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.
Dashiell Hammett: The Library of America Edition [2 vols, slipcased]
Dashiell Hammett: The Library of America Edition [2 vols, slipcased]
Here, for the first time in a deluxe collector’s box, is the most comprehensive edition of the hard-boiled crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett ever published. Complete Novels, the first of two volumes gathered here, presents the five groundbreaking books whose gritty, lean prose won admiration from such contemporaries as Stein, Hemingway, and Faulkner: Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man.
In the stories he wrote for Black Mask and other pulp magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, Hammett used the vernacular adventure tale to register the jarring textures and revved-up cadences of modern America. Crime Stories & Other Writings presents 24 of these classic tales, along with revealing essays and an early, unfinished version of his novel The Thin Man. The texts, reprinted here for the first time, are those that appeared originally in the pulps, without the revisions introduced by later editors.
Steven Marcus, volume editor, is George Delacorte Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, at Columbia University. A distinguished cultural historian and literary critic, he is the author of many books, including The Other Victorians and Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class. He is also the editor of the historic collection of Hammett stories, The Continental Op.
Each Library of America series volume is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.