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.
Breslin: Essential Writings
Breslin: Essential Writings
Rediscover the golden age of journalism, when columns were events, through this collection of more than 70 pieces by a master stylist and larger-than-life character on the New York and national scene from JFK to Trump
Plus, on its 50th anniversary, revisit the Watergate summer in How the Good Guys Finally Won, an unforgettable portrait of the Congressional leaders who took down a rogue president
“He opened us up to a world of possibilities. What we did with them was our concern. He had his own work to do. No one ever did it better.”
—John Schulian
Across a career spanning six decades, from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11, Jimmy Breslin was the greatest newspaper columnist of his era.
The 72 columns selected here by editor Dan Barry, more than half of which have not been reprinted since initial publication, reveal Breslin at his best, addressing stories of national and global importance but more often uncovering tales of ordinary New Yorkers, by turns tragic or absurd but always gripping to read. Gathered here are the highlights of his consummate deadline artistry: his celebrated interview with the man who dug the grave for John F. Kennedy, his coverage of the assassination of Malcolm X, his dispatches from the South at the height of the Civil Rights movement and from Vietnam, accounts of his involvement with the “Son of Sam” case as the serial killer who terrorized New York City in 1977, his story about John Lennon’s murder in 1980, his award-winning series about the AIDS crisis in 1986, and his disgusted glimpse of Donald Trump conning the press corps during a book promotion in 1990.
These masterful columns are joined by two of Breslin’s books: How the Good Guys Finally Won (1976), one of the best accounts of the Watergate scandal, centered on House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill and his allies, whose success in forcing Richard Nixon for office scored an unlikely victory for U.S. democracy; and The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez (2002), the story of an immigrant laborer killed at a construction site in Brooklyn and of the malfeasance among developers, city officials, and others that enabled the accident to happen.
As quintessentially a New York figure as the memorable urban characters he portrayed, Breslin nonetheless transcended the confines of his local audience and became a national celebrity, writing with a novelist’s awareness of the telling detail that reveals the depth of a person’s, and a people’s, character.
“Breslin touched nearly all the bases of New York newspapering … He now joins the handful of journalists—among them, A.J. Liebling—in the august roster of authors collected by the Library of America. The magnificent journalism Breslin produced in his long career amounts to a pocket history of our times—high and low—told with energetic reporting and an unmistakable verve.” —The Wall Street Journal