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.
John O'Hara: Four Novels of the 1930s
John O'Hara: Four Novels of the 1930s
Already a frequent contributor of well-crafted stories to The New Yorker when he turned to the larger canvas of the novel, John O’Hara wrote with unusual acuity about the power of status and class in American life. His reputation as a novelist rests largely on four extraordinary books published from 1934 to 1940. These early novels, like those of his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, dramatize the longings and dashed hopes of a generation seduced and betrayed by the glittering temptations of the modern age. Richly detailed and often strikingly contemporary in their themes, they are deeply rooted in the real world, in “society,” exposing its unspoken rules—and the costs of their transgression—with a still-bracing clarity. O’Hara, observes Fran Lebowitz is “the real Fitzgerald,” the Jazz Age’s truest, most unblinking literary chronicler.
This Library of America volume opens with Appointment in Samarra (1934), an intense and gripping work of social portraiture that Time magazine in 2011 named one of the top 100 novels written in English since 1923. The life of the car dealer Julian English falls apart in a matter of days after he throws a drink in another man’s face at the country club in O’Hara’s fictional town of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania. This seemingly trivial act triggers a humiliating chain of events, which plays out as tragedy in one of the most impressive debut novels in American literature.
Drawn from the notorious headline-grabbing case of a drowned socialite with whom O’Hara was acquainted, Butterfield 8 (1935) opens a door onto the speakeasy world of a hedonistic Manhattan. The central character, Gloria Wandrous, whose frank portrayal scandalized many of the book’s early readers, is revealed to have been the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of a socially prominent older man when she was an adolescent. (Faber and Faber, which had released Appointment in Samarra in England, would refuse to publish Butterfield 8 because of its candid sexual content.) Memorably, if loosely, adapted by Hollywood in 1960, in the film that earned Elizabeth Taylor her first Academy Award, O’Hara’s second novel retains its power to shock and surprise.
The long-out-of-print Hope of Heaven (1938), one of O’Hara’s favorites among his works, shifts the scene to Los Angeles to tell the tale of a relationship between Peggy Henderson, a young leftist working at a bookstore, and O’Hara’s alter ego Jim Malloy, a world-weary screenwriter. And in Pal Joey (1940), a novel in the form of fourteen interconnected stories and the basis for the enduring Rodgers & Hart musical, O’Hara created perhaps his most memorable character, a louche nightclub emcee whose tough-guy talk highlights O’Hara’s mastery of American vernacular. As Dorothy Parker once remarked, “O’Hara’s eyes and ears have been spared nothing.”