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.
Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Outerbridge Reach
Robert Stone: Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise, Outerbridge Reach
“I love America, so it enrages me—if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be so angry, nor would I make America my subject.” Fueled by this incandescent fury, Robert Stone’s fiction combined the taut storytelling of thrillers with writing of often hallucinatory intensity, earning the praise of such novelists as Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jonathan Lethem. This volume brings together for the first time three of his greatest novels, masterpieces of physical and moral extremity that brilliantly capture the desperate underside of American life in the 1970s and 80s.
In Dog Soldiers (1974) a wartime scheme to smuggle three kilos of heroin from Saigon to California draws in John Converse, a disillusioned and fearful journalist no longer bound by “moral objections”; Marge, his disaffected, opiate-addicted wife; and his friend Ray Hicks, a former marine and student of Zen who lives by his own warrior code. Their plot is overtaken by Antheil, a corrupt drug “regulatory agent,” setting in motion a deadly chase from Berkeley to Los Angeles and across the Southwest. Through a series of corrosive and often nightmarish encounters with tabloid hacks, psychopathic criminals, counterculture predators, Hollywood poseurs, and failed cult leaders, Stone explores the wreckage left behind by the failed hopes of the 1960s. A feverish novel of suspense, Dog Soldiers ranks alongside the work of Michael Herr and Tim O’Brien as an impassioned reckoning with how the Vietnam War changed America.
A richly layered political thriller set in Central America, A Flag for Sunrise (1981) depicts a left-wing uprising in the fictitious republic of Tecan and its impact on four North Americans: Father Egan, an alcoholic priest burdened by dreadful secrets; Sister Justin Feeney, an idealistic nun drawn to the revolutionary cause; Frank Holliwell, a visiting anthropologist with CIA connections; and Pablo Tabor, a Coast Guard deserter driven by rage and amphetamines. Through their actions, and those of assorted revolutionaries, gun runners, freelance spies, murderous fanatics, compromised intellectuals, and sadistic policemen, Stone explores the costs of religious and political faith in a dark and terrifying universe.
In Outerbridge Reach (1992) Owen Browne, a yacht salesman who served in Vietnam, turns away from the superficiality of his comfortable life in 1980s America to test his courage and resolve in a solo round-the-world boat race. His decision draws the attention of Ron Strickland, a documentary filmmaker intent on exposing the hidden truth about his subject, and strains the loyalties of his wife, Anne. Alone in the South Atlantic, Browne, facing the outward challenges of the sea and the inner perils of isolation and doubt, will discover his true capacity for both deception and enlightenment.
Madison Smartt Bell is professor of English at Goucher College and the author of fifteen novels, including his acclaimed Haitian Revolution trilogy, three collections of short stories, and five works of nonfiction. He is the author of Child of Light: A Biography of Robert Stone (2020) and the editor of The Eye You See With (2020), a selection of Stone’s nonfiction writing.
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.