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: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s (boxed set)
American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s (boxed set)
Modern science fiction came of age in the 1950s, and it was in America that the genre broke most exuberantly free from convention. Moving beyond the pulp magazines, science fiction writers stretched their imaginations at novel length, ushering in an era of stylistic experiment and freewheeling speculation that responded in wildly inventive ways to the challenges and perplexities of an era of global threat and rapid technological change. Long unnoticed or dismissed by the literary establishment, these “outsider” novels are now recognized as American classics.
“Here is literary irony at glorious work: The Library of America has issued a gorgeous two-volume collection of novels, American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, most originally published as cheap paperbacks with cheesy covers. Yet many of the stories here—by Robert Heinlein, Fritz Leiber, Leigh Brackett, and others—now come off as highly crafted material. This anthology contains the spores of sci-fi themes that would blossom, consciously or by chance, in much of contemporary film, TV, and literary fiction. Indeed, 1953’s The Space Merchants, by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth, now reads like a precursor to everything Mad Men addresses about the ad business—just set in the future, and on various planets. Grade: A”—Entertainment Weekly