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.
Jean Stafford: Complete Novels
Jean Stafford: Complete Novels
Twenty-nine-year-old Jean Stafford made a bold entrance onto the American literary scene in 1944 when her first novel, Boston Adventure, became a surprise best seller, its style inviting comparisons to James and Proust. She followed this remarkable debut with two more acclaimed novels, The Mountain Lion (1947) and The Catherine Wheel (1952). All three works are gathered here for the first time in a single volume, allowing readers to rediscover the extraordinary talent of this midcentury master of precise prose and acute psychological insight.
Sonia Marburg, the protagonist of Boston Adventure, grows up in the North Shore village of Chichester, the daughter of a choleric marriage between immigrant parents who remain outsiders in America. Seeking to escape the material and spiritual impoverishment of her childhood, Sonia looks across the bay at the State House dome in Boston for the promise of a richer life. Her dreams seem to find fulfillment when she secures a position as secretary-companion to Miss Lucy Pride, a summer guest at the hotel where Sonia cleans rooms, and moves into Miss Pride’s Beacon Hill home. Boston Adventure is a perceptive satire of upper-class Boston society and a quicksilver portrait of a young woman trying to navigate a singular transit between very different worlds.
“Ralph was ten and Molly was eight when they had scarlet fever.” In a colloquial voice evocative of the American West, The Mountain Lion is the haunting story of Ralph and Molly Fawcett and their troubled passage from childhood. Sickly, self-conscious, and eerily precocious, brother and sister live on a walnut farm in southern California, where, outsiders at school and at home, they share an intimate, private world. That world is threatened when they begin spending summers on the Colorado ranch of their Uncle Claude. There Ralph embraces the rugged ideal of Western manhood, while Molly withdraws into uneasy solitude. As their childhood bond frays, the story moves inexorably toward a devastating conclusion.
Set in a summer house in coastal Maine, The Catherine Wheel tells of the relationship between Andrew Shipley, a lonely twelve-year-old boy angry that his best friend has abandoned him, and his adored older cousin Katharine Congreve, a wealthy woman still bitter that Andrew’s father married her cousin instead of her. Over the course of a long summer, as Andrew and Katharine become increasingly obsessed by their secret desires for revenge, the veneer of genteel society begins to crack. In lyrical prose at once sharp-witted and mournful, Stafford spins out the tragic consequences of jealousy, resentment, and spiritual isolation.