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In 1973 Frye was asked by The Franklin Mint<\/a> to become a member of the advisory panel that would select one hundred great books<\/a>.\u00a0 In a telegram from the Franklin Mint 2 October 1973, one of several urgent messages imploring Frye to join the project, he was told that Willard Thorp of Princeton (who had recommended Frye to the advisory board), Alan Heimert of Harvard, Albert Guerard of Stanford, Frank Kermode of Cambridge, and Richard Ellmann of Oxford had already signed on.\u00a0 The Mint even sent a representative, Darby Perry, to visit Frye in his office at Victoria College.\u00a0 He eventually consented and was sent a checklist with certain titles already on the list and with instructions that it was possible to add alternate titles.\u00a0 Along with nine others, Frye duly constructed his list.\u00a0 He was paid $1000 for agreeing to participate in the venture.\u00a0 Shortly after the Franklin Mint made its list of titles<\/a> available, Frye began receiving mail, criticizing him for lending his name to such a cheap commercial enterprise and noting that the gimmicky advertising brochure of the Franklin Mint did not indicate the titles selected or the editions used.<\/p>\n Frye responded to one of his critics by saying, \u201cMy connection with the Franklin Library scheme was confined to agreeing to serve as an \u2018advisor\u2019 for their list of titles.\u00a0 They sent their list of titles to me; I sent them back my own notion of what a hundred \u2018great books\u2019 might be, and they went ahead with their original selection.\u00a0 In other words, consulting me was pure ritual.\u00a0 If you were to say that I should have known in advance that this was the case, you would doubtless be right.\u201d\u00a0 To another he wrote, \u201cYou were quite right about the participation: I should never have lent myself to such a business, and much regret having done so.\u00a0 I am not at my most perceptive on the end of a long distance telephone, and the proposal to ask for my advice in selecting a list of books, accompanied with various distinguished names who are friends of mine, looked at the time more innocent than it is, and than I should have known it would be.\u201d<\/p>\n Nevertheless, Frye did take his assignment seriously and his list of recommendations was accompanied by this note of 23 October 1973 to Ron Wallace of the Franklin Mint: \u201cI am sending with this the form sent me, marked up according to instructions.\u00a0 As I considered the list, however, I found myself drafting a more analytical table of what I would consider the hundred essential books of Western culture, following your own categories closely.\u00a0 I hope it will be more helpful than confusing.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Category 1:\u00a0 Novels outside the English-speaking World.<\/strong><\/p>\n 1. Apuleius, Metamorphoses<\/em> (substituted for Petronius, on list).<\/p>\n 2. Murasaki, The Tale of Genji<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 3. Selected Arabian Nights<\/em> (on list, transferred).<\/p>\n 4. Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 5. Cervantes, Don Quixote<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 6. Balzac, Cousine Bette<\/em> (substituted for P\u00e9re Goriot<\/em>, on list).<\/p>\n 7. Flaubert, Madame Bovary<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 8. Stendhal, Charterhouse of <\/em>Parma<\/em> (substituted for The Red and the Black<\/em>, on list).<\/p>\n 9. Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 10. Proust, Swann\u2019s Way<\/em> (substituted for Cities of the Plain<\/em>, on list).<\/p>\n 11. Camus, The Plague<\/em> and The Stranger<\/em> (on list separately).<\/p>\n 12. Tolstoy, War and Peace<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 13. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina<\/em> (added).<\/p>\n 14. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov<\/em> (substituted for Crime and Punishment<\/em>, on list).<\/p>\n 15. Dostoevsky, The Idiot<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n Possible alternates:\u00a0 Kafka, The Trial<\/em> (on list); Musil, The Man without Qualities<\/em>; Mann, The Magic<\/em> Mountain (on list); Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude <\/em>(there isn\u2019t any Latin-American title on the list).<\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n 1. I think Apuleius has more general appeal than Petronius, apart from the fact that the latter is exasperatingly fragmentary.<\/p>\n 3. I transferred the Arabian Nights<\/em> from children\u2019s books: you mention the Burton translation, which would need pretty careful editing if children were to read it.<\/p>\n 9. I\u2019d prefer Les Miserables<\/em> for a lifetime library, but it\u2019s too long.<\/p>\n 10. Swann\u2019s Way<\/em> is the first novel of the Proust series, and the obvious choice:\u00a0 Sodome et Gomorrhe<\/em> is very difficult to follow unless one knows something of what preceded it.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Category 2:\u00a0 British Novels.<\/strong><\/p>\n 1 (16).