Gateway to the Great Books
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Gateway to the Great Books is a 10-volume series of books originally published by Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. in 1963 and edited by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins. The set was designed as an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World, published by the same organization and editors in 1952. The set included selections - short stories, plays, essays, letters, and extracts from longer works - by over a hundred authors. The selections were generally shorter and in some ways simpler than the full-length books included in the Great Books.
[edit] Authors
A number of authors in the Great Books set - such as Plutarch, Epictetus, Tacitus, Dante, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin and William James - were also represented by shorter works in the Gateway volumes. And several Gateway readings discussed authors in the Great Books series. For instance, a selection from Henry Adams' Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres critiqued the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Indeed, many writers in the Gateway set were eventually "promoted" to the second edition (1990) of the Great Books, such as Alexis de Toqueville, Moliere, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein and John Dewey.
[edit] Index, reading plans, criticism
The set included an index similar to the Great Books' Syntopicon, along with reading plans of increasing difficulty. Hutchins contributed an introduction that was essentially a boiled-down version of The Great Conversation, his preface to the Great Books.
Although the editors maintained that many selections were appropriate to readers as young as seventh-grade students, the set included a fair amount of material challenging for the most experienced reader. In what may have been a response to complaints about the cramped typography of the Great Books, the Gateway volumes were single-column with larger, more readable type.
Many of the same criticisms leveled at the Great Books can be made of the Gateway set. The books concentrated heavily on Western European literature and included few selections by women or minority authors. The set is now out of print but is easily available from used-book sites on the Internet.
