Headcanon

In first days of the new year in 2025, I tried to compile a list of literature that might constitute a kind of canon of world thought, with a Western-centric focus, though not overly or exclusively. It is important to be clear about that — the list does not pretend to be a universal list but it is an attempt at what a well-read English speaker of Western Europe might want to read to be situated within the relevant traditions of thought.

Thinker	Tradition	Century	Primary works
Enheduanna	Ancient Sumerian	-2330	Exaltation of Inanna, Sumerian Temple Hymns
The Sumerians	Ancient Sumerian	-2100	✅ The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Hebrews	Judaism	-1000	The Torah, The Tanakh, The Talmud, The Midrash, The Siddur, The Zohar
Homer	Ancient Greek	-900	The Iliad, The Odyssey
Parmenides	Ancient Greek	-600	On Nature
Zoroaster	Zoroastrianism	-600	The Gathas
Aesop	Ancient Greek	-500	Aesop’s Fables
Confucius	Confucianism	-500	The Analects
Heraclitus	Ancient Greek	-500	On Nature
Laozi	Ancient Chinese	-500	🚧 Tao Te Ching
Sappho	Ancient Greek	-500	Sapphic Poems
Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha)	Ancient Indian	-500	The Poli Canon
Sun Tzu	Ancient Chinese	-500	The Art of War
Valmiki	Hinduism	-500	Ramayana
Arete of Cyrene	Ancient Greek	-400	-
Aspasia of Miletus	Ancient Greek	-400	Life of Pericles (via Plutarch)
Herodotus	Ancient Greek	-400	Histories
Plato and Socrates	Ancient Greek	-400	The Republic, ✅ The Symposium, The Apology, Parmenides
Zeno of Elea	Classical Roman	-400	-
Aristotle	Ancient Greek	-300	Nicomachean Ethics, Politics
Diogenes	Ancient Greek	-300	The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (via Diogenes Laertius)
Epicurus	Ancient Greek	-300	Letter to Menoeceus
Mencius	Confucianism	-300	The Mencius
Vyasa AKA Krishna Dvaipayana	Hinduism	-300	Mahabharata
Cicero	Classical Roman	0	On Duties
Jesus of Nazareth	Early Church	0	✅ The New Testament
Lucretius	Classical Roman	0	On the Nature of Things
Ovid	Classical Roman	0	Metamorphoses
Seneca	Stocism	0	Moral Letters
Virgil	Classical Roman	0	The Aeneid
Marcus Aurelius	Stocism	100	✅ Meditations
Zhu Xi	Confucianism	110	Commentary of the Analects
Plotinus	Neoplatonism	200	The Ennades
Augustine of Hippo	Early Church	300	The City of God
Hypatia of Alexandria	Neoplatonism	300	Ecclesiastical History (via Socrates Scholasticus)
Boethius	Classical Roman	400	The Consolation of Philosophy
Al-Farabi	Classical Islamic	800	The Virtuous City, On the Perfect State
Al-Kindi	Classical Islamic	800	On First Philosophy, On the Intellect, On the Use of the Philosophical Arts in the Divine Religion
Al-Ghazali	Medieval Islamic	1000	The Incoherence of the Philosophers, The Revival of the Religious Sciences
Anselm of Canterbury	Scholasticism	1000	The Proslogion
Ferdowsi AKA Abu’l-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi	Medieval Islamic	1000	Shahnameh
Ibn Sina AKA Avicenna	Medieval Islamic	1000	The Book of Healing, The Canon of Medicine
Omar Khayyam	Classical Persian	1000	The Rubaiyat
The Beowulf Poet	Epic	1000	Beowulf
Hildegard of Bingen	Medieval Christian	1100	Scivias
Ibn Rushd AKA Averroes	Medieval Islamic	1100	The Incoherence of the Incoherence, Commentaries on Aristotle
Maimonides	Medieval Jewish	1100	The Guide for the Perplexed
Turoldus	Medieval Christian	1100	Song of Roland
Dōgen	Zen	1200	Shobogenzo
Duns Scotus	Scholasticism	1200	Ordinatio
Meister Eckhart	Neoplatonism	1200	German Sermons
Rumi	Sufism	1200	Masnavi
Thomas Aquinas	Scholasticism	1200	Summa Theologica
Dante	Medieval Christian	1300	The Divine Comedy