\u00a0 Bunyan, The Pilgrim\u2019s Progress<\/em> (on list transferred).<\/p>\n 2 (17). Swift, Gulliver\u2019s Travels<\/em> (on list, transferred).<\/p>\n 3 (18). Defoe, Robinson Crusoe<\/em> (on list, transferred).<\/p>\n 4 (19).\u00a0 Defoe, Moll Flanders<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 5 (20).\u00a0 Fielding, Tom Jones<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 6 (21).\u00a0 Sterne, Tristram Shandy<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 7 (22).\u00a0 Austen, Pride and Prejudice<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 8 (23).\u00a0 Emily Bronte, Wuthering<\/em> <\/em>Heights<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 9 (24).\u00a0 Dickens, Great Expectations<\/em> (substituted for David Copperfield, on list).<\/p>\n 10 (25).\u00a0 Thackeray, Vanity Fair<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 11 (26).\u00a0 George Eliot, Middlemarch<\/em> (substituted for The Mill on the Floss<\/em>, on list).<\/p>\n 12 (27).\u00a0 Conrad, Lord Jim<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 13 (28).\u00a0 Hardy, The Return of the Native<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 14 (29).\u00a0 Lawrence, Sons and Lovers<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 15 (30).\u00a0 Joyce, Ulysses<\/em> (on list, transferred).<\/p>\n Possible Alternates:\u00a0\u00a0 Meredith, The Egoist<\/em>; Trollope, Last Chronicle of Barset<\/em>; Woolf, To the Lighthouse<\/em> (on list); Patrick White, Voss<\/em>; Forster, A Passage to India <\/em>(on list).<\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n 1, 2, 3. I\u2019ve transferred these books from other categories: Robinson Crusoe<\/em> is not a child\u2019s book, unless abridged and edited in a way I shouldn\u2019t care for.<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Category 3:\u00a0 American Novels<\/strong><\/p>\n 1 (31).\u00a0 Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 2 (32).\u00a0 Melville, Moby Dick<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 3 (33).\u00a0 Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer<\/em> AND Huckleberry Finn<\/em> (on list separately).<\/p>\n 4 (34).\u00a0 Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham<\/em> (added).<\/p>\n 5 (35).\u00a0 James, The Ambassadors<\/em> (substituted for The American<\/em>, on list).<\/p>\n 6 (36).\u00a0 Lewis, Babbitt<\/em> (substituted for Main Street<\/em>, on list).<\/p>\n 7 (37).\u00a0 Dreiser, Sister Carrie<\/em> (substituted for An American Tragedy<\/em>, on list).<\/p>\n 8 (38).\u00a0 Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 9 (39).\u00a0 Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms<\/em> (substituted for For Whom the Bell Tolls<\/em>, on list).<\/p>\n 10 (40).\u00a0 Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n Category 4:\u00a0 Short Stories and Novellas.<\/strong><\/p>\n 1 (41).\u00a0 Boccaccio, Decameron<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 2 (42).\u00a0 Poe, Selected Stories<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 3 (43).\u00a0 Melville, Billy Budd<\/em> (on list; see note).<\/p>\n 4 (44).\u00a0 Henry James, The Turn of the Screw<\/em> (on list; see note).<\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n 3. This book should contain Benito Cereno<\/em> and Bartleby<\/em>, or, perhaps, instead of them, The Confidence Man<\/em>, which is really a novella.<\/p>\n 4. This should also be combined with one or two other James stories of comparative length, such as The Beast in the Jungle <\/em>or The Pupil<\/em>.\u00a0 Another possibility, and one I like better, would be a book of three short novels by different authors:\u00a0 James, The Turn of the Screw<\/em>; Conrad, Heart of Darkness<\/em>; D.H. Lawrence, The Man Who Died<\/em>.<\/p>\n Category 5:\u00a0 Children\u2019s Stories.<\/strong><\/p>\n 5 (45).\u00a0 Grimm\u2019s Fairy Tales<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 6 (46).\u00a0 Andersen\u2019s Fairy Tales <\/em>(on list).<\/p>\n 7 (47).\u00a0 Carroll, Alice in Wonderland<\/em> AND Through the Looking Glass<\/em> (on list separately).<\/p>\n 8 (48).\u00a0 Dickens, Christmas Carol<\/em> (on list; see note).<\/p>\n 9 (49).\u00a0 Stevenson, Treasure Island<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 10 (50).\u00a0 Kipling, The Jungle Book<\/em> (substituted for Just-So-Stories<\/em>, on list).<\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n 8. Again, Christmas Carol<\/em> might look a bit skimpy unless combined with The Chimes<\/em> or The Cricket on the Hearth<\/em>.\u00a0 Another possibility would be to collect three Victorian stories for younger readers under a common title: Christmas Carol<\/em>, Kingsley\u2019s Water Babies<\/em>, and George MacDonald\u2019s At the Back of the North Wind<\/em>.<\/p>\n Category 6:\u00a0 Poetry.<\/strong><\/p>\n 1 (51).\u00a0\u00a0 Homer, The Iliad <\/em>(on list).<\/p>\n 2 (52).\u00a0\u00a0 Homer, The Odyssey<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 3 (53).\u00a0\u00a0 Virgil, The Aeneid<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 4 (54).\u00a0\u00a0 Ovid, Metamorphoses <\/em>(on list).<\/p>\n 5 (55).