The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures books in order

The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures is a Harvard lecture series published as books, featuring major thinkers from architecture to literature across nine volumes spanning 1941 to 2016.

Reading order

# Title Published Author Buy on Amazon
1 Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition 1941 Toni Morrison Buy
2 i: Six Nonlectures 1953 Toni Morrison Buy
3 Sincerity and Authenticity 1972 Toni Morrison Buy
4 The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance 1973 Toni Morrison Buy
5 Six Walks in the Fictional Woods 1994 Toni Morrison Buy
6 The Romantic Generation 1995 Toni Morrison Buy
7 Lessons of the Masters 2003 Toni Morrison Buy
8 Bathers, Bodies, Beauty: The Visceral Eye 2006 Toni Morrison Buy
9 The Origin of Others 2016 Toni Morrison Buy

The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures have been delivered at Harvard University since 1925, with published volumes going back to 1941. The nine books in this collection represent some of the most prominent thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, each delivering six lectures on a topic in the arts.

The series covers a huge range of fields: Sigfried Giedion on architecture, E.E. Cummings on poetry, Lionel Trilling on sincerity, Umberto Eco on fiction, and Toni Morrison on the construction of the racial Other. Morrison’s The Origin of Others (2016) uses her Norton Lectures to examine how literature creates outsiders and what that tells us about the cultures producing it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many books are in the The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures series?

There are nine books in the The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures series, published between 1941 and 2016.

What is the first book in the The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures series?

The first book in the The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures series is Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, published in 1941.

What are the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures?

The Norton Lectures are an annual lecture series at Harvard University. Each year a distinguished figure in the arts delivers six lectures, which are then published as a book. Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others (2016) is one of the most recent entries.

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. We may receive commissions for purchases made through links on this site.

Privacy Policy