Geoffrey Chaucer	Medieval Christian	1300	The Canterbury Tales
Giovanni Boccaccio	Civil Rights	1300	The Decameron
Hafez	Medieval Islamic	1300	Divān
Ibn Khaldun	Medieval Islamic	1300	Muqaddimah
Jean Buridan	Scholasticism	1300	Questions on the Eight Books of the Physics
Julian of Norwich	Medieval Christian	1300	Revelations of Divine Love
William of Ockham	Scholasticism	1300	Summa Logica
Christine de Pizan	Medieval Christian	1400	The Book of the City of Ladies
Isotta Nogaroia	Humanism	1400	Dialogue on the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve
Kabir	Bhakti	1400	Bijak, Guru Garanth Sahib
Machiavelli	Republicanism	1400	🚧 The Prince
Wang Shouren AKA Wan Yangming	Neo-Confucianism	1400	Instructions for Practical Living, Record of Teaching and Learning
Christopher Marlowe	Humanism	1500	Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great
Edmund Spenser	Humanism	1500	The Faeire Queen
Erasmus	Humanism	1500	The Praise of Folly
Frances Bacon	Empiricism	1500	Novum Organum
Luis de Camoes	Classicism	1500	Os Lusíadas
Michel de Montaigne	Humanism	1500	Essays
Miguel de Cervantes	Humanism	1500	Don Quixote
Shakespeare	Early Modern	1500	✅ Hamlet, ✅ Romeo and Juliet, Sonnets
Mulla Sadra	Theosophism	1571	The Transcendent Philosophy of the Four Journeys of the Intellect
Baruch Spinoza	Rationalism	1600	Ethics
Blaise Pascal	Rationalism	1600	Pensees
Daniel Defoe	Early Realism	1600	Robinson Crusoe
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz	Rationalism	1600	Monodology
Isaac Newton	Enlightenment	1600	The Principia
John Bunyan	Puritanism	1600	Pilgrim’s Progress
John Locke	Empiricism	1600	Two Treatises of Government
John Milton	Humanism	1600	Paradise Lost
Jonathan Swift	Political Satire	1600	Gulliver’s Travels
Margaret Cavendish	Early Modern	1600	Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy, The Blazing World
María de Zayas	Humanism	1600	Amorous and Exemplary Novels, Disenchantments of Love
Miyamoto Musashi	Bushido	1600	✅ The Book of Five Rings
Nicolas Malebranche	Rationalism	1600	The Search After Truth
Reme Descartes	Rationalism	1600	Meditations on First Philosophy
Takuan Sōhō	Zen	1600	The Unfettered Mind
Thomas Hobbes	Empiricism	1600	Leviathan
Adam Smith	Capitalism	1700	The Wealth of Nations
Alexander Pope	Enlightenment	1700	An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad
David Hume	Empiricism	1700	A Treatise of Human Nature, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding
Friedrich Schlegel	Romanticism	1700	Lucinde, Athenaeum Fragments
G. W. F. Hegel	Idealism	1700	Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, Elements of the Philosophy of Right
Giambattista Vico	Historicism	1700	The New Science
Immanuel Kant	Idealism	1700	Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason
Jane Austen	Early Realism	1700	Pride and Prejudice
Jean-Jacques Rousseau	Romanticism	1700	The Social Contract
Jeremy Bentham	Utilitarianism	1700	An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Johann Gottlieb Fichte	Idealism	1700	Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	Humanism	1700	Faust, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Marquis de Sade	Humanism	1700	The 120 Days of Sodom
Mary Astell	Proto-feminism	1700	A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
Mary Wollstonecraft	Proto-feminism	1700	A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Montesquieu	Classical Liberalism	1700	The Spirit of the Laws
Pierre-Simon Laplace	Determinism	1700	Celestial Mechanics
The Kʼicheʼ people	Mayan	1700	Popol Vuh (via Francisco Ximénez)
Thomas Paine	Humanism	1700	Rights of Man
