What Makes a (Harvard) Classic?

Filling Dr Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf in 1909

Abstract

Drawing attention to a forgotten controversy, this article describes the furious nationwide response to an inaccurate advance list of the contents of the forthcoming Harvard Classics that circulated across the United States in June 1909. The conversation about this list offers a rich trove of evidence for historians of reading: commentators express views about good and bad reading, the proper curriculum of a liberal education, and criteria for the status of “classic.” Especially in their attention to the perceived omissions of Shakespeare and the Bible from the set, these responses contradict simple, unidirectional accounts of “high” and “low” culture. Instead, this controversy shows Americans of the early twentieth century invoking a “classic” at once accessibly ubiquitous and highly prestigious: their commentary about the contents of the Harvard Classics presumes a relationship between elite authority and the broader reading public that is complex and reciprocal.