The Library of America (LOA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LOA has published more than 300 volumes by authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Saul Bellow, Frederick Douglass to Ursula K. Le Guin, including selected writing of several U.S. presidents. Anthologies and works containing historical documents, criticism, and journalism are also published. Library of America volumes seek to print authoritative versions of works; include extensive notes, chronologies, and other back matter; and are known for their distinctive physical appearance and characteristics.

Overview and history

The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ("La Pléiade") series published in France provided the model for the LOA, which was long a dream of critic and author Edmund Wilson. During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a long saga of rival literary outfits attempting to assemble and finding funding for much the same thing. The founding of the Library of America took place in 1979, with the creation of an entity known as Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. (This remains the entity under which LOA notes, chronologies, and other auxiliary materials are copyrighted; and, officially, employees work for Literary Classics of the United States, Inc. ) Publishers associated in some way with the creation include Lawrence Hughes, Helen Honig Meyer, and Roger W. Straus Jr. The initial board of advisers included Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, R. W. B. Lewis, Robert Coles, Irving Howe, and Eudora Welty. Funding at the start came from two sources, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, in the total amount of $1.8 million. The initial president of the new entity was the American academic Daniel Aaron, who had been a friend of Wilson's since the 1950s. The executive director was Cheryl Hurley, who had worked at the Modern Language Association. Other founding officers included the literary critic Richard Poirier, as vice president, and the publisher Jason Epstein, as treasurer. Epstein, and later Aaron and Poirier, had all been involved in the long series of proposals and discussions that led up to the creation of the Library of America. Another founder was the textual scholar G. Thomas Tanselle; he too had been involved in the discussions prior to creation, and after that he chaired the committee that was the arbiter of LOA textual policy. Aaron remained in his position until 1985, and was responsible for navigating the shoals between the orthodoxies of literary criticism and a wider view of what the Library of America could publish. He was followed as president by executive director Hurley. In 2017, she retired as president and was replaced by Max Rudin, who was already the entity's publisher. Hanna M. "Gila" Bercovitch served as founding editor, senior editor, and then editor-in-chief until her death in 1997. Upon her passing, Henry Louis Gates said that "It is hard to find anyone who has been more central to institutionalizing the canon of American literature." She was followed as editor-in-chief by the poet and critic Geoffrey O'Brien. He retired in 2017, and was followed in 2018 by John Kulka, who was given the title of editorial director. The first volumes were published in 1982, ten years after Wilson's death. They were priced moderately. The launch was accompanied by considerable amounts of publicity. Public response was in terms of sales positive from the beginning; by 1986, the non-profit was breaking even, although it accepted special grants for specific projects, such as one from the Bradley Foundation to enable the two-volume The Debate on the Constitution set. The response to the series continued to grow over time; between 1993 and 1996, the publisher's frontlist sales doubled. By 1996, the Library of America was getting two-thirds of its sales via subscription programs and one-third through bookstores. While for a long time the series only published the works of authors who had passed on, this changed in the late 1990s when Eudora Welty was published, soon to be followed by Philip Roth. Similarly, the rule that authors had to be American-born was later relaxed when Vladimir Nabokov was added to the list. While a nonprofit entity, the Library has not been immune to commercial considerations, often going further into genre works such as detective fiction and science fiction than some of its founders would have imagined. Besides the works of many individual writers, the series includes anthologies such as (in a different format from the above illustration) Writing Los Angeles. The Library of America introduced coverage of American journalism with the 1995 two-volume set Reporting World War II, which not only garnered positive reviews, but soon became one of the publisher's five best-selling offerings to that point, the others being volumes about Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Walt Whitman. That those others all concerned the Civil War era was did not go unnoticed; one of the publisher's most ambitious later efforts, a multi-volume collection of first-person narratives, revolved around the same topic, as did such volumes as a collection of letters that Grant wrote to his wife Julia. The publisher aims to keep classics and notable historical and genre works in print permanently to preserve America's literary and cultural heritage. Previously, often only the best-known works of an author remained in print, as exemplified by Stephen Crane, whose novels and short stories were but whose poetry and journalism were not. As LOA chief executive Cheryl Hurley stated in 2001, "We're not only a publisher, we're a cultural institution." Although the LOA sells more than a quarter-million volumes annually, with the original seed money having run out, the publisher depends on individual contributions to help meet the costs of preparing, marketing, manufacturing, and maintaining its books. In one large form of donation, as of 2001 a $50,000 contribution could sponsor a particular book being kept in print. Some books published as additions to the series are not kept in print in perpetuity.

