The Essential Humanities Reader

by Gerard NeCastro (Editor)

The study of the Humanities is the study of what makes us human, which is a seemingly infinite and infinitely difficult subject. Most definitions of what make us human seem to break down or melt into definitions of other living beings. One thing that does seem to distinguish humans from other species is our attempt both to discuss the human condition and to record that discussion for future generations. The best of these recordings, which take various forms in arts and letters, help us to understand the world around us and to give it meaning. For this reason, people seeking answers to difficult questions tend to return century after century to these same readings.

Selections from the Old Testament, Homer, Pericles, Plato, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, the New Testament, Medieval Song Tradition, Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Chaucer, Pico, Montaigne, Luther, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Cervantes, Donne, Marvell, Milton, Behn, Barker, Pope, Jefferson, Blake, Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Darwin, Tennyson, Marx and Engels, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Maupassant, Freud, Gilman, Eliot, Owen, Stein, and Rogers.

322 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 18, 2013

About the author

Born and raised in Erie, Pennsylvania, Gerard NeCastro, after graduating from Mercyhurst college, was an accountant and bookstore manager in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, and Redlands, California. While working as a bookseller by day, he returned to school at night, studying languages part-time and eventually joined the master’s program in English at the University of California – Riverside, where he began his long involvement with Chaucer, Dante, and Medieval and Renaissance Drama. When he completed his MA, he continued his studies in Medieval Literature at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. While he was there, he taught in the legendary Integrated Liberal Studies program where he developed his love of Art History.

Upon completion of his Ph.D., he taught for two years at the University of Maine – Orono, and then for many years both on the graduate faculty at Orono and the regular faculty at Machias, where, after teaching hundreds of classes and editing dozens of publications, he was named as Emeritus Professor of English and Humanities. After his retirement there, he began his second career at WLU in July 2017. He and Vicki, his wife of 30+ years, live in the quiet town of Bethany. When he is not serving as dean or teaching his classes, he spends his time reading, editing, gardening, and writing fiction and poetry. He is now revising his novels Columbine AS3 and The In-Law.