During World War II, the university sent three books to each of the 1,300 students who were serving in the Armed Forces. Below is the list of the books compiled by faculty and administrators and sent to the young Princetonians from which to choose.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams.

American Short Stories of the 19th Century.

Augustine, Saint. Confessions.

Bierce, Ambrose. In the Midst of Life.

Borrow, George. Lavengro.

Buchan, John. Thirty-Nine Steps.

Bunyan, John The Pilgrim's Progress.

Carroll, Lewis. Collected Stories.

Cellini, Benvenuto. Autobiography.

Cervantes. Don Quixote.

Charnwood, Lord. Abraham Lincoln.

Collins, Willkie. The Moonstone.

Comprehensive Anthology of American War.

Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim.

Cummings, E.E. The Enormous Room.

Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species.

Dickens, Charles. Pickwick Papers.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodo. Crime and Punishment.

Dumas, Alexandre. The Three Musketeers.

Eddington, Sir Arthur. The Nature of the Physical World.

Edelman, Maurice. How Russia Prepared.

Elizabethan Playwrights.

English Verse.

Forster, E.M. A Passage to India.

Fourteen Great Detective Stories.

France, Anatole. Penguin Island.

Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography.

Great Modern Short Stories

Gregory, J.W. The Making of the Earth.

Hemingway, Ernest. Farewell to Arms.

Homer. The Odyssey.

Hudson, W.H. The Purple Land.

Hugo, Victor. Toilers of the Sea.

Huxley, Thomas. Man's Place in Nature, and Other Essays.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Keith, Sir Arthur. Man: A History of the Human Body.

Lardner, Ring. Collected Short Stories.

Lewis, Sinclair. Arrowsmith.

Maugham, W. Somerset. Of Human Bondage.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick.

Montaigne. Essays.

Nevins, Allan and Commager, H.S. Pocket History of the U.S.

Nordhoff, C.B. and Hall, J.N. Mutiny of the Bounty.

Parkman, Francis. The Conspiracy of Pontiac.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensees and The Provincial Letters.

Pearson, Karl. The Grammar of Science.

Pevsner, Nikolaus. An Outline of European Architecture.

Plato. The Philosophy of Plato.

Pocket Book of Verse.

Shakespeare. Complete Works.

Sophocles. The Seven Plays.

Steinbeck, John. Tortilla Flat.

Stendhal. The Red and the Black.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island and Kidnapped.

Strachey, Lytton. Eminent Victorians.

Temple, William. Christianity and the Social Order.

Thackeray, William Makepeace. Henry Esmond.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.

Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War.

Tolstoy, Count Leo. Anna Karenina and War and Peace.

Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Sons.

Whitehead, A.N. An Introduction to Mathematics.

Wollman, John. The Journal and Other Papers.