This fifth edition of Literature of the Western World is intended, as its predecessors were, to provide the best possible materials for courses in the literatures of Europe and America from the earliest times to the present. It is a textbook in the broad sense of "a book of texts" rather than in the library of Western literature upon which a wide range of courses might be based and which students might preserve after a particular class is over as a useful part of their personal libraries. Through the successive incarnations of the book, the editors have clung to a quite personal conception of their roles as participants in a conversation with instructors and students who use the book, and they have made choices of texts and presentation accordingly.

- Introduction
- Gilgamesh
- The Old Testament (Hebrew Bible)
- Homer
- Aesop
- Aeschylus
- sophocles
- Euripides
- Aristophanes
- Virgil
,etc.