Voltaire	Classical Liberalism	1700	Candied, Letters on the English
William Blake	Romanticism	1700	Milton: A Poem in Two Books, Songs of Innocence and Experience
Abraham “Bram” Stoker	Gothic	1800	Dracula
Abraham Lincoln	Civil Rights	1800	The Gettysburg Address, The Emancipation Declaration, Second Inaugural Address
Ada Lovelace	Mathematics	1800	Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers
Alfred North Whitehead	Process philosophy	1800	Process and Reality, Principia Mathmatica (w/ B. Russell)
Arthur Rimbaud	Modernism	1800	A Season in Hell, Illuminations
Arthur Schopenhauer	Idealism	1800	The World as Will and Representation
Auguste Comte	Positivism	1800	The Course of Positive Philosophy
Benjamin Disraeli	Early Realism	1800	Sybil
Charles Baudelaire	Modernism	1800	The Flowers of Evil
Charles Darwin	Enlightenment	1800	The Origin of the Species
Charles Dickens	Early Realism	1800	Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield
Charlotte Brontë	Romanticism	1800	Jane Eyre
D. H. Lawrence	Modernism	1800	Sons and Lovers, Women In Love, Lady Chatterly’s Lover
David Ricardo	Classical Liberalism	1800	On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
Edgar Allan Poe	Gothic	1800	The Raven, The Telltale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher
Edmund Husserl	Phenomenology	1800	Logical Investigations, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomonology
Emile Durkheim	Positivism	1800	The Division of Labour in Society, Suicide
Emily Brontë	Romanticism	1800	Wuthering Heights
Emily Dickinson	Romanticism	1800	The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper	Civil Rights	1800	Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects
Franz Kafka	Modernism	1800	The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle
Friedrich Engels	Marxism	1800	✅ The Communist Manifesto, The Condition of the Working Class in England
Friedrich Nietzsche	Early Existentialism	1800	Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ✅ Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals
Fyodor Dostoevsky	Realism	1800	Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
George Eliot	Early Realism	1800	Middlemarch
Gustave Flaubert	Realism	1800	Madame Bovary
Helena Blavatsky	Theosophism	1800	Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine
Henri Bergson	Idealism	1800	Creative Evolution
Henry David Thoreau	Transcendentalist	1800	Walden
Herman Melville	Romanticism	1800	Moby Dick
John Dewey	Pragmatism	1800	Democracy in Education
John Keats	Romanticism	1800	Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn
John Stuart Mill	Empiricism	1800	On Liberty, Utilitarianism
Joseph Conrad	Modernism	1800	Heart of Darkness
Karl Marx	Marxism	1800	Capital, ✅ The Communist Manifesto
Leo Tolstoy	Realism	1800	War and Peace, Anna Karanina
Lord Byron	Romanticism	1800	Don Juan, Child Herald Pilgrimage, She Walks in Beauty
Louisa May Alcott	Realism	1800	Little Women
Marcel Proust	Modernism	1800	In Search of Lost Time
Mark Twain	Realism	1800	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mary Shelley	Romanticism	1800	Frankenstein
Max Weber	Hermeneutics	1800	The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Oscar Wilde	Aestheticism	1800	The Picture of Dorian Grey, The Importance of Being Ernest, Deprofundus
Percy Bysshe Shelley	Romanticism	1800	Osymandias, Prometheus Unbound, Ode to the West Wind
Ralph Waldo Emerson	Transcendentalist	1800	Self-Reliance, Nature
Sir James Frazer	Modernism	1800	🚧 The Golden Bough
Sitting Bull	Civil Rights	1800	Sitting Bull’s Autobiography (via Wallace Tear)
Sojourner Truth	Abolitionist	1800	Ain’t I a Woman?
