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.
All James Baldwin titles and Ursula K. Le Guin titles are on the respective pages of the authors.
A.J. Leibling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings
A.J. Leibling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings
One of the most gifted American journalists of the twentieth century, A. J. Liebling learned his craft as a newspaper reporter before joining The New Yorker in 1935. This volume collects five books that demonstrate his extraordinary vitality and versatility as a writer.
Named the best sports book of all time by Sports Illustrated in 2002, The Sweet Science (1956) offers a lively and idiosyncratic portrait of boxing in the early 1950s that encompasses boastful managers, veteran trainers, wily cornermen, and the fighters themselves: Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Archie Moore, “a virtuoso of anachronistic perfection.” No one has captured the fierce artistry of the ring like Liebling. “A boxer,” he observed, “like a writer, must stand alone.” A classic of reporting, The Earl of Louisiana (1961) is a vivid account of Governor Earl Long’s bid for reelection after his release from a mental asylum in 1959—and an insightful look at Southern politics during the civil rights era.
The Jollity Building (1962) collects hilarious stories about Manhattan cigar-store owners, night-club promoters, and the scheming “Telephone Booth Indians” of Broadway, as well as a profile of “The Honest Rainmaker,” the racing columnist and confidence man extraordinaire Colonel John R. Stingo. An unabashed celebration of the pleasures of unrestrained eating, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962) is a richly evocative memoir of Liebling’s lifelong love for Paris and French food and wine. The Press (1964) brings together the best of Liebling’s influential “Wayward Press” pieces, in which he perceptively examined the flaws of American journalism and presciently warned of the dangers of consolidated media ownership. “Freedom of the press,” he wrote, “is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.