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.
The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764–1776 (boxed set)
The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764–1776 (boxed set)
For the 250th anniversary of the Stamp Act Crisis, the momentous upheaval that marked the beginning of the American Revolution, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon S. Wood presents a landmark two-volume edition of the political debate that led to independence. A contest of words between Americans and Britons and among the colonists themselves, this debate was carried on largely in inexpensive pamphlets—the galvanizing medium of their day. Those concerned with the American controversy number well over a thousand, and they cover all of the most fundamental concerns of politics—the nature of power, liberty, representation, rights and constitutions, the division of authority between different spheres of government, and sovereignty.
This unprecedented collection gathers in two authoritative Library of America volumes the full texts of thirty-nine of the most fascinating and important of these works, including pamphlets by Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Johnson, and Edmund Burke. Here, in its entirety, is John Dickinson’s justly famous Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, the most significant political tract prior to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, which is also included. Here too is the dramatic transcript of Benjamin Franklin’s testimony before Parliament as it debated repeal of the Stamp Act. By the time the political contest traced here was over, the first British empire was in tatters, and Americans had not only clarified their understanding of the limits of public power, they had prepared the way for their grand experiment in republican self-government and constitution-making.