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: Essential Prose
Gary Snyder: Essential Prose
In one volume, the indispensable prose of our “poet laureate of deep ecology”
Here is Gary Snyder’s own selection of his pathbreaking environmental essays, Buddhist journals, poetic notebooks, and more, including previously uncollected material
Gathered for the first time in a single volume and completing the definitive Library of America edition of his works, here is the essential prose of our “poet laureate of deep ecology”: philosophical essays, travel journals, poetic notebooks, reflections on Buddhism, environmental polemics, memoirs, speeches, interviews, letters, and other writings spanning the entire arc of Snyder’s lauded, seventy-year career. All of Snyder’s published prose collections are represented, omitting only items he feels are repetitious or merely occasional, followed by a selection of from his private journals. The volume includes:
Earth House Hold: describing his life as a fire lookout in Washington State in the early 1950s, and his experiences as an initiate in a Kyoto monastery
“Poetry and the Primitive,” a kind of “ecological survival technique”
“Buddhism and the Coming Revolution,” which imagines the “nation-shaking implications” of spiritual discovery
He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village, charting Snyder’s deep engagements with Native American mythology
Passage Through India: about a six-month pilgrimage with his wife and the poet Allen Ginsberg, culminating in a meeting with the Dalai Lama.
The Practice of the Wild: a classic of American environmental writing in the tradition of Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Annie Dillard
The essays in A Place in Space and Back on the Fire: exploring bioregionalism, forestry practices, sustainability, and the ecosystems of the Sierra Nevada, where Snyder has lived since 1970
The Great Clod: a mediation on the intersections of nature and culture in Asian history and literature.
It’s all here, the profound reflections and inspiring meditations of our greatest living guide to the nature of meaning and the meaning of nature.