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's Liberation! Feminist Writings That Inspired a Revolution & Still Can
Women's Liberation! Feminist Writings That Inspired a Revolution & Still Can
When Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, the book exploded into women’s consciousness. Before the decade was out, what had begun as a campaign for women’s civil rights transformed into a diverse and revolutionary movement for freedom and social justice that challenged many aspects of everyday life long accepted as fixed: work, birth control and abortion, childcare and housework, gender, class, and race, art and literature, sexuality and identity, rape and domestic violence, sexual harassment, pornography, and more. This was the women’s liberation movement, and writing—powerful, personal, and prophetic—was its beating heart.
Fifty years on, in the age of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, this visionary and radical writing is as relevant and urgently needed as ever, ready to inspire a new generation of feminists. Activists and writers Alix Kates Shulman and Honor Moore have gathered an unprecedented collection of works—many long out-of-print and hard to find—that catalyzed and propelled the women’s liberation movement.
Ranging from Friedan’s Feminine Mystique to Backlash, Susan Faludi’s Reagan-era requiem, and framed by Shulman and Moore with an introduction and headnotes that provide historical and personal context, the anthology reveals the crucial role of Black feminists and other women of color in a decades–long mass movement that not only brought about fundamental changes in American life—changes too often taken for granted today—but envisioned a thoroughgoing revolution in society and consciousness still to be achieved.
With sixteen pages of photographs.
Alix Kates Shulman’s 1972 debut novel, the million-copy best seller Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is now a feminist classic. Hailed by The New York Times as “the voice that has for three decades provided a lyrical narrative of the changing position of women in American society,” she has written five novels, three memoirs, a biography of anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman, and the collection A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays. Her memoir Drinking the Rain was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and in 2018 she received a Clara Lemlich Award for a lifetime of social activism.
Honor Moore is the author of Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury; The White Blackbird, a life of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent; The Bishop’s Daughter, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and three collections of poems. For Library of America, she edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems and Poems from the Women’s Movement. She is on the faculty of the graduate writing program at the New School, where she heads nonfiction.