AUTODIDACTS AND GREAT BOOKS
© Roxianne Moore
I found Hailey's story inspiring, but discouraging. Here was a fifteen-year old who decided she'd had enough of formal education. She graduated from high school a year early and began educating herself. Her parents, playwright Oliver Hailey and novelist Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, were supportive, but didn't actually help with her education.
She began with the Greeks, then on to the Romans, making her way through the centuries to modern novelists and playwrights. While her classmates were sitting through dull classes on grammar and algebra, she was reading Dickens, Dostoevsky, Proust, and Shaw. In the meantime, she wrote a novel, a screwball comedy and a play, in which she also acted. By the time she was nineteen, she'd studied books most of us have been meaning to read for years.
While I originally bought the book as a gift to my homeschooled niece, I'm glad I sat down and read it again. It's inspired me to re-educate myself, to catch up on the centuries of reading I've neglected (as if I didn't read enough).
Great Books Online
If you'd like to begin your own classical education, or if you're enrolled in a traditional program and don't know where to find these works, here's a good start:
The Great Books Index lists authors and works online. This is no ordinary reading list. You'll find:
- Aeschylus
- Apollonius
- Aquinas
- Austen
- Francis Bacon
- Balzac
- Chaucer
- Chekhov
- Dante
- Descartes
- Dickens
- Dostoevsky
- Galileo
- Gibbon
- Hippocrates
- Kierkegaard
- Lawrence
- Nietzsche
- Plato
- Shaw
- Shakespeare
- Voltaire
- Woolf
... and that's just the beginning. Some works are available only as text versions, but many are in HTML, making them much easier to read onscreen. The list is an excellent start for a Great Books course or discussion group, although I'd like to see Cicero and Socrates, as well as a few others.
You should also try to find a copy of Kendall Hailey's book. It's out of print, but ABE Book Search had a couple copies listed (which is how I found mine). Libraries and used book stores might also have copies. This is a must-read for anyone who feels formal education was NOT a good preparation for the life of a writer.
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