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 Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns
The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns
Spanning nearly a century, The Great American Sports Page presents essential columns from more than three dozen masters of the press-box craft, unforgettable dispatches from World Series, Super Bowls, and legendary title bouts written with passion, spontaneity, humor, and a gift for the memorable phrase. Read avidly day in and day out by a sports-mad public, these columnists became journalistic celebrities in their home cities, their coverage trusted and savored, their opinions hotly debated. Gathered here in this groundbreaking anthology, writers from Grantland Rice and Jim Murray to Bob Ryan and Sally Jenkins capture some of sports’ most enduring moments and many of its all-time greats—Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan among them—taking the measure of the human richness, complexity, and competitive spirit of sports.
Expertly selected by editor John Schulian, these columns trace the fascinating evolution of American sportswriting as a popular form. Early on, Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon were as apt to crack jokes as to tell their readers the final score. At midcentury the elegance of Red Smith, the “Shakespeare of the Press Box,” and the streetwise verbal jabs of Jimmy Cannon expressed complimentary ways of connecting with a wide readership. By the 1960s journalistic pioneers like Larry Merchant went behind the scenes and forged new, less deferential ways of writing about athletes, owners, and fans. Women, belatedly and often against persistent opposition, entered the press corps during an era when newspapers began to grant their star columnists more space and greater freedom to take on complicated, sometimes uncomfortable stories. The sports page became home not just to celebrations of achievement but also to startling candor about the grittier aspects of the games we love.
The editor of the volume, John Schulian, who was a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Daily News, is a recipient of the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing. He edited the Library of America anthologies Football: Great Writing about the National Sport and, with George Kimball, At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing; and is the author, most recently, of the novel A Better Goodbye.
Charles P. Pierce, who had provided a foreword to the collection, has been a working journalist since 1976. He is a regular contributor to Esquire and the author of four books, including Sports Guy.