In 1943, Hutchins invited several dozen prominent business leaders in Chicago to a luncheon to discuss a method for "successful business and professional men" to remedy their educational gaps "in a relatively painless fashion in congenial surroundings." The idea was a hit: just one month later Hutchins and Adler offered their Great Books seminar to Chicago's business elite. Dubbed the "Fat Man's Great Books Course" by everyone involved, the class met each month at Chicago's University Club. Adler and Hutchins led most class sessions, but they brought in guest discussion leaders such as Dean of the College Clarence Faust, Lionel Trilling and Jacques Barzun from Columbia University, and veterans of Erskine's classes, Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, and Richard McKeon.
Among the first students was future Senator William Benton, University of Chicago Trustee, CEO of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Hutchins's former classmate at Yale. He proposed a Great Books set to be edited by Adler and Hutchins and published by Britannica. It promised to put the Great Books in middle-class living rooms while codifying their selections. Adler immediately seized the idea. It fit his dreams of popularizing the Great Books while also promising to give him an opportunity to bring together a kind of twentieth-century Summa Theologica he referred to as a Summa Dialectica. Hutchins balked at the idea. He feared that under the auspices of Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Great Books would lose their educational value and be sold like encyclopedias. He refused to endorse the set unless he could be assured that it would be an instrument of popular education.
Adler devised the idea of a grand index of the Great Ideas contained in the Great Books to make the set an educational force. Hutchins was persuaded, and he allotted $60,000 dollars to the project that he hoped would be completed in two years.
The production of the Great Books of the Western World proved to be a much more labor-intensive task than Adler, Hutchins or Benton anticipated. The two years lapsed in to eight years and the $60,000 ballooned to over $2,000,000. Adler assembled an editorial board that included himself and Hutchins; two other University of Chicago professors, Professor of Natural Sciences, Joseph Schwab, and Dean of the College, Clarence Faust; his cohorts from St. John's College, Stringfellow Barr, and Scott Buchanan; his first teaching partner, Mark Van Doren; and constitutional scholar and former president of Amherst College, Alexander Meiklejohn. The last to be invited was Adler's Columbia mentor and first champion of the Great Books, John Erskine, who had grown wary of his prodigy and only reluctantly accepted the post.
Using the same general criteria for greatness set down in the St. John's catalog, the initial selection of Great Books would have filled nearly eighty encyclopedia-like volumes, which the publisher rejected as unmarketable. After a brutal round of cuts (expressed in Joseph Schwab's recommendations for "oblivion") the list was pared down to 443 works by seventy-four authors designed to fill a set of fifty-four volumes, one volume of which was to be devoted to an introductory essay by Hutchins and two more to Adler's index of Great Ideas. The set started with Homer and ended with two writers who helped set the stage for modernism, Freud and William James--no women were included.
For Adler the heart of the Great Books of the Western World was his proposed index of the Great Ideas that unify "the all-embracing universe of discourse in which the mind of western man moves from problem to problem, subject-matter to subject-matter." The index, dubbed the Syntopicon, "would provide a map or chart of the conversation about fundamental subjects in which the authors of the Great Books engaged with one another across the centuries." Further, it would "enable the owner of a set of Great Books to use it as a reference library in which he could look up the discussion of any subject in which he had a special interest."
Determining which ideas to index took Adler over two years. He continuously merged concepts to limit the list to 102 Great Ideas starting with "angel" and progressing alphabetically to "world." He then hired a team of graduate students and independent researchers to find all references to each idea in the titles selected for the Great Books set. Complete with an introductory essay describing the history of each term, the Syntopicon alone took over seven years to produce at a cost of nearly $1,000,000.
A gala dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York on April 15, 1952, marked the publication of the Great Books of the Western World. After a prime rib dinner, the 500 subscribers to the "Founders' Edition" were treated to speeches by University of Chicago Chancellor Lawrence Kimpton, Jacques Maritain, Robert Oppenheimer, Clifton Fadiman, Senator William Benton, and of course Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins. Celebrating the project as "the most significant publishing event since Dr. Johnson's dictionary," with a touch of irony Benton favorably compared the subscribers present to Lord Chesterfield, Samuel Johnson's less-than-ideal patron. When Hutchins spoke, he was evangelical in his praise: "This is more than a set of books, and more than a liberal education. Great Books of the Western World is an act of piety. Here are the sources of our being. Here is our heritage. This is the west. This is its meaning for mankind."
The evening concluded with the announcement that the first two sets produced would be presented to Queen Elizabeth and President Truman, the "heads of the two great English-speaking nations." The Queen's set was bound in blue leather, while the President's copy was bound in maroon: "the gone-but-not-fully-forgotten color of the uniforms of the University of Chicago football team."
Reaction to the Great Books of the Western World upon publication was, in the main, politely respectful. But one voice loudly cried foul. In a New Yorker review that Adler called a "hatchet job," Dwight Macdonald referred to the set as a "fetish of The Great" and accused its producers of being "a typical expression of the American advertising psyche." "The way to put over a two-million-dollar cultural project," he lamented, "is, it seems, to make it appear as pompous as possible." To Hutchins' claim that the set of books represented a liberal education upon which the fate of the country and the world depended, Macdonald responded: "Madison Avenue cant" and "poppycock." He concluded, "the problem is not placing these already available books in people's hands but getting people to read them, and the hundred pounds of densely printed, poorly edited reading matter assembled by Drs. Adler and Hutchins is scarcely likely to do that."
Macdonald was reacting to the physical format (with two columns of dense, encyclopedia-sized type the set earned the reputation for being virtually unreadable), but he was also reacting to the inferior translations selected. The editorial board saved money by selecting only texts in the public domain, even purposefully overlooking excellent recent translations of Greek texts by University of Chicago faculty members. Homer is presented in prose form, and most of the translations date from the nineteenth century. In a telling sign of the times, no one seriously questioned the texts selected--even Macdonald had no real complaint. Years later, when the second edition appeared, it was greeted with scorn for its lack of inclusiveness.
Initially the Great Books of the Western World sold poorly. In the first year it sold 1,863 copies (500 to the original subscribers), then a mere 138 sets in 1953. It looked as though the $2,000,000 expended would never be recouped, but in 1956 Encyclopaedia Britannica hired Kenneth M. Harden to manage sales. A long-time encyclopedia salesman who knew the value of a "foot in the door," Harden understood the hard sell. He marketed the set door-to-door with a simple installment plan ($10 down and $10 a month) and used premiums such as a free Bible and bookshelf to entice would-be buyers. Backed by colorful brochures, posters, and magazine advertisements, he reached the mass market to sell over 50,000 copies in 1961. In 1964, William Benton reminded his staff that, "for 196 years, the man with the foot in the door has been the great source of our company's strength," then effortlessly blending culture with commerce, he applauded his staff for their role as educational leaders "in a world hungering above all else" for "an education of which the Great Books is a supreme symbol." The Great Books of the Western World was a financial disaster until it was sold as Hutchins feared it would be--by door-to-door salesmen touting "culture" to an insecure American middle class.
