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.
Gary Snyder: Collected Poems
Gary Snyder: Collected Poems
The first collected edition of an essential, Pulitzer Prize-winning Beat poet, the indispensable voice whose deep ecological vision and Buddhist spirituality grows more relevant with each passing decade
Gary Snyder is one of America’s indispensable poets, the “Thoreau of the Beat Generation” and our “laureate of Deep Ecology.” Now, for the first time, all of Snyder’s poetry is gathered in a single, authoritative Library of America volume.
Here are all of Snyder’s published books of poetry spanning a career of almost seventy years. Early collections such as Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Myths & Texts, and The Back Country reflect his hardscrabble rural upbringing in the Pacific Northwest; his life as a logger, fire-lookout, freighter crewman, carpenter, and trail-blazer; his lifelong interest in Native American oral literatures; and his pioneering studies of Zen Buddhism.
In Turtle Island and Axe Handles––the former a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and the latter the American Book Award in 1984––he explores countercultural alternatives to environmental and spiritual decline and envisioning new forms of harmony with nature.
His epic Mountains and Rivers Without End, a poem four decades in the making and regarded by many as his masterwork, is followed by Danger on Peaks, and the intimate, preternaturally candid late lyrics of This Present Moment, which meditate on his life as a father, husband, friend, neighbor, and homesteader in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada, where he has lived since 1971.
The volume concludes with a generous selection, made by Snyder himself, of previously uncollected poems from little magazines and broadsides; translations from East Asian literatures; and drafts and fragments never before published. Also included are explanatory notes, a detailed chronology of Snyder’s life, and an essay on textual selection.