me of Joseph Epstein's "Lifetime Reading List," https://www.jstor.org/stable/41211230
The classics of Celtic and Norse literature come to mind: The TΓ‘in, The Mabinogion, The Poetic Edda. Some of the biblical apocrypha. Islamic classics like Ibn Khaldun's history and Tufail's αΈ€ayy ibn YaqαΊΔn. All of these are very influential in western history and elude most Great Books lists.
Also, Aristotle's biological texts, agree with others on Cicero, Hume's essays, Leopardi's poems and diary.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A sweeping, ambitious, French American quest. Influential but overlooked.
I am quite late to this discourse but I would like to champion *The Heptameron* by Marguerite de Navarre as the second-place finisher to *The Canterbury Tales.* I think it's just as good an exemplar of the "pilgrim tales" form while being just as fun, witty, and almost as naughty (while having even more entertaining historical context--the author was satirizing real people at her court!!)
A whole lot of George Bernard Shaw, apart from PygmalionβMan and Superman; Saint Joan; Major Barbara. Etc.
Van Wyck Brooks 5-volume Makers and Finders (unrivaled, majestic, novelistic history of American literature to 1915; completely out of print).
Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly.
Colin Wilson's The Outsider.
Meville's Typee.
The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus by Washington Irving. (Biographies are too easyβvirtually every really famous person has multiple once-regnant biographies that are now completely superseded.)
Jack London's The Iron Heel. Maybe Martin Eden, but perhaps that's more of a cult classic.
A bunch of stuff by Herbert Spencer.
D.F. Strauss's Life of Jesus.
Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine.
H.G. Wells's non-science fiction novels, and his nonfiction book The Outline of History.
Democritus! Wrote a bunch. Cicero thought he rivaled Plato as a stylist. Nothing but a few fragments remain to us.
And now I've got to stop, because this is getting me too excited and I'll just keep going forever.
One more. Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. Should be considered a classic, but somehow isn't quite (at least among people I've discussed it with).
great answers!
yes! why isn't Shaw performed more? (at least it's not in the States.)
The great Bildungsroman: Anna Karenina by Tolstoy; Emma by Jane Austen, Middlemarch by George Elliot; North and South by Elizabeth Gaskill
Some of those would typically be on a GB reading list
Emma never, but Northanger Abbey is barely almost great. It is fun, though.
All of those except Gaskell are high on The List Which Must Not Be Named
These are great books. For Eliot, I would say Daniel Derronda.
Thinking about the top 5% of books while excluding the top 1%. People, myself included, will err too far backward in time and too far toward literary works; the top 5% will include contemporary works as well as some "genre" fiction.
Hermann Hesse - "Glass Bead Game" and "Siddhartha," Thomas Mann - "The Magic Mountain," Albert Camus - "The Plague" and "The Stranger," Joan Didion - "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and others, Ursula K. Le Guin - "The Dispossessed," Joseph Heller - "Catch 22," David Lindsay - "A Voyage to Arcturus," Dan Simmons - "Hyperion," Camille Paglia - "Sexual Personae," as others have suggested - "The Anti-Federalist Papers," Raymond Carver - "Fires," Clausewitz - "On War," Jack Kerouac - "On the Road."
We should include Knausgaard's "My Struggle," maybe not all of it, but definitely the first two volumes. Biographies should take up room here. I loved Agassi's "Open," but is it in the 95th percentile? Philosophical treatises: Parfit's 'Reasons and Persons' ranks in the top 5%, but probably not the top 1%.
I think some of the works of the early Nobel Prize winners might qualify. You don't hear much about 'Jean-Christophe' by Romain Rolland or Henryk Sienkiewicz's Trilogy these days.
In fact, browsing public domain book repositories like Project Gutenberg or Standard eBooks and checking the Wikipedia pages of the books there gives me the impression that there are a lot of works that were once the talk of the town but are now gone from the public consciousness.