\u00a0\u00a0 Dante, Divine Comedy<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 6 (56).\u00a0\u00a0 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 7 (57).\u00a0\u00a0 Milton, Paradise Lost<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 8 (58).\u00a0\u00a0 Goethe, Faust<\/em> (on list, transferred).<\/p>\n 9 and 10 (59-60).\u00a0 Two Anthologies <\/em>(added; see note).<\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n It seems to me that, apart from epic, poetry is impossible to add to a series like this without making special anthologies.\u00a0 There\u2019s room for two collections of British and American poetry in my scheme, say one on British Poetry 1550\u20131880, running from Shakespeare\u2019s age down to the first-generation Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge), and one on British and American Poetry 1800\u20131950, running form the second-generation Romantics (Byron, Shelley, Keats) to our own day.<\/p>\n Owing to the difficulty of translating poetry, I don\u2019t include translations of shorter poems by non-English poets, important as they are.<\/p>\n Category 7:\u00a0 Drama.<\/strong><\/p>\n 1 (61).\u00a0 Classical Tragedies (selected from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, on list).<\/p>\n 2 (62).\u00a0 Classical Comedies (selected from Aristophanes, Terence, Plautus, on list).<\/p>\n 3, 4, 5 (63, 64, 65).\u00a0 Shakespeare (on list)<\/p>\n 6 (66).\u00a0 Plays Selected from Shakespeare\u2019s Contemporaries (Jonson, Webster, Marlowe, etc.; added).<\/p>\n 7 (67).\u00a0 English Comedies, selected from Wycherley, Congreve, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde, Synge,<\/p>\n O\u2019Casey (added).<\/p>\n 8 (68).\u00a0 Shaw, Arms and the Man<\/em>, Major Barbara<\/em>, Heartbreak House<\/em> (substituted for the Puritan plays, on list).<\/p>\n 9 (69).\u00a0 Plays selected from Ibsen (on list) Chekhov (on list), Strindberg (added).<\/p>\n 10 (70).\u00a0 Plays selected from O\u2019Neill (on list), Pirandello (on list), Sartre (added) and Beckett (added).<\/p>\n Note:<\/p>\n Drama, like poetry, is difficult to represent except in collections.<\/p>\n Category 8:\u00a0 Biography and Essays.<\/strong><\/p>\n 1 (71).\u00a0 Plutarch, Selected Lives<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 2 (72).\u00a0 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy<\/em> (added).<\/p>\n 3 (73).\u00a0 Erasmus, The Praise of Folly <\/em>(on list).<\/p>\n 4 (74).\u00a0 Castiglione, The Courtier<\/em> (added).<\/p>\n 5 (75).\u00a0 Montaigne, Selected Essays<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 6 (76).\u00a0 Bacon Essays<\/em> and Advancement of Learning<\/em>, <\/em>Book I (first on list; second added).<\/p>\n 7 (77).\u00a0 Boswell, Life of Johnson<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 8 (78).\u00a0 Voltaire, Candide<\/em> (on list; see note).<\/p>\n 9 (79).\u00a0 Carlyle, Sartor Resartus<\/em> (added).<\/p>\n 10 (80).\u00a0 Thoreau, Walden<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n Possible Alternates:\u00a0 Pascal, Pens\u00e9es<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n 4. There doesn\u2019t seem to be on your list a book specifically on education, which is why I add what is in my opinion the world\u2019s best book on the subject.<\/p>\n 8. Candide is reasonably short: I\u2019d like to see Zadig<\/em> or Micromegas<\/em> added (or even, perhaps, Diderot\u2019s Le neveau de Rameau<\/em>).<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Category 9A:\u00a0 Discursive Prose to 1600.<\/strong><\/p>\n 1 (81).\u00a0 The Bible (on list; see note).<\/p>\n 2 (82).\u00a0 Dictionary (on list; see note).<\/p>\n 3 (83).\u00a0 Plato, Republic<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 4 (84).\u00a0 Plato, Shorter Dialogues (should include at least Apology, Phaedo<\/em>, Phaedrus<\/em>, Symposium<\/em>, Timaeus<\/em>, and Critias<\/em>; added).<\/p>\n Notes:<\/p>\n 1.\u00a0 There\u2019s no doubt that the Bible is one of the world\u2019s hundred great books, but whether it should be in a series like this I\u2019m not sure.\u00a0 I could see an abridged or \u201cessential\u201d Bible as a possibility.<\/p>\n 2.\u00a0 Again, there\u2019s no doubt that a good dictionary is essential to a good library, whether or not it should be one of the hundred books.\u00a0 Perhaps it should be left outside the numbering.\u00a0 I should have no objection to Webster, but others might want to exclude the famous Third.<\/p>\n 8.\u00a0 You have both the Bhagavadgita<\/em> and selections from the Vedas<\/em> on your list: perhaps there should be a volume of \u201cHindu Wisdom,\u201d including these along with selections from the Upanishads<\/em> and the Patanjali Yoga Sutras<\/em>.<\/p>\n Category 9B:\u00a0 Discursive Prose from 1600.<\/strong><\/p>\n 11 (91).\u00a0 Descartes, Discourse on Method<\/em>; Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding<\/em>; Leibnitz, Monadology<\/em> (first two on list; third added; see note).<\/p>\n 12 (92).\u00a0 Hegel, The Philosophy of History<\/em> (added).<\/p>\n 13 (93).\u00a0 Rousseau, The Social Contract<\/em> (on list).<\/p>\n 14 (94).\u00a0 Mill,