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AUTODIDACTS AND GREAT BOOKS

© Roxianne Moore

AUTODIDACT: a person who is self-taught.

This week I was re-reading The Day I Became an Autodidact: And the Advice, Adventures, and Acrimonies That Befell Me Thereafter by Kendall Hailey. Published in 1988, this book has become on of the bibles of the homeschooling movement. I read it soon after it came out, when I was beginning a self-directed degree program (more on that in a future column).

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.

The copyright of the article AUTODIDACTS AND GREAT BOOKS in Resources for Writers is owned by Deb Jones. Permission to republish AUTODIDACTS AND GREAT BOOKS in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.