Soren Kierkegaard	Christian Existentialism	1800	Either/Or
The Brothers Grimm	Romanticism	1800	Grimms’ Fairy Tales
Victor Hugo	Romanticism	1800	Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notredam
Vladimir Lenin	Marxism	1800	What Is To Be Done?, The State in Revolution
Walt Whitman	Transcendentalist	1800	Song of Myself
William James	Pragmatism	1800	The Principles of Psychology, Pragmatism
Abraham Maslow	Humanism	1900	Motivation and Personality, Toward a Psychology of Being
Alan Watts	Zen	1900	The Way of Zen, ✅ The Wisdom of Insecurity, Become What You Are
Alasdair MacIntyre	Communitarianism	1900	After Virtue
Albert Camus	Atheist Existentialism	1900	✅ The Stranger/Outsider, ✅ The Myth of Sisyphus, ✅ The Plague
Aldous Huxley	Modernism	1900	✅ A Brave New World, ✅ The Doors of Perception
Allen Ginsberg	Beat	1900	Howl, America
Andrea Dworkin	Feminism	1900	Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Woman Hating, Letters from a War Zone
Andy Warhol	Modernism	1900	The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
Angela Davis	Marxism	1900	Women, Race and Class, Are Prisons Obsolete?
Anne Frank	Humanism	1900	The Diary of Anne Frank
Ayn Rand	Objectivism	1900	Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, Philosophy Who Needs It?
bell hooks	Intersectional Feminism	1900	Ain’t I a Woman?, To Feminist Theory, ✅ All About Love
Benoit Mandelbrot	Mathematics	1900	The Fractal Geometry of Nature
Bertrand Russell	Analytic Philosophy	1900	🚧 History of Western Philosophy, Principia Mathematica, ✅ Why I Am Not a Christian
Betty Friedan	Feminism	1900	✅ The Feminine Mystique, The Second Stage, The Fountain of Age
Billy Graham	Evangelicism	1900	Peace with God, Just As I Am
Black Elk	Lakota	1900	Black Elk Speaks (via John G. Neihardt)
Bruno Latour	Postmodernism	1900	✅ We Have Never Been Modern, Science in Action, Actor-Network Theory and After
C. G. Jung	Psychoanalytical	1900	Man and His Symbols, Psychological Archetypes, ✅ Memories, Dreams, Reflections
C. S. Lewis	Modernism	1900	✅ The Chronicles of Narnia, ✅ Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters
Carl Rogers	Psychoanalytical	1900	Client-centered Therapy, On Becoming a Person, A Way of Being
Chantal Mouffe	Post-marxist	1900	Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, The Democratic Paradox
Chinua Achebe	Postcolonialism	1900	Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God
Christopher Hitchens	Humanism	1900	✅ God is not Great, Hitch 22, The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Claude Levi-Strauss	Anthropology	1900	Tristes Tropiques, The Savage Mind, Structural Anthropology
Cormac McCarthy	Modernism	1900	Blood Meridian, The Road, No Country for Old Men
Cornel West	Pragmatism	1900	Race Matters, Democracy Matters
Daniel Dennett	Post-positivism	1900	Consciousness Explained, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Freedom Evolves
David Foster Wallace	Modern Criticism	1900	Infinite Jest, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
David Graeber	Anarchism	1900	✅ Debt, 🚧 Bullshit Jobs, ✅ The Utopia of Rules
David Kellogg Lewis	Modal Realism	1900	On the Plurality of Worlds, Counterfactuals
Don DeLilo	Postmodernism	1900	White Noise, Underworld
Donna Haraway	Ecological Futurism	1900	A Cyborg Manifesto
E. M. Forster	Modern Realism	1900	A Passage to India
Edith Hamilton	Humanism	1900	✅ Mythology, The Greek Way, The Roman Way
Edward Said	Postcolonialism	1900	Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism
Emma Goldman	Anarchism	1900	Anarchism and Other Essays
Eric Hobsbawn	Marxism	1900	The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848
Erich Fromm	Psychoanalytical	1900	Escape from Freedom, The Art of Loving
Ernest Becker	Atheist Existentialism	1900	The Denial of Death
Ernest Hemingway	Postmodernism	1900	The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises
Ezra Pound	Modernism	1900	The Cantos, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
F. Scott Fitzgerald	Modern Realism	1900	✅ The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night
