THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher and educational outreach entity, was founded in 1979 with grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Although its mission was a well-grounded and no-nonsense business approach to publishing, it essentially was fulfilling a long-held dream by the great critic Edmund Wilson and others. The United States of America, they felt, ought to have a publications series of high standards and high quality of production for its national literature, and it ought to reflect the diversity and traditions of all of its writing.
The first books appeared in 1982, when I first began selling new books in an independent book store here in Carlisle. (The founding of Whistlestop Bookshop was three years away.) I still have my copies of Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. I won’t tell you how many of the 300+ to date I have acquired, but I am happy to say I never regretted one. The books are remarkably beautiful and efficient and scholarly and finely-made. They are sometimes the only respectable edition available (beware of photo-offset print-on-demand editions!). The accompanying chronologies and notes and textual discussions of every volume are a joy and an education. I cannot praise them too highly.
This listing is what I carry in the store. If you would like other volumes, send me an e-mail or call the store. Enjoy browsing, buying, and owning landmark definitive editions of great writers or great American subjects.
The listings are alphabetical by author except for new or recent anthologies at the top. Older anthologies are at the bottom of the page.
Booth Tarkington: Novels and Stories
Booth Tarkington: Novels and Stories
In his greatest fiction Booth Tarkington wrote about the fragility of status in America’s ruthlessly dynamic society with keen realism and striking psychological insight. Here in one volume, edited by novelist and critic Thomas Mallon, are Tarkington’s best and most enduring works, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams.
A popular and critical triumph in its day and the inspiration for Orson Welles’s classic 1942 film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) is a brilliant family saga and a powerful dramatization of the vast social changes that swept America during the Gilded Age and its aftermath. Having amassed a fortune in the financial panic of 1873, Major Amberson, the family patriarch, established a palatial estate, an ostentatious monument to stability and permanence, in a city modeled closely on Tarkington’s native Indianapolis. But with the advent of new fortunes built on new technologies, especially the automobile, the family’s stature is suddenly imperiled, and the Major’s grandson George Minafer, a spoiled child and an equally insufferable young man, undergoes a “come-upance” of tragicomic proportion.
The protagonist of Alice Adams (1921), which Tarkington called his “most actual and life-like work,” is one of the great heroines of American literature. Coming of age in a small midwestern town in the wake of World War I, Alice Adams is the emotional heart of her lower-middle-class family, torn between her mother’s driving social ambitions and her father’s good-natured apathy. When she catches the eye of a promising young gentleman, Alice tries to conceal the reality of her family’s straitened situation, leading her father to take a desperate act to ensure his daughter’s happiness. Relying on skills honed during his long career writing for the stage, Tarkington crafts unforgettably poignant scenes—a dance, a catastrophic dinner party—that dramatize the inner anguish of a complex and sensitive young woman who can see her prospects dwindling before her eyes
Complementing these novels is the story collection In the Arena: Stories of Political Life (1905), a work borne of Tarkington’s brief but, for him, seminal career as an Indiana state representative. President Theodore Roosevelt, author of the famous 1910 speech, “The Man in the Arena,” so admired these stories that he invited Tarkington to lunch at the White House. Introducing the collection, whose tales deal with immigration, corruption, and other political problems still very much with us, Tarkington makes a plea for active engagement by citizens, even or especially when our democratic institutions are less than perfect: “When wrong things are going on and all the good men understand them, that is all that is needed. The wrong things stop going on.”
Thomas Mallon, editor, is the author of ten novels, including Landfall, Watergate, and Finale, and seven books of nonfiction. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review.