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 Science Fiction Box Set: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s
American Science Fiction Box Set: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s
The tumultuous 1960s was a watershed decade for American science fiction. While acknowledged masters from the genre’s golden age reached the height of their powers, a new wave of brilliant young voices emerged, upending the genre’s pulp conventions with newfound literary sophistication. Amid calls for civil rights and countercultural revolution, female, nonwhite, and other outsider authors broke into the ranks of SF writers, introducing provocative new protagonists and themes.
In the first volume, editor Gary K. Wolfe gathers four trailblazing novels that reveal the full range of the decade’s creative intensities. In The High Crusade (1960), Poul Anderson celebrates the space operas of the pulp era, but with a madcap twist: when technologically advanced aliens touch down among the seeming primitives of medieval England, they find they have met their match. Clifford D. Simak’s Hugo Award–winning Way Station (1963) follows the progress of an unassuming Civil War veteran whose rural Wisconsin homestead has, unbeknownst to his neighbors, become an unlikely nexus of intergalactic battle.
Daniel Keyes’s much-loved best seller Flowers for Algernon (1966) imagines a near-future in which intelligence can be enhanced artificially—but Keyes downplays the speculative and technical possibilities of his premise in favor of intimate character study, taking the SF novel in daring new directions. In the postapocalyptic thriller This Immortal (1966)—published here under the author’s preferred title . . . And Call Me Conrad—Roger Zelazny weaves a skein of ancient myth and legend into his tale of mutant humans and blue aliens with the allusive daring and stylistic virtuosity that exemplify the New Wave at its best.
The second volume showcases four of the best novels from the final years of the decade. In R. A. Lafferty’s utterly idiosyncratic and uncategorizable Past Master (1968), Renaissance philosopher Thomas More is summoned to Golden Astrobe in the year 2535: Can he save the planet’s troubled utopia from its soulless technological perfection and ensure the survival of the faith? Joanna Russ introduces one of SF’s first and most engaging female adventurers in her taut and edgy debut novel Picnic on Paradise (1968): the tough, sardonic, unforgettable Alyx, an ancient Phoenician mercenary teleported into the future to serve as guide and bodyguard for a band of stranded space tourists.
The first African American writer to make a name for himself in the genre, Samuel R. Delany was hailed as “the best science-fiction writer in the world” on the basis of Nova (1968), a white-hot, fast-paced, protocyberpunk interstellar adventure featuring a misfit crew on a high-stakes quest. Stumbling on a mysterious ancient text among his father’s belongings, the son of a master woodcarver uncovers the key to revolutionary change in Jack Vance’s Emphyrio (1969), a marvel of craftsmanship and visionary world-building set on remote, feudal, theocratic Halma.
Gary K. Wolfe, editor, is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Roosevelt University and the author, most recently, of Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature and Sightings: Reviews 2002–2006. He writes regular review columns for Locus magazine and the Chicago Tribune, and co-hosts with Jonathan Strahan the Hugo-nominated Coode Street Podcast.