Flann O’Brien	Modernism	1900	At Swim-Two-Birds, ✅ The Third Policeman, An Béal Bocht
Flannery O’Connor	Gothic	1900	A Good Man is Hard to Find, Wise Blood
Frank Herbert	Modern Realism	1900	Dune
Frantz Fanon	Marxism	1900	Black Skin, White Masks, The Wretched of the Earth
Friedrich Hayek	Classical Liberalism	1900	✅ The Road to Serfdom, The Constitution of Liberty
Gabriel Garcia Marquez	Postmodernism	1900	One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Gary Snyder	Beat	1900	Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Turtle Island
George Orwell	Modernism	1900	✅ 1984, ✅ Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia
Georgia O’Keeffe	Modernism	1900	Georgia O’Keeffe Art and Letters
Germaine Greer	Feminism	1900	✅ The Female Eunuch, Sex and Destiny, The Whole Woman, The Change
Gilbert Ryle	Post-positivism	1900	The Concept of Mind
Gilles Deleuze	Postmodernism	1900	Difference and Repetition, A Thousand Plateaus
Gloria Steinem	Feminism	1900	Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, My Life on the Road, Revolution from Within
Gore Vidal	Modern Liberalism	1900	Burr, Lincoln, The City and the Pillar
Graham Greene	Modern Realism	1900	The Power and the Glory
Gramsci	Marxism	1900	Prison Notebooks, The Modern Prince
Gregory Corso	Beat	1900	Gasoline, The Happy Birthday of Death, Bomb
Hannah Arendt	Phenomenology	1900	The Human Condition, Eichmann and Jerusalem, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hans-Georg Gadamer	Hermeneutics	1900	Truth and Method
Harold Bloom	Aestheticism	1900	The Anxiety of Influence, The Western Canon, Shakespeare
Haruki Murakami	Postmodernism	1900	Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84
Helen Keller	Civil Rights	1900	The Story of My Life
Henry Miller	Modernism	1900	Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, The Rosy Crucifixion
Herbert Marcuse	Postmodernism	1900	One-Dimensional Man, Eros and Civilization
Hilary Putnam	Pragmatism	1900	Reason, Truth, and History, The Philosophy of Logic
Howard Zinn	Marxism	1900	A People’s History of the United States, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train
Huda Shaarawi	Feminism	1900	The Harem Years
Hunter S. Thompson	Gonzo	1900	✅ Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hell’s Angels, ✅ Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Train 1972
Ian McEwan	Modern Realism	1900	Atonement, Enduring Love
Iris Murdoch	Modernism	1900	The Sea, the Sea, The Sovereignty of Good, Under the Net
Isaac Asimov	Modern Realism	1900	✅ Foundation, ✅ I, Robot
Italo Calvino	Modernism	1900	Invisible Cities, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, The Baron in the Trees
J. D. Salinger	Modern Realism	1900	✅ The Catcher in the Rye
J. R. R. Tolkien	Modernism	1900	✅ The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, ✅ The Silmarillion
Jack Kerouac	Beat	1900	✅ On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur
Jacques Derrida	Postmodernism	1900	Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference
Jacques Lacan	Psychoanalytical	1900	Écrits, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
James Baldwin	Modern Realism	1900	Go Tell It on the Mountain, The Fire Next Time, Giovanni’s Room
James C. Scott	Anarchism	1900	Seeing Like a State, Weapons of the Weak, The Art of Not Being Governed
James Joyce	Modernism	1900	Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners
James Lovelock	Ecological Futurism	1900	Gaia
Jane Goodall	Environmentalism	1900	In The Shadow of Man, Reason for Hope
Jean Baudrillard	Postmodernism	1900	✅ Simulacra and Simulation, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
Jean Rhys	Modernism	1900	Wide Sargasso Sea, Good Morning, Midnight
Jean-Paul Sartre	Atheist Existentialism	1900	Being and Nothingness, No Exit, Existentialism is Humanism
John Cheever	Modern Realism	1900	✅ The Stories of John Cheever
John Rawls	Modern Liberalism	1900	A Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism
John Steinbeck	Modern Realism	1900	The Grapes of Wrath, ✅ Of Mice and Men
John Updike	Modern Realism	1900	Rabbit, Run, The Witches of Eastwick
