The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everthing Else

January, or I Made a Little Book

Volume I: Franklin; Woolman; Penn

Volume II: Plato; Epictetus; Marcus Aurelius

Volume III: Bacon; Milton; Thomas Browne

Volume IV: Complete Poems, Milton

Dear Son—So begins Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1788), and with it the Harvard Classics. On that New Year’s night, the words seemed to confirm my idea of the Classics as a communication from earlier generations, and I was excited to be finally receiving this communication. Several times over the months since I’d come up with my plan to read the Shelf, I’d considered getting an early start. I would walk to the place where the volumes waited in my parents’ library and run my fingers along their spines, wondering what secrets they held for me. The fifty-one volumes took up three shelves, each close to two feet wide—the whole thing a bit more than the advertised five feet, I guessed. Reading a volume of four or five hundred pages a week didn’t seem like much of a task, but when these books were taken together the expanse was overwhelming.

Now there was nothing to keep me from them. I was ready to read.

But first, I thought I might fix myself a drink—after all, it was New Year’s eve. I walked from the library to the kitchen, thinking idly about the contents of this first volume. After Franklin’s Autobiography, the volume is rounded out by William Penn’s Fruits of Solitude and the journals of a Quaker named John Woolman. To be honest, I’d questioned the way the Shelf started ever since I first considered reading it. What was it about these relatively marginal works that earned such a prominent place for them? Why did Eliot start here?

As it happens, I wasn’t the first to ask these questions.

Eliot announced his retirement from Harvard in October 1908, to take effect the following May, on the fortieth anniversary of his election to the presidency. A few months after this announcement, two men—William Patten and Norman Hapgood—approached him about editing what became the Classics.

Patten had started in the advertising department at P. F. Collier & Son, where he was the assistant to Condé Nast. He was later moved to the book department, which produced mostly cheap anthologies to be used as inducements for subscribers to Collier’s Weekly, the muckraking magazine that was the company’s major business. (A few years earlier, the magazine had published Upton Sinclair’s initial investigations into Chicago’s meatpacking industry.) When Patten had the idea of a series of great books that could be offered for subscription, Eliot’s name came to mind. Patten proposed his idea to the editor of Collier’s Weekly, Hapgood, who was an acquaintance of Eliot’s. Hapgood assured Patten that there was not a chance in the world Eliot would agree to this sort of commercial undertaking. But after Patten produced an old article from Scribner’s Magazine, in which Eliot had mentioned his long-standing theory about a five-foot shelf that might provide a liberal education, Hapgood agreed to introduce Patten to Eliot. Somewhat to the surprise of both men, Eliot signed on, with the one condition that he be allowed an assistant. For that role, he chose William Neilson, a literature professor at Harvard who would later become the president of Smith College. Work on the Shelf began almost immediately.

A few weeks into this work, Eliot remarked in a speech given to a high school in Atlanta that he planned to dedicate the early days of his retirement to compiling his Five-Foot Shelf. The news quickly spread that America’s most famous educator intended to provide an outline by which any man or woman could attain the best education. It’s difficult now to imagine the excitement this announcement generated. Editorials appeared in newspapers around the country. While they waited for Eliot’s list to materialize, many of these newspapers invited the presidents of their own local colleges to offer candidates for inclusion. There was a great deal of debate about whether a true education could be had without formal instruction, especially in Latin and Greek.

Initially, Eliot gave no suggestion that his list was part of a business venture, and a number of other publishers—Houghton Mifflin and Funk and Wagnall’s among them—approached him with offers to publish his Shelf. Once Collier’s involvement became clear, there was suspicion about the project, especially among Harvard alumni, some of whom argued that their university’s name—and by extension, its reputation—was being used for personal gain. (In today’s age of rampant college licensing, the real surprise is how little compensation Eliot and the university received for their imprimatur: Eliot was given a $2,500 honorarium, which was renewed in later years; Neilson, who did the bulk of the work, was paid $50 a week; the university allowed its name and seal to be used for free.)

