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.
Kurt Vonnegut Novels 1976 - 1985
Kurt Vonnegut Novels 1976 - 1985
By 1976, the year that Kurt Vonnegut published his eighth novel, Slapstick, it was apparent that the author of Slaughterhouse-Five was more than a favorite of the sixties’ counterculture, more than an acidly witty public personality and a gadfly of the military-industrial complex—more, even, than one of America’s most widely read living writers. Out of the sweeping spotlight of popular success emerged the enduring Vonnegut: a satiric fabulist to rival Mark Twain, a comic storyteller whose books are as morally serious as they are imaginative and amusing.
With the four novels collected here Vonnegut was recognized as an original American classic, the architect of an oeuvre built to last, a body of work tightly joined and cleanly made, designed along lines entirely his own. This third volume in the Library of America’s definitive edition of his fiction opens with Slapstick, the memoirs of Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain, a hundred-year-old former president of the United States and the promulgator of an ingenious national program to stamp out “American loneliness.” By giving every citizen a new middle name, President Swain, himself assigned to the computer-generated Daffodil clan, also gives them a numberless network of concerned “relatives”—a taste of the familial bliss that Swain once enjoyed with his twin sister, Eliza, his soulmate and missing half, now dead beneath an avalanche on Mars.
Jailbird (1979) is a political memoir of a less fantastic sort, chronicling the misadventures of Walter F. Starbuck, a once-idealistic government functionary who, through no wrongdoing of his own, has become embroiled in every major national scandal from Sacco and Vanzetti to Watergate. Deadeye Dick (1982) is the story of a talentless playwright’s lifelong struggle to atone for the accidental crimes of his youth, the foolishness of his father, and the sins of his country. And in Galápagos (1985), a favorite of the author’s among his books, a ghost from the future reveals how and why a million years ago—during the global ecological disaster of 1986—humankind abandoned the land for the sea and embarked upon an unlikely evolution. The volume is rounded out with an assortment of Vonnegut rarities: speeches, essays, and commentary that touch upon the themes and particulars of these novels.
Sidney Offit, editor, has written novels, books for young readers, and memoirs including, most recently, Friends, Writers, and Other Countrymen. He was senior editor of Intellectual Digest, book editor of Politics Today, and contributing editor of Baseball Magazine. He wrote the foreword to Look at the Birdie, a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s unpublished short fiction.
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.