Jorge Luis Borges	Modernism	1900	Ficciones, The Aleph, Labyrinths
Joseph Campbell	Anthropology	1900	The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The Power of Myth, Myths to Live By
Judith Butler	Postmodernism	1900	Gender Trouble, Bodies that Matter
Julia Kristeva	Postmodernism	1900	Powers of Horror, Revolution in Poetic Language
Kahlil Gibran	Modernism	1900	The Prophet, The Broken Wings
Karl Popper	Positivism	1900	The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Open Society and Its Enemies
Kazuo Ishiguro	Metamodernism	1900	The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go
Ken Kesey	Beat	1900	✅ One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Sometimes a Great Notion
Krishnamurti	Metaphysical Existentialism	1900	The First and Last Freedom, Freedom from the Known
Kurt Vonnegut	Postmodernism	1900	Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions
Louis Althusser	Marxism	1900	For Marx, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
Ludwig von Mises	Classical Liberalism	1900	Human Action, Socialism, The Theory of Money and Credit
Ludwig Wittgenstein	Post-positivism	1900	Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty
Malcolm X	Civil Rights	1900	The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X: The Last Speeches
Manly P. Hall	Theosophism	1900	The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Margaret Atwood	Modern Realism	1900	The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin
Martha Nussbaum	Capability Approach	1900	Cultivating Humanity
Martin Heidegger	Phenomenology	1900	Being and Time, The Question Concerning Technology
Martin Luther King Jr.	Civil Rights	1900	Stride Toward Freedom, Letter from Birmingham Jail
Maurice Merleau-Ponty	Phenomenology	1900	Phenomenology of Perception, The Visible and the Invisible
Maya Angelou	Civil Rights	1900	I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together In My Name, The Heart of a Woman, And Still I Rise
Michael Sandel	Communitarianism	1900	✅ Justice, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, ✅ The Tyranny of Merit
Michel Foucault	Postmodernism	1900	Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Madness and Civilization
Mikhail Bakhtin	Dialogism	1900	Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics
Milton Friedman	Libertarianism	1900	Capitalism and Freedom, Free to Choose, A Monetary History of the United States
Nelson Mandela	Civil Rights	1900	Long Walk to Freedom
Noam Chomsky	Anarchism	1900	Syntactic Structures, Manufacturing Consent, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, On Anarchism
Northrop Frye	Romanticism	1900	Anatomy of Criticism, The Educated Imagination, Fearful Symmetry
Octavia E. Butler	Afrofuturism	1900	Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Dawn, Bloodchild
Oliver Sacks	Scientism	1900	Awakenings, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Pablo Neruda	Modernism	1900	Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Canto General
Paul Ricoeur	Phenomenology	1900	Time and Narrative, The Symbolism of Evil
Peter Singer	Utilitarianism	1900	Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics
Philip K. Dick	Psychedelic	1900	✅ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, ✅ The Man in the High Castle, ✅ Ubik
Philip Roth	Postmodernism	1900	American Pastoral, Portnoy’s Complaint
Rabindranath Tagore	Modernism	1900	Gitanjali, The Home and the World
Rainer Maria Rilke	Modernism	1900	Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus
Ralph Ellison	Modernism	1900	Invisible Man, Shadow and Act
Ram Dass	Beat	1900	Be Here Now, Journey of Awakening, Still here
Ray Bradbury	Modern Realism	1900	Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles
Richard Feynman	Scientism	1900	The Feynman Lectures on Physics, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
Richard Rorty	Postmodernism	1900	Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Robert Graves	Modernism	1900	I, Claudius, The White Goddess
Robert Nozick	Libertarianism	1900	Anarchy State and Utopia
