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.
Don DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980s
Don DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980s
A definitive edition of a modern master: three essential works that reveal his incomparable style, dark humor, and uncanny sensitivity to the complexities of “living in dangerous times”
Includes White Noise, now a major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig
This first volume in the Library of America Don DeLillo edition presents three indispensable novels from the 1980s, published here with new prefaces from the author.
The Names (1982) was DeLillo’s breakthrough novel, a book that, as he reflects here, spanned a “broader expanse” than his earlier novels. James Axton, a “risk analyst” tasked with assessing dangers for his corporate clients from terrorism and other forms of political upheaval, uncovers evidence of ritual murders committed by a cult obsessed with ancient languages. The investigations of these crimes yields a profound series of meditations on identity, disconnection, and the nature of language itself.
Part campus satire, part midlife character study, and part fever dream of a hyperreality that has become uncannily familiar, the National Book Award–winning White Noise (1985) creates a terrifying yet wickedly funny portrait of a postmodern America that is still recognizably ours, a world where children chant brand names in their sleep, university professors “read nothing but cereal boxes,” and “you are the sum of your data.”
Three years in the research and writing, Libra (1988) offers a magnificent counter-history of the JFK assassination and a nuanced portrait of the president’s murderer. DeLillo has observed that “the novel, working within history, is also outside it, correcting, clearing up, finding balances and rhythms.” The result is a revelatory new depiction of a defining event in twentieth-century history.
Rounding out the volume are two hard-to-find essays directly related to the novels: “American Blood,” the 1983 Rolling Stone article that was DeLillo’s first effort to grapple with the JFK assassination and the welter of information and speculation the events of the killing and Oswald’s own murder by Jack Ruby; and “Silhouette City,” an assessment of extremist right-wing groups and the troubling presence of neo-Nazism in the United States.