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 Annotated Sun Also Rises
The Annotated Sun Also Rises
100th Anniversary Deluxe Edition: A richly illustrated, full-color, clothbound celebration of the novel that established Hemingway as the preeminent voice of the Lost Generation
Rediscover a literary masterpiece through illuminating commentary that brings its colorful world to vivid life
The Sun Also Rises is the novel that established Hemingway as the preeminent voice of the Lost Generation. Now, rediscover this classic work in a fully illustrated annotated centenary edition that features Library of America’s authoritative corrected text, including an introduction by The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik, some 140 illustrations and photographs, and more than 200 fascinating marginal notes.
Drawn from the authoritative Library of America edition of Hemingway’s writings, this deluxe edition features:
The novel’s original opening two chapters from his typescript, cut at the strong urging of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.
A selection of letters from Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others that concern the composition, editing, and publication of The Sun Also Rises.
Other special features include an introduction by Adam Gopnik and a detailed chronology of Hemingway’s life and career.
Throughout, Hemingway scholar Robert W. Trogdon offers fascinating insight into the novel’s historical and biographical contexts, language, literary allusions, and contemporary references. The large cast of expat figures whom Hemingway fictionalizes in his book, the setting of 1920s Paris and Spain, the San Fermin festival in Pamplona, and, of course, bullfighting, as well as the novel’s rich cultural afterlife, are brought vividly to life as never before.
The new, corrected text of the novel fixes numerous errors, restoring key changes made to his original punctuation—most notably in the novel’s famous final lines—to bring us closer than ever before to the groundbreaking modernist work Hemingway envisioned.