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.
Frances Hodgson Burnett Collection : The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy
Frances Hodgson Burnett Collection : The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Little Lord Fauntleroy
“Everything ’s a story. You are a story—I am a story.” From the people and places around her, Frances Hodgson Burnett, who moved to America from England at age fifteen, found stories enough for over forty novels and plays—including the three still-beloved classics of children’s literature presented in this Library of America volume. Restoring the novels to their original, unabridged American texts, this authoritative edition features over forty illustrations carefully reproduced from the first editions, twenty of them printed in full color.
In Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), seven-year-old Cedric Errol is growing up in New York City with his young widowed mother when he unexpectedly learns that the grandfather he has never met is an English earl. The Earl wants to give his grandson an education in power and privilege, but he does not suspect that the innocent little American may have more to teach.
Ten-year-old Sara Crewe in A Little Princess (1905) is sent by her father to a London boarding school, whose headmistress grudgingly favors the little girl while secretly loathing her intelligence and independence. When Sara’s once-wealthy father dies penniless, the headmistress’s behavior changes immediately. Sara goes from star pupil to hungry maid in the attic, but she remains cheerful by imagining that she is secretly a princess.
And in The Secret Garden (1911), Mary Lennox is a spoiled child who is sent to her neglectful uncle’s manor in Yorkshire, England, after her parents’ deaths, where she discovers an abandoned walled garden. Mary becomes fascinated by the prospect of restoring the garden—and in the process stumbles upon the house’s other secret, which changes both her and her uncle’s lives for the better.
The volume includes all the original illustrations by Reginald B. Birch, Ethel Franklin Betts, and Maria Louise Kirk, as well as three rare stories in which the author describes the inspirations behind the books: “How Fauntleroy Occurred, and a Very Real Boy Became an Ideal One,” a memoir of Burnett’s son, Vivian, the author’s inspiration for Fauntleroy; “Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s,” the short story that was the basis for the stage play and novel A Little Princess; and “My Robin,” Burnett’s memoir of an English robin that inspired the “robin” episodes of The Secret Garden.
Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, editor, is Paul Murray Kendall Professor of Biography and Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. She is the author of Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden (2004).