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.
Jonathan Schell: The Fate of the Earth, The Abolition, The Unconquerable World
Jonathan Schell: The Fate of the Earth, The Abolition, The Unconquerable World
From the Vietnam era to the war on terror, Jonathan Schell (1943–2014) produced a body of work as brave, humane, and consequential as any in the history of American journalism. His legacy rests especially on three books about the threat of nuclear weapons—“the gravest danger of our age”—and the changing nature of modern warfare. On the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Library of America brings together these essential works in one volume for the first time.
What exactly would happen, to people and to the planet, in a nuclear war? With vivid, meticulous, and increasingly harrowing answers to this simple question, The Fate of the Earth (1982) shook the nation and the world to attention. An immediate international best seller, it dramatically illuminated the stakes involved in abstract discussions of “survivability” and the balance of power, prompting fierce criticism from foreign policy hawks, electrifying public consciousness, and leading many readers to question the sanity, and the inevitability, of the status quo. In the wake of its publication, an emboldened nuclear freeze movement would ultimately prevail upon the Reagan administration to alter its rhetoric and to pursue substantive arms reduction talks.
In The Abolition (1984), Schell makes the case that a world without nuclear weapons is achievable. The pursuit of pathways to disarmament, he argues, is neither naive nor utopian but a matter of urgent, practical necessity. Answering critics for whom the “mutually assured destruction” of conventional deterrence theory seems the only realistic option for national security, he proposes concrete steps toward a new international order, a system of “weaponless deterrence” and continually negotiated peace.
Situating the unimaginably destructive forces of the atomic era within a broad history of nation-state conflict, Schell’s magisterial The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (2003) looks forward to the future with a surprising degree of hope. A sweeping, richly detailed analysis of the changing nature of military confrontation, both nuclear and conventional, from the horrors of the twentieth century to the beginnings of the Iraq War, it argues that war itself has atrophied in the nuclear age, indeed it has increasingly become a self-defeating instrument. Meanwhile another power, the “will of the people,” as expressed in popular nonviolent movements, has more and more come to the fore to replace it.