Research and scholarship

Library of America volumes are prepared and edited by recognized scholars on the subject. Notes on the text are normally included and the source texts identified; these notes have been called "fascinating in themselves". This is part of the extensive back matter typically included with each volume, behind which large amounts of research and scholarship are conducted. Efforts are made to correct errors and omissions in previous editions and create a definitive version of the material. For instance, under the guidance of Bercovitch, the LOA text of Richard Wright's Native Son restored a number of passages that had been previously cut to make the work more palatable to the Book-of-the-Month Club. The LOA also commissioned a new translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America by Arthur Goldhammer for their edition of the text. Library of America volumes of letters tend to be representative rather than exhaustive in terms of inclusion criteria. Unlike some other series such as the Norton Critical Editions, Library of America volumes provide no introductory essays or critical examinations of the work involved. This is per Wilson's original design. At times this omission can lead to frustration based on the inability to know the basis upon which material for a volume was selected. Each volume also includes a chronology of the author's career or significant incidents in the case of the anthology volumes. Indeed, Library of America volumes are noted for their chronologies; The New York Times has called them "predictably superb". The author and journalist Gloria Emerson's review of the Reporting World War II volumes notes that they include "an excellent chronology of the war". The poet and literary critic Stephen Yenser, in reviewing of volume about the work of the poet Elizabeth Bishop, noted that the chronology was "so packed with pertinent details it amounts to a mini-biography". The notes and chronologies are often put together by LOA staff members and in some cases have informed the perspective of the guest editors working on the volume in question. LOA staff have also sometimes helped scholars working on related projects.

Critical reception

The Library of America has received considerable praise for its endeavors. After the initial series were published, the critic Charles Champlin wrote that "The volumes in the series are in fact marvels of scholarship, unobtrusively displayed, and a prime effort has been to work from the text that reflects the author's final word." The aforementioned poet and critic Stephen Yenser has called the Library of America "invaluable"; that same term has been used to describe Library of America by the Cox News Service, by the Los Angeles Times, and by a book prize committee. Newsweek magazine said in 2010 that "For three decades, the LOA has done a splendid job of making good on" its initial goals. Writing for the New York Times Book Review, the essayist and teacher William Deresiewicz has referred to the Library of America as "our quasi-official national canon". Indeed, whether an American writer has achieved a level of greatness is sometimes associated with whether they have the imprimatur of the Library of America. Writing for The Sewanee Review, the academic Michael Gorra has said that "the Library has shaped and indeed expanded our sense of what counts as American literature ... what makes the Library of America so valuable is the risks it takes around the edges of what used to be American literature". The Library of America has attracted a number of criticisms as well, including accusations of selection biases in favor of literary and political trends and the questionable inclusion of certain writers ostensibly non-canonical. An offshoot series put out in 1989 by Vintage Books that was associated with the Library of America name was faulted as overly commercial and exploitative. Even the marketing for the main series has been reproved as overbearing, in that it exaggerated the degree to which the preservation of American literature was in peril and the degree to which the Library of America was saving it. The LOA has been satirized by the essayist Arthur Krystal as "confer[ing] value on writers by encasing their work in handsome black-jacketed covers with a stripe of red, white, and blue on the spine." The oft-perceived requirement that writers have passed from the scene led to one wry comment that "one sympathizes with the directors of a publishing venture increasingly dependent on the idea that great American writers just can't die fast enough." The series even prompted a mocking poem that began: "It's like heaven: you've got to die To get there. And you can't be sure. The publisher might go out of business." In an April Fools' Day swipe at the Library of America's selection standards, another satirical piece proclaimed that the LOA "would publish volumes of Paris Hilton's and William Shatner's memoirs, and possibly those of Jersey Shore's Snooki." Images of the faux volumes were included. In his 2001 book Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future, LOA co-founder Jason Epstein, who by his own account had lost out in an internal power struggle and departed the venture, sharply criticized the Library of America's finances and what he saw as the publication of unnecessary anthologies and authors whose qualifications for the series were suspect. He concluded: "The Library of America has now published substantially all the work for which it was created and for which rights are available. Its obligation hereafter is to husband its resources so that this work remains in print and accessible to readers, and to ensure that funds are on hand for the publication of twentieth-century writers as rights permit." What Edmund Wilson would think of the series as it has evolved is unknowable, but writing for The Antioch Review in 1986, the fellow Paul M. Wright ventures that "We might reasonably infer that he would be pleased but not, I think, entirely pleased." Less reservedly, the editor and commentator Norman Podhoretz, writing for Commentary in 1992, said that "the Library of America is as close to the kind of thing [Wilson] envisaged as it could conceivably be."

Build and manufacture

The designer of the appearance of Library of America books is Bruce Campbell. When the first LOA volumes appeared in 1982, the "Book Design & Manufacturing" column of Publishers Weekly headlined that the series's physical appearance was "a triumph of the bookmaker's art". The LOA uses paper that meets guidelines for permanence originally set out by a committee of the Council on Library Resources and subsequently by the American National Standards Institute. Each volume is printed on thin but opaque acid-free paper, allowing books ranging from 700 to 1,600 pages to remain fairly compact (although not as small as those in La Pléiade). The paper used means the books will last a very long time without crumbling or yellowing. All volumes in the main series have the same trim size, 4+7//8 in by 7+7//8 in, dimensions that are based on the golden section. The weight of each volume is around 2 lb. For the hardcover editions, the binding cloth is woven rayon, and the books are Smyth-sewn. Each includes a ribbon bookmark. Pages in the books will lie flat when open. The uniform typeface is Galliard. The LOA publishes selected titles in paperback, mainly for the college textbook market.

Main series

Special anthologies

American poets project

Special publications

Notes and references