John Erskine, i "Great Books" e i classici antichi

After the collapse of the traditional system of the American college, largely due to Ch. Eliot, the Columbia professor John Erskine established, around 1915-1920, a new approach to the "Classics", dressing a list of so-called "Great Books". This simple idea was very successful and was later adopted (and vastly changed) at Chicago by Robert Hutchins and particularly Mortimer Adler, who framed the original idea of Erskine into a philosophical perspective.