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.
Crime Novels of the 1960s boxed 2 volume set
Crime Novels of the 1960s boxed 2 volume set
Library of America presents a deluxe edition of unforgettable crime thrillers of the 1960s
Here in two volumes are 9 timeless novels, including 4 lost classics now restored to print
In the 1960s a number of gifted writers—some at the peak of their careers, others newcomers—reimagined American crime fiction. Here are nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade:
Fredric Brown’s The Murderers (1961), a darkly comic look at a murderous plot hatched on the hip fringes of Hollywood.
Dan J. Marlowe’s terrifying The Name of the Game Is Death (1962), about a nihilistic career criminal on the run
Charles Williams’s Dead Calm (1963), a masterful novel of natural peril and human evil on the high seas.
Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man (1963), an unsettling tale of racism and wrongful accusation in the American Southwest.
Richard Stark’s taut The Score (1964), in which the master thief Parker plots the looting of an entire city with the cool precision of an expert mechanic.
The Fiend (1964), in which Margaret Millar maps the interlocking anxieties of a seemingly tranquil California suburb through the rippling effects of a child’s disappearance.
Ed McBain’s classic police procedural Doll (1965), a breakneck story that mixes murder, drugs, fashion models, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of the 87th Precinct.
Run Man Run (1966), Chester Himes’s nightmarish tale of racism and police violence that follows a desperate young man seeking safe haven in New York City while being hunted by the law.
Patricia Highsmith’s ultimate meta-thriller, The Tremor of Forgery (1969), a novel in which a displaced traveler finds his own personality collapsing as he attempts to write a novel about a man coming undone.
Each volume features an introduction by editor Geoffrey O’Brien (Hardboiled America), newly researched biographies of the writers and helpful notes, and an essay on textual selection.