Roger Penrose	Scientism	1900	The Emperor’s New Mind, The Road to Reality, Cycles of Time
Roland Barthes	Modernism	1900	Mythologies, ✅ The Death of the Author
Rudolf Carnap	Positivism	1900	The Logical Structure of the World, Meaning and Necessity
Salman Rushdie	Postmodernism	1900	Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh
Samuel Beckett	Modernism	1900	Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Molloy
Saul Kripke	Logicism	1900	Naming and Necessity, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic
Seamus Heaney	Modern Realism	1900	Death of a Naturalist, Station Island
Signmund Freud	Psychoanalytical	1900	The Interpretation of Dreams, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Ego and the Id
Simone de Beauvoir	Feminist Existentialism	1900	✅ The Second Sex, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Memories of a Dutiful Daughter
Simone Weil	Mystical Existentialism	1900	Gravity and Grace, The Need for Roots
Stephen Hawking	Scientism	1900	A Brief History of Time, The Grand Design
Steve Jobs	Capitalism	1900	Steve Jobs
Susan Sontag	Modern Criticism	1900	On Photography, Illness as Metaphor
Sylvia Plath	Modernism	1900	The Bell Jar, Ariel
T. S. Eliot	Modernism	1900	✅ The Waste Land, Four Quartets, ✅ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Ta-Nehisi Coates	Modern Realism	1900	Between the World and Me, The Water Dancer, We Were Eight Years in Power
Terence McKenna	Psychedelic	1900	Food of the Gods, The Archaic Revival
Theodor Adorno	Postmodernism	1900	Dialectic of Enlightenment, Negative Dialectics
Thich Nhat Hanh	Zen	1900	The Miracle of Mindfulness, Peace Is Every Step
Thomas Kuhn	Post-positivism	1900	The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Pynchon	Postmodernism	1900	Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, V
Timothy Leary	Psychedelic	1900	The Psychedelic Experience, High Priest, Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out
Tom Wolfe	Gonzo	1900	✅ The Electric Koolaid Acid Test, The Right Stuff, Bonfire of the Vanities
Toni Morrison	Postmodernism	1900	Beloved, The Blue Sty, Song of Solomon
Truman Capote	Modern Realism	1900	In Cold Blood, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Other Voices, Other Rooms
Umberto Eco	Postmodernism	1900	The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, The Theory of Semiotics
Ursula Le Guin	Humanism	1900	✅ Earthsea Cycle, The Dispossessed, ✅ The Left Hand of Darkness
Viktor Frankl	Humanist Existentialism	1900	✅ Man’s Search for Meaning, The Will to Meaning, The Unheard Cry for Meaning
Virginia Woolf	Modernism	1900	Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, ✅ A Room of One’s Own
Vladimir Nabokov	Modernism	1900	Lolita, Pale Fire
W. B. Yeats	Modernism	1900	The Tower, The Second Coming, The Winding Stair and Other Poems
Walter Abish	Postmodernism	1900	How German Is It, Alphabetical Africa
Walter Benjamin	Postmodernism	1900	The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations
William Faulkner	Modernism	1900	The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August
William S. Burroughs	Beat	1900	Naked Lunch, Junkie, The Nova Trilogy
Zora Neale Hurston	Anthropological Feminism	1900	Their Eyes Were Watching God
Greta Thunberg	Environmentalism	2000	The Climate Book
Jordan B. Peterson	Modern Reactionary Traditionalism	2000	Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules for Life
Mark Fisher	Postmodernism	2000	✅ Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, The Weird and the Eerie, Ghosts of My Life
Oprah Winfrey	Transcendentalist	2000	The Life You Want, What I Know for Sure
Philip Pullman	Modern Realism	2000	✅ His Dark Materials Trilogy
Shoshana Zuboff	Post-capitalism	2000	✅ The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Slavoj Žižek	Post-marxist	2000	The Sublime Object of Ideology, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Living in the End Times
Terry Eagleton	Marxism	2000	Literary Theory: An Introduction, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Culture and the Death of God
Zadie Smith	Metamodernism	2000	White Teeth, On Beauty