Library of America

John Updike had already made a name as a contributor of stories and poems to The New Yorker when, in January 1959, at the age of twenty-six, he published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, launching one of the most extraordinary literary careers in American letters. Now, Library of America inaugurates a multi-volume edition of Updike's novels with this volume gathering his first four novels, including the landmark Rabbit, Run, chosen in 2010 by...

Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...

"For the first time, the complete stories of a Pulitzer Prize-winning master of the form, plus her fascinating portrait of the mother of one of the world's most infamous assassins"--

"Gary Snyder is one of America's indispensable poets, the "Thoreau of the Beat Generation" and our "laureate of Deep Ecology." Now, for the first time, all of Snyder's poetry is gathered in a single, authoritative Library of America volume. Here are all of Snyder's published books of poetry spanning a career of almost seventy years. Early collections such as Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Myths & Texts, and The Back Country reflect his hardscrabble...

This collection of 80 dramatic firsthand writings by Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and others brings to life the struggle for racial justice from the Civil War to World War. A vital resource for the teaching of the history of race in America that traces the ascendency of white supremacy after Reconstruction--and the outspoken resistance to it led by Black Americans and their allies. W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified "the problem of the color-line"...

"This comprehensive gathering highlights Barthelme's unique approach to fiction: his upside-down worlds that are nonetheless grounded in fundamental human truths; his scrambled visions of history that yield unexpected insights; and his genius for dialogue, parody, and collage, "the central principle of all art in the twentieth century"..."

"This second volume in Library of America's definitive Didion edition includes two novels and three remarkable essay collections with which she extended the compass of the extraordinary journalistic eye first developed in the celebrated books Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album. Gathered here are Salvador, a searing look at terror and Cold War politics in the Central American civil war of the early 1980s; Miami, a portrait not just of...

A master storyteller and visionary champion of creative freedom, Ray Bradbury is one of the most beloved and influential writers of our time. In books that look forward to astonishing futures and backward to evanescent realms of memory, he elevated speculative fiction from the pages of the pulps to the vital center of American literary culture. This definitive Library of America edition gathers his novels and story cycles of the 1950s and 1960s for...

This first volume in the Library of America Don DeLillo edition presents three indispensable novels from the 1980s, published here with new prefaces from the author. The Names (1982) was DeLillo's breakthrough novel, a book that, as he reflects here, spanned a "broader expanse" than his earlier novels. James Axton, a "risk analyst" tasked with assessing dangers for his corporate clients from terrorism and other forms of political upheaval, uncovers...

"In the 1970s, feminist authors created a new mode of science fiction in defiance of the "baboon patriarchy"--Ursula K. Le Guin's words--that had long dominated the genre, imagining futures that are still visionary. In this sequel to her groundbreaking 2018 anthology The Future is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin, SF-expert Lisa Yaszek opens a time portal to the decade when women changed science...

In one authoritative volume, here are two landmark story collections by one of America's most beloved authors, plus 27 stellar, speculative, and strange tales from other collections, including 7 restored to print The author of over 400 short stories, Ray Bradbury was a master not only in the science fiction genre, for which he is best known, but also in speculative, horror, and dark fantasy. Here are two of Bradbury's most beloved collections, along...

"For too long, African Americans have been left out of the story of the nation's founding, their voices absent from the memory and celebration of the creation of the American republic. Black Writers of the Founding Era--by far the richest and most expansive anthology of its kind ever assembled--restores these voices. The writings gathered here reveal the complexity and dynamism of African American life and culture in the period and show how the principles...

"'The poet's measures serve anarchic joy. / The story-teller tells one story: freedom.' Throughout a celebrated career that spanned genres, Ursula K. Le Guin was first and last a poet. This sixth volume in the definitive Library of America Le Guin edition presents for the first time an authoritative gathering of her verse -- from the earliest collection, Wild Angels, through her final publication, So Far So Good, which she delivered to her editor...