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.
Reporting World War II Boxed Set [2 volumes]
Reporting World War II Boxed Set [2 volumes]
Released to mark the 75th anniversary of America’s entrance into World War II, this Library of America two-volume boxed set gathers the acclaimed collection that evokes an extraordinary period in American history—and in American journalism. In two authoritative Library of America volumes, nearly 200 pieces by 80 writers record events from Munich to the birth of the nuclear age. Included are reports by William L. Shirer, Edward R. Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, Margaret Bourke-White, and scores of other of the era’s great journalists, as well as the complete texts of two books: Bill Mauldin’s Up Front, the classic evocation of war from the GI’s point of view, presented with his famous cartoons, and Hiroshima, John Hersey’s compassionate account of the first atomic bombing and its aftermath. Each volume contains a chronology, maps, biographical profiles, notes and a glossary, and 32 pages of photographs.
The advisory board for Reporting World War II includes Samuel Hynes, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature emeritus at Princeton University; Anne Matthews, the first woman to direct the Princeton Writing Program; writer Nancy Caldwell Sorel (1934-2015), and Roger J. Spiller, George C. Marshall Distinguished Professor of Military History (retired) at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Each Library of America series volume is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.