Gateway to the Great Books is a 10-volume collection of classic fiction and nonfiction literature edited by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, with Clifton Fadiman credited as associate editor, that was published by Encyclopædia Britannica in 1963.

The set included selections of short stories, plays, essays, letters, and extracts from longer works by more than one hundred authors.

A number of authors in the Great Books set – such as Plutarch, Epictetus, Tacitus, Dante, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Francis Bacon, Charles Darwin and William James – were also represented by shorter works in the Gateway volumes.

Indeed, many writers in the Gateway set were eventually "promoted" to the second edition (1990) of the Great Books, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Molière, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein and John Dewey.

In another departure from the Great Books series, the set included black-and-white drawings of most of the authors by Chicago portraitist Fred Steffen, who also wrote brief notes describing the illustrations.