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.
American Noir: 11 Classic Crime Novels of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s
American Noir: 11 Classic Crime Novels of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s
ABOUT AMERICAN NOIR: 11 CLASSIC CRIME NOVELS OF THE 1930S, 40S, & 50S
Collects:
CRIME NOVELS: AMERICAN NOIR OF THE 1930s & 40s
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy
Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson
The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham
I Married a Dead Man by Cornell Woolrich
990 pages • 978-1-883011-46-8 Library of America volume #94
CRIME NOVELS: AMERICAN NOIR OF THE 1950s
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Pick-Up by Charles Willeford
Down There by David Goodis
The Real Cool Killers by Chester Himes
892 pages • 978-1-883011-49-9 Library of America volume #95
This adventurous two-volume collection presents a rich vein of modern American writing too often neglected in mainstream literary histories. Evolving out of the terse and violent hardboiled style of the pulp magazines, noir fiction expanded over the decades into a varied and innovative body of writing. Tapping deep roots in the American literary imagination, the novels in this volume explore themes of crime, guilt, deception, obsessive passion, murder, and the disintegrating psyche. With visionary and often subversive force they create a dark and violent mythology out of the most commonplace elements of modern life. The raw power of their vernacular style has profoundly influenced contemporary American culture and writing.
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.