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.
Philip K. Dick: VALIS & Later Novels
Philip K. Dick: VALIS & Later Novels
This volume, the third in The Library of America gathering the novels of Philip K. Dick —following Four Novels of the 1960s and Five Novels of the 1960s and 70s—brings together four books from the later phase of Dick’s career, when religious revelation, always an element of his fiction, became a dominant and irresistible theme. Here, Dick moves beyond the constraints of generic science fiction, producing the works responsible for his growing reputation as an irreplaceable American visionary.
The collection opens with A Maze of Death (1970), a darkly speculative thriller that foreshadows Dick’s final novels. Mysteriously summoned to the planet Delmak-O, a motley group of colonists attempts to survive together in a hostile new world. Along the way, they are forced to confront not only one another, but also the nature of the God—or “Mentufacturer”—who determines their destiny.
Dick’s life was changed utterly by a psychic break he later referred to as “the events of 2-3-74”: his sense of everyday reality fell away, and he experienced what he came to believe was a mystical revelation. The writings of the remainder of his career attempt in various ways to understand and explain this visionary experience.
In VALIS (1981)—at times close to a memoir of what he went through—he creates a harrowing self-portrait of a man confronting a “Vast Active Living Intelligence System,” torn between conflicting interpretations of what might be gnostic illumination or mental collapse. In The Divine Invasion (1981), the life of a solitary off-world colonist is hijacked by a local alien, who turns out to be the Yahweh of Judeo-Christian tradition. Returning to Earth with his pregnant wife in tow, Dick’s hapless Herb Asher finds himself thrust into the middle of an apocalyptic war between Good and Evil. Conceived as a sequel to VALIS, the novel is a powerful exploration of divine revelation and its human consequences.
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), Dick’s last novel, is by turns a theological mystery story, a roman à clef, and a starkly disillusioned portrait of contemporary California life. Based loosely on the career of Bishop James Pike, Dick’s close friend and a kindred spirit, the novel’s title character gives up his comfortable place in the church hierarchy in a tragic quest for enlightenment. Seeking an ultimate and shocking truth behind the sacred texts of his religion, he leaves behind a wounded world—a world that his daughter-in-law, one of Dick’s most fondly delineated characters, must begin to piece together