In May 1909, well before the selection of the Classics was finished, Collier’s salesmen began soliciting subscriptions, using a tentative, incomplete list of titles. This list soon made its way into the press, where it was roundly ridiculed. Eliot Names Books for 5-Foot Library, read a headline in the New York Times over the subhead, Shakespeare Is Not in It. On the basis of the odd selection of titles, some newspapers reported that Eliot had been duped into a scheme to unload Collier’s underselling backlist. In response to this report and to letters from a number of alumni, Eliot wrote an open letter in the July 7 issue of Collier’s Weekly.

The incomplete and inaccurate list which appeared in the newspapers a few weeks ago was issued without my knowledge, he wrote, and gives an erroneous impression of [the] project. He acknowledged Collier’s commercial motives, but he emphasized that his own interest in the project was educational—an assertion that Collier’s payment scheme tends to confirm. Eliot also assured readers that he had complete autonomy in choosing the titles for Shelf.

As it happens, this last part wasn’t entirely true. The company believed readers would be unlikely to buy a set that included several titles that they already owned—hence the initial exclusion of the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, the two books that any literate household in those days was likeliest to own. This principle also meant excluding nineteenth-century novelists like Dickens and Thackeray, whose works were already offered by Collier. (In the wake of the controversy surrounding the partial list, Eliot would win out on the Bible and Shakespeare, but not on the novels; Dickens and Thackeray would later be included in the Harvard Classics Fiction Shelf, a second set compiled after the great success of the initial Shelf.)

Moreover, the choices that received the most ridicule in the press—Woolman and Penn—had been made before Eliot’s involvement in the project even began. Patten put this first volume together himself as part of his initial proposal to Eliot, who let the inclusion stand.

I knew very little of this on the night I began reading. Nor did I know that the volumes had been compiled in more or less random order. Like the newspaper columnists of 100 years ago, I assumed that Eliot had chosen these works to initiate the set for some good reason. I continued to puzzle over the question after I sat down with my drink, mostly because it was something to do besides reading the work that sat open in front of me.

Dear Son.

The words stopped me as soon as I began. Here in my hands was a thick old book with an unbroken spine and four hundred pages. And there on the shelf were fifty more such books. It didn’t seem possible that a year from now the contents of all those volumes would have passed, however fleetingly, through my mind. But this wasn’t the only problem. The truth is that as I looked at all those books my whole plan, so fresh just a moment before, seemed suddenly very silly to me. Perhaps I wouldn’t have felt this way if the Classics had started with Plato, or Homer, or Shakespeare. But the arbitrary beginning reminded me of the arbitrary nature of the project. Or better to say, both projects—Eliot’s effort to compile this set and my effort to read it. What did I hope to achieve with a yearlong act of literary peak-bagging? Why was I sitting by myself, reading a dead man’s letter to his son, instead of celebrating the New Year with my own family?

But these feelings were dispelled after I forced myself to push on. Franklin’s letter occupies about seventy pages, during which he passes along not just his own life story but his family’s history dating back more than a hundred years. He writes about his grandfather, father, and uncles, among them an elder Benjamin Franklin, also something of a man of letters, who liked to transcribe church sermons using, as the younger Franklin writes, a short-hand of his own, which he taught to me, but, never practicing it, I have now forgot.

Long after Franklin abandons the pretext of the letters, his Autobiography maintains its casually paternal tone. For long stretches it forgoes narrative entirely, in favor of simple fatherly advice. Here is the Franklin we all know: Poor Richard with his pithy aphorisms. The man had formed a shorthand of his own—for living—and he was eager that it be practiced and not forgotten. He tells us the thirteen virtues necessary for upright living, beginning with temperance (Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation) and ending with humility (Imitate Jesus and Socrates). He even explains in practical detail how one can gradually acquire these