Overview and History
Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip Roth, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Saul Bellow, including the selected writings of several U.S. presidents.
The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ("La Pléiade") series published in France provided the model for the LoA, which was long a dream of the critic Edmund Wilson.
The initial publishers included American academic Daniel Aaron, Lawrence Hughes, Helen 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. Officers included Richard Poirier, Jason Epstein, and Cheryl Hurley. As of 2009, Hurley remains president of the Library of America.
The first volumes were published in 1982, ten years after Wilson's death. Besides the works of many individual writers, the series includes anthologies like Reporting World War II and (in a different format to the above illustration) Writing Los Angeles.
The publisher aims to keep classics in print permanently to preserve America's literary heritage. Although the LoA sells more than a quarter-million volumes annually, the publisher depends on individual contributions to help meet the costs of preparing, marketing and manufacturing its books.
LoA texts are prepared by recognized scholars, and determined efforts are made to correct errors and omissions in previous editions, which are normally listed and the source texts properly identified. For instance, the LoA text of Richard Wright's Native Son restored a number of passages that had been previously cut. Each volume includes a chronology of the author's career or significant incidents in the case of the anthology volumes. The books are designed to be as long-lasting as possible, with (acid-free) bible paper (allowing books with a large number of pages to remain fairly compact), durable binding cloth, and flexible, but firm binding boards.
The Publisher of the Library of America series is Max Rudin; and Geoffrey O'Brien is Editor-in-Chief.
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