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.
May Swenson: Collected Poems
May Swenson: Collected Poems
Propelled by, in her words, “a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming,” May Swenson’s poetry is a free-ranging exploration of outer and inner worlds, of nature and the human mind. Sensuous abundance, imaginative daring, and unfailing precision are the abiding characteristics of her work. Its great scope is an index of her boundless curiosity and her delight in close observation. Fellow writers have praised her “holy exactitude” (Cynthia Ozick) and “serious fun” (Mona Van Duyn). James Merrill asked: “without her to write them, who could have imagined these poems?”
In celebration of the centenary of May Swenson’s birth, The Library of America presents the first comprehensive edition of her work, gathering all of the poems she published in the collections Another Animal (1954), A Cage of Spines (1958), To Mix with Time (1963), Half Sun Half Sleep (1967), Iconographs (1970), New & Selected Things Taking Place (1978), and In Other Words (1987), as well as an extensive selection of previously uncollected work.
Swenson’s work encompasses nature poems revealing the author’s profound absorption in wildlife; love poems celebrating beauty and passion; and poems recording her travels to the American southwest, Florida, France, and Italy, as well as her residence in New York City and Sea Cliff, Long Island. She ranged effortlessly over subjects that included—to cite only a few instances—baseball, wave motion, the DNA molecule, bronco busting, James Bond movies, and the first walk on the moon. Her attentiveness to natural forms and volatilities was matched by her explorations of unusual juxtapositions and jarringly unexpected perspectives, as well as by the genius for formal invention on display in her famous shaped poems.