The term "Western canon" refers to a body of books, music, and art that have been traditionally accepted by Western scholars as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. As of May 23 2023 the Canon is:

"The Iliad" by Homer
"The Odyssey" by Homer
"The Aeneid" by Virgil
"Oedipus Rex" by Sophocles
"Antigone" by Sophocles
"The Oresteia" by Aeschylus
"The Republic" by Plato
"Phaedrus" by Plato
"Symposium" by Plato
"Nicomachean Ethics" by Aristotle
"Poetics" by Aristotle
"The Histories" by Herodotus
"The History of the Peloponnesian War" by Thucydides
"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius
"The Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri
"Canterbury Tales" by Geoffrey Chaucer
"Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes
"Paradise Lost" by John Milton
"Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan
"Leviathan" by Thomas Hobbes
"Discourse on Method" by René Descartes
"Pensees" by Blaise Pascal
"Ethics" by Baruch Spinoza
"Paradise Lost" by John Milton
"The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark" by William Shakespeare
"King Lear" by William Shakespeare
"Macbeth" by William Shakespeare
"Othello" by William Shakespeare
"A Midsummer Night's Dream" by William Shakespeare
"Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare
"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen
"Emma" by Jane Austen
"Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville
"Walden" by Henry David Thoreau
"Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert
"War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy
"Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy
"The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
"Thus Spoke Zarathustra" by Friedrich Nietzsche
"The Interpretation of Dreams" by Sigmund Freud
"Ulysses" by James Joyce
"To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
"The Stranger" by Albert Camus
"The Trial" by Franz Kafka
"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
"In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust
"Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
"1984" by George Orwell
"The Bible"
"Faust" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift
"Tom Jones" by Henry Fielding
"Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley
"Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte
"David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens
"A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens
"Great Expectations" by Charles Dickens
"Middlemarch" by George Eliot
"Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte
"Les Misérables" by Victor Hugo
"The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexandre Dumas
"Moby Dick" by Herman Melville
"The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll
"Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain
"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson
"A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce
"Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf
"The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway
"The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck
"The Catcher in the Rye" by J.D. Salinger
"To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee
"Catch-22" by Joseph Heller
"On the Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin
"The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith
"Das Kapital" by Karl Marx
"Critique of Pure Reason" by Immanuel Kant
"Beyond Good and Evil" by Friedrich Nietzsche
"Winnie-the-Pooh" by A.A. Milne
"The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov
"The Lord of the Rings" by J.R.R. Tolkien
"The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien
"Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
"The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath
"Beloved" by Toni Morrison
"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood
"A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking
"Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace
"The Odyssey" translated by Emily Wilson
"The Divine Comedy" translated by Allen Mandelbaum
"The Essential Rumi" translated by Coleman Barks
"In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde
"Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad
"The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner