The Texas List of Unrequired Reading

Spring 1987
Abstract
UTAustin released this list in 1987. Originally meant for undergraduates, it
was a four-year reading plan of books in philosophy, science, literature and history.
The College of Liberal Arts printed 20,000 copies of the list in a large, fullcolor brochure. Approximately 15,000 were distributed on campus; the rest were
mailed to Texas high schools, libraries, and school board presidents. Printing was
paid for by private donations.1

Note: Alternate titles are listed in blue.

Freshman

The Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas

The Discoverers, Daniel J. Boorstin
The Pandas Thumb, Stephen Jay
Gould
King Solomons Ring, Konrad Lorenz

Philosophy and Other Topics

The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand
Russell
The Wordly Philosophers, Robert
L. Heilbroner
The Religions of Man, Huston Smith
The Republic, Plato
A History of Western Philosophy,
Bertrand Russell
The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau

Literature
The Odyssey, Homer (T. E. Lawrence
translation)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Mark Twain
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
Antigone ; Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Science
The Double Helix, James D. Watson
Awakenings, Oliver Sacks

1 This list was republished in The Alcalde, the alumni magazine of UTAustin, vol. 75, no. 4 (March/April
1987): 910.
A new reading list was created in 2007, due to the popularity of the original list. It was compiled by
members of UTs Academy of Distinguished Teachers, a body that was created in 1995 by President Robert
Berdahl to honor the Universitys best professors. The updated list was published with the title The Ultimate Longhorn Reading List, in The Alcalde, vol. 95, no. 5 (May/June 2007): 3847.

History

Samuel Johnson, John Wain

The Making of the Middle Ages,
R. W. Southern
The Autobiography of Benjamin
Franklin, B. Franklin

The Historians Craft, Marc Bloch

The American Political Tradition,
Richard Hofstadter
Young Man Luther, Erik H. Erikson

Sophomore

Einstein, Jeremy Bernstein

Philosophy and Other Topics

Literature

The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle

Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
Genesis, Exodus, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Isaiah & Amos, Old Testament
The Prince, Niccol`o Machiavelli
Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, Philip
Hallie
The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Max Weber

Alices Adventures in Wonderland and

Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
Richard II, William Shakespeare
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

History
The Defeat of the Spanish Armada,
Garrett Mattingly
This Hallowed Ground, Bruce Catton
Melbourne, David Cecil
The Education of Henry Adams, Henry
Adams
History of the Conquest of Mexico,
William H. Prescott
Origins of the New South, C. Vann
Woodward

Science
Microbe Hunters, Paul De Kruif
Science and the Modern World, Alfred
North Whitehead
The First Three Minutes, Steven
Weinberg
The Creative Explosion, John Pfeiffer
Knowledge and Wonder, Victor Frederick Weisskopf

Junior

The Varieties of Religious Experience,

William James
Pragmatism, William James
Meaning in Western Architecture,
Christian Norberg-Schulz
Witness, Whittaker Chambers

Philosophy and Other Topics

Utilitarianism ; On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
Purposes of Art (2nd ed.), Albert Elsen
2

Science

ed.
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra
Hard Times, Charles Dickens
To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

A
Mathematicians
Apology,
G. H. Hardy
The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, Hans
Reichenbach
The Cosmic Code, Heinz Pagels
On Human Nature, Edward O. Wilson
The Two Cultures and the Scientific
Revolution, C. P. Snow
Scientific Knowledge and Its Social
Problems, Jerome Ravetz

History
The White Nile, Alan Moorehead
The Crisis of the Old Order, Arthur
M. Schlesinger
Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock
Huey Long, T. Harry Williams
The Old Regime and the French Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville
The Raven, Marquis James

Literature
Candide, Voltaire
Hamlet, William Shakespeare
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd

Senior

Dobzhansky
The Growth of Biological Thought,
Ernst Mayr
Chance and Necessity, Jacques
Monod
The Nature of Light and Color in the
Open Air, M. G. J. Minnaert

Philosophy and Other Topics

Groundwork of the Metaphysic of
Morals, Immanuel Kant
The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton,
James Madison & John Jay (Ed. Benjamin Fletcher Wright)
The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis
The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich
A. von Hayek
The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx

Literature
A Midsummer Nights Dream, William
Shakespeare
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Bread and Wine, Ignazio Silone
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Light in August, William Faulkner
The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann

Science
Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus, Martin
Gardner
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
Thomas S. Kuhn
Mankind Evolving,
Theodosius

History
Russia and the West under Lenin and
Stalin, George F. Kennan
3

 Tumultuous Years, Robert J. Donovan

Stilwell and the American Experience
in China, Barbara W. Tuchman
Stalin as Revolutionary, Robert

C. Tucker
The Rebel, Albert Camus
Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm Little & Alex Haley

This is not a list of the books we think every student should read. Rather, its purpose is to encourage reading and to provide a good starting point and plan for future reading. Alternate titles are provided because we recognize the vast differences
among individuals in reading experience and taste. We encourage you to start by following your own inclinations.
The topics covered in these volumes are a good sampling of the most important
ideas and events responsible for intellectual life and struggle in Western Civilization.
A serious effort to examine at least selected topics in history, literature, philosophy,
and science is an essential beginning in your education beyond secondary school. And
this effort does not have to constitute a great burden. Only one book per month completes the reading program.
After you get well into the list, we believe you will want to explore other perspectives and opinions. If you do, we will conclude that this reading project has been a
success.
Unrequired Reading List Committee
Robert D. King, Dean of Liberal Arts
Joseph M. Horn, Committee Chairman
Warner J. Barnes
W. Roger Louis
M. Gwyn Morgan
Cynthia W. Shelmerdine
William M. Scott
James W. Vick
Paul B. Woodruff