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.
Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s
Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s
The Library of America and editor Sarah Weinman redefine the classic era of American crime fiction with a landmark collection of eight brilliant novels by the female pioneers of the genre, the women who paved the way for Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and Lisa Scottoline.
Though women crime and suspense writers dominate today's best seller lists, the extraordinary creations of the mid-century female pioneers of the genre are largely unknown. Their work, influential in its day and still vibrant and extraordinarily riveting, is long overdue for rediscovery. Now The Library of America makes these classic books available in a deluxe two-volume collector's edition.
From the 1940s, here are Vera Caspary's famous career girl mystery Laura; Helen Eustis's intricate campus thriller The Horizontal Man; Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place, the terrifyingly intimate portrait of a serial killer; and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall, in which a wife in wartime is forced to take extreme measures when her family is threatened.
The 1950s volume includes Charlotte Armstrong's Mischief, the nightmarish drama of a child entrusted to a psychotic babysitter; Patricia Highsmith's brilliant The Blunderer, which tracks the perverse parallel lives of two men driven toward murder; Margaret Millar's Beast in View, a relentless study in madness; and Dolores Hitchens's Fools' Gold, a hard-edged tale of robbery and redemption.
Boxed set contains:
Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s (Library of America #268)
Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s (Library of America #269)