Carl Sagan’s Ambitious College Reading List: Plato, Shakespeare, Gide, and Plenty of Philosophy, Math & Physics (1954)

Carl Sagan may have passed away almost twen­ty years ago, but he con­tin­ues to influ­ence minds of all gen­er­a­tions through intel­lec­tu­al heirs like Neil DeGrasse Tyson (host of the remake of Sagan’s beloved 1980 TV series Cos­mos) as well as through the books he wrote in his life­time. But what books influ­enced Sagan, launch­ing him on the jour­ney toward astron­o­my, cos­mol­o­gy, astro­physics, astro­bi­ol­o­gy, and glob­al celebri­ty? Thanks to the Library of Con­gress’ Carl Sagan Archive, we now know at least forty titles from the no doubt volu­mi­nous amount of read­ing mate­r­i­al he digest­ed dur­ing his youth and edu­ca­tion.

Sagan wrote this read­ing list (which a fan has tran­scribed with links and post­ed to Red­dit) in 1954, as an under­grad­u­ate at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. On it he iden­ti­fies the books, as a young Charles Dar­win once wrote on his own list, to be read, whether whol­ly, par­tial­ly, or as a part of his course­work:

In Whole

• The Immoral­ist — Andre Gide
• Death, Be Not Proud — John Gun­ther
• Out­line of Abnor­mal Psy­chol­o­gy - Gard­ner Mur­phy
• Who Speaks For Man — Nor­man Cousins
• Astron­o­my — Robert Bak­er
• Obser­va­tion­al Approach to Cos­mol­o­gy — Robert Hub­ble
• Can­cer
• Quan­ti­ta­tive Aspects of Car­cino­genic Radi­a­tion — Harold Thay­er Davis
• Star Short Sci­ence Fic­tion Nov­els #1
• New Biol­o­gy #15
• Young Archimedes — Aldous Hux­ley
• Julius Cae­sar — Shake­speare
• Sym­po­sium — Pla­to
• Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of An Une­d­u­cat­ed Man — Hutchins
• Timaeus — Pla­to

In Part

• Extra­or­di­nary Pop­u­lar Delu­sions — Charles MacK­ay
• But We Were Born Free — Elmer Davis
• Read­ings In Phi­los­o­phy
• His­to­ry of West­ern Phi­los­o­phy — W.T. Jones
• The Greek Read­er — W.H. Auden
• In the Mat­ter of J. Robert Oppen­heimer
• The Berlitz Ger­man Self-Teacher
• Sig­ma Galax­ies
• The Uses of the Past — Her­bert J. Muller
• Short Sto­ries for Study
• The Repub­lic — Pla­to
• The Bible — Anony­mous
• Sev­er­al Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­cans

Course Read­ings:

• Heat and Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics - Mark Wal­do Zeman­sky
• Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics, Kinet­ic The­o­ry, Sta­tis­ti­cal The­o­ry - Fran­cis W. Sears
• Kinet­ic The­o­ry of Gas­es — E.H. Ken­nard
• Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics: An Advanced Treat­ment — E.A. Guggen­heim
• Elec­tric­i­ty and Elec­tro­mag­net­ism — Horn­well
• The­o­ry of Func­tions (5 Vol­umes) — Kon­rad Knopp
• Advanced Cal­cu­lus (in part) — Wil­fred Kaplan
• Com­plex Analy­sis — Lars Ahlfors
• Vol. II, Dif­fer­en­tial and Inte­gral Cal­cu­lus — Richard Courant (Author)
• Elec­tric Fields — Rugers 
• Elec­tro­mag­net­ics — John Daniel Kraus
• Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Cir­cuit Fun­da­men­tals — Carl Edwin Smith

Pret­ty ambi­tious mate­r­i­al for a twen­ty-year-old, but remem­ber: we’re talk­ing about some­one who, around a decade ear­li­er, had already sketched out his ideas for human­i­ty’s space­far­ing future. It makes sense that such a child would grow up to read sci­ence fic­tion — and with the pub­li­ca­tion of Con­tact thir­ty years after that, write it — and even that he would take up math­e­mat­ics and physics as a course of aca­d­e­m­ic study.

But it takes a mind like Sagan’s not to lose sight of the impor­tance of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with the non­spe­cial­ist pub­lic, as evi­denced by the pres­ence on his list of Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can and Extra­or­di­nary Pop­u­lar Delu­sions. Nor did he neglect, even before his career began, the need to con­tex­tu­al­ize sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies in the realm of human thought and feel­ing, which extends from Pla­to and the Bible to Shake­speare, André Gide, and John Gun­ther — that last writer’s work, and cer­tain oth­er vol­umes on his list, also show­ing an advanced con­scious­ness of human lim­i­ta­tions and mor­tal­i­ty. All of it placed Sagan well, despite his trun­cat­ed time on Earth, to do work that will out­last us all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See Carl Sagan’s Child­hood Sketch­es of The Future of Space Trav­el

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Carl Sagan on the Virtues of Mar­i­jua­na (1969)

New Carl Sagan Archive Fea­tures His Dig­i­tized Home Movies, Stu­dent Jour­nal­ism, Draft of His Pale Blue Dot & More

What Did Charles Dar­win Read? See His Hand­writ­ten Read­ing List & Read Books from His Library Online

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.