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 Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground
The Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground
In this dazzling collection, Glenn O’Brien provides a kaleidoscopic guided tour through the subterranean scenes and tribes that gave birth to cool: the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of the racially and sexually excluded, of outlaws and drug users creating their own dissident networks. Whether labeled Bop or Beat or Punk, these outsider voices would merge and recombine in surprising ways, changing America forever.
To read The Cool School is to experience the energies of that vortex. Drawing on memoirs, poems, novels, comedy routines, letters, essays, and song lyrics, O’Brien creates an unparalleled literary mixtape spanning decades of tumultuous and exuberant change. In the Forties, the era when the strands of hip begin to converge, Miles Davis joins Charlie Parker in a revolutionary musical collaboration that also signals a revolution in attitude; Henry Miller, back from Paris, dissects the grotesque hypocrisies of a Hollywood dinner party; and Beat avatar Neal Cassady writes to Jack Kerouac about his life on the road.
The Fifties sees the flowering of the Beats, in such voices as Kerouac, Diane di Prima, and Gregory Corso; Chandler Brossard and Terry Southern take sharp and satirical looks at the burgeoning hipster culture; Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl create a new outspoken form of stand-up comedy; and comedy maverick Del Close provides a glossary of “How to Talk Hip.” The cultural maelstrom of the Sixties and Seventies finds expression in the apocalyptic cut-ups of William S. Burroughs, the free-form fictions of Ishmael Reed and Richard Brautigan, and Andy Warhol’s reel-to-reel transcription of a speed-fueled night world. Bob Dylan recreates the Village folk scene, Ed Sanders celebrates poetic orgies, and Hunter S. Thompson plunges into the twisted heart of Las Vegas.
The Cool School tracks as well the succeeding generations of writers who have extended the terrain of their underground predecessors and continue to push against the enticements of mainstream America, including such contemporaries as Nick Tosches, Iris Owens, Lynne Tillman, Gary Indiana, and Eric Bogosian—all the way to a brilliant coda provided by the late George Carlin.
This one-of-a-kind anthology—“a possible textbook for Outlier Lit 101” in Glenn O’Brien’s words—recreates an unforgettable era in all its hallucinatory splendor: transgressive, raucous, unruly, harrowing, and often subversively hilarious.
Glenn O’Brien, editor, is the author of Soapbox, Human Nature (dub version), and How To Be A Man. A former editor at Interview, Rolling Stone, Spin, and High Times, he writes frequently on contemporary art, supplied the lead catalog essay to the Whitney Museum exhibition “Beat Culture and the New America: 1950–65,” and is a contributing editor at Ten, L’Officiel Hommes, and GQ, where he writes the “Style Guy” column.
This special publication features full-cloth binding, acid-free paper, and a unique design with specifications differing from those of Library of America series titles.