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.
Bruce Catton: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy
Bruce Catton: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy
Library of America restores to print a masterpiece of Civil War history in a deluxe collector’s edition
Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac trilogy is a landmark of historical story-telling, one of the most popular and influential works ever written about the Civil War. And yet for decades it has been unavailable in full. Now, Library of America restores the entirety of this essential classic to print in a deluxe, single-volume collector’s edition, with full-color endpaper maps, and detailed notes and a newly-researched chronology of Catton’s life and career by acclaimed Civil War scholar Gary W. Gallagher.
Mr. Lincoln’s Army, the first book in the trilogy, describes the Army of the Potomac’s formation as the bulwark of the Union war effort as emerging friction between the army’s commanding general George McClellan and the Commander in Chief in Washington reaches a crisis in the wake of the deadly battle at Antietam.
Glory Road recounts the critical months between the autumn of 1862 and midsummer 1863, including the battles at Fredericksburg, Rappahannock and Chancellorsville which set the state for the costly Union victory as Gettysburg. Catton’s retelling of the story of Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg remains unrivalled.
In A Stillness of Appomattox, which won both Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the Army of the Potomac, now under the driving command of Ulyssess S. Grant, finally gains the upper hand against Robert E. Lee, culminating in one of the most vividly drawn accounts of Lee’s final surrender.