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The project for the Great Books of the Western World began at the University of Chicago, where the president, Robert Hutchins, worked with Mortimer Adler to develop there a course of a type originated by John Erskine at Columbia University in 1921, with the innovation of a "round table" approach to reading and discussing great books among professors and undergraduates.
The set included an index similar to the Great Books' Syntopicon, along with reading plans of increasing difficulty.Hutchins wrote an introduction with a more informal tone than he used in The Great Conversation, his preface to the Great Books, and that chiefly explained the relevance of most of the categories making up the set: "The Imagination of Man" (about fiction and drama), "Man and ...
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In 1937, under Stringfellow Barr, St. John's College introduced a curriculum based on the direct study of "great books". These sets are popular today with those interested in homeschooling. Gateway to the Great Books [23] was designed as an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World, published by the same organization and editors in 1952.
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^ d: Adler and Hutchins collaborated on The Great Books of the Western World, published in 1952, which was intended to present the entire Western canon in one 54-volume set. [128] The selection of works it contained defined the reading list on which Great Books curricula were based, and which Shimer has largely kept, with minor changes, ever since.
In addition to being a “special idea” that would set Great Books of the Western World apart, the Syntopicon serves four other purposes, outlined in its preface. The Syntopicon can serve as a reference book, as a book to be read, as an “instrument of liberal education,” and as “an instrument of discovery and research.” [9]