Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan

This is another good, more well-known and polished, guide to great works of literature. It's less street-level than Rexroth, but Fadiman I find, has his unique advantages like for instance he is good at isolating the great works of individual writers who have alot of works to their name. Fadiman also is not politically-correct, but like Rexroth he also covers non-western works. (Other good books of this kind, or on this subject, are the various encyclopedias of literature and similar reference books. A good, big bookstore - like a Borders, say - will usually have a section near the fiction section that contains all these kinds of reference works.) See inside this book here. And, while I'm at it, look inside the Rexroth book here.