The Great Books (Contd.)

What are the greatest books of the 20th century?

That parlor question has been troubling Philosopher Mortimer Jerome Adler, 75, partly because the sage of Aspen has an incurable passion for arranging ideas into categories, partly because this is the 25th anniversary of his proclamation, with the help of Robert Hutchins, of the "Great Books of the Western World." To organize that 5-ft. 1-in. shelf, Adler bestowed the title of greatness on 443 works by 74 authors, but denied it to anyone after Freud and William James.

Now Adler is planning an equally weighty continuation of that shelf: a 20-volume series entitled, not surprisingly, "Great Books of the 20th Century." Writing to the series' editorial board--including such luminaries as Norman Cousins and Jacques Barzun--Adler asked which modern authors might be worthy of the company of Homer, Galileo and Marx. He added: "I am willing to stick my neck out by nominating the authors and works from which a selection should be made."

Adler's list of 131 works by 73 writers is, quite naturally, eclectic. It extends from the popular (Orwell's Animal Farm) to the ponderous (Sartre's Being and Nothingness). To stimulate the board, Adler professes to consider his selections "woefully inadequate" and urges anyone to "challenge the soundness of my nominations."

The offer is hard to resist. How, one might ask, could Adler nominate Eliot's pretentious The Cocktail Party and not his superb Four Quartets? If there is room for the historical musings of Toynbee, why is there no room for Braudel's monumental The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II? And if this list is supposed to update the original of 25 years ago, why does it recognize so few living writers? Bellow and Solzhenitsyn are admirable, but where is the magic of Grass's The Tin Drum or Robert Lowell's Life Studies or Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow?

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