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The definitive firsthand narrative of our nation''s greatest conflict, now in a collector''s boxed set: “Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861–65 in which so many people were so articulate?” wondered Edmund Wilson in his 1962 classic Patriotic Gore. Reflecting the unprecedented, widespread literacy of nineteenth century Americans, an astonishing number of writers—white and black, male and female, soldiers and politicians, public intellectuals and private citizens—left vivid first-hand accounts of the Civil War. For the last four years, to mark the sesquicentennial of the most epochal event in American history, The Library of America has published a four-volume series that orchestrates this symphony of voices to chronicle as never before the full drama of the nation’s most devastating conflict, from Lincoln’s election in 186o to the Grand Review of the Armies in 1865. Now, in advance of the 150th anniversary of the war’s climactic final months, all four volumes are presented in a beautiful collector’s box. As a special feature, each box includes four pull-out posters featuring full color maps by expert Civil War cartographer Earl McElfresh. Here is the ultimate gift for anyone interested in the Civil War era.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The Library of America presents the definitive edition of an American master of crime fiction: twelve modern classics in a deluxe three-volume collector's boxed set. This is Elmore Leonard at his unbeatable best.Contains:Four Novels of the 1970s (Library of America volume #255) Fifty-Two PickupSwagUnknown Man No. 89The SwitchFour Novels of the 1980s (Library of America volume #267)City PrimevalLaBravaGlitzFreaky DeakyFour Later Novels (Library of America volume #280)Get ShortyRum PunchOut of SightTishomingo BluesLIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Go back to the Future Is Female in this all new collection of wildly entertaining stories by the trailblazing feminist writers who transformed American science fiction in the 1970sIn the 1970s, feminist authors created a new mode of science fiction in defiance of the "baboon patriarchy"-Ursula 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 offers a time machine back to the decade when far-sighted rebels changed science fiction forever with stories that made female community, agency, and sexuality central to the American future. Here are twenty-three wild, witty, and wonderful classics that dramatize the liberating energies of the 1970s:Sonya Dorman, "Bitching It" (1971) Kate Wilhelm, "The Funeral" (1972)Joanna Russ, "When It Changed" (1972) NEBULA AWARD Miriam Allen deFord, "A Way Out"(1973)Vonda N. McIntyre, "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" (1973) NEBULA James Tiptree, Jr., "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) HUGO AWARD Kathleen Sky, "Lament of the Keeku Bird" (1973)Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974) NEBULA & LOCUS AWARD Eleanor Arnason, "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons" (1974)Kathleen M. Sidney, "The Anthropologist" (1975)Marta Randall, "A Scarab in the City of Time" (1975) Elinor Busby, "A Time to Kill" (1977)Raccoona Sheldon, "The Screwfly Solution" (1977) NEBULA AWARD Pamela Sargent, "If Ever I Should Leave You" (1974)Joan D. Vinge, "View from a Height" (1978)M. Lucie Chin, "The Best Is Yet to Be" (1978)Lisa Tuttle, "Wives" (1979) Connie Willis, "Daisy, In the Sun" (1979)

"Two late masterpieces by John Updike that take on the American Century and Shakespeare's Hamlet, and a bittersweet coda to the Rabbit series: In the Beauty of the Lilies, Gertrude and Claudius, and Rabbit Remembered"--

More urgent than ever, two landmark essays by the legendary political theorist on the greatest threat to democracy, gathered with a new introduction by David Bromwich"No one," Hannah Arendt observed, "has ever counted truthfulness as a political virtue." But why do politicians lie? What is the relationship between political lies and self-delusion? And how much organized deceit can a democracy endure before it ceases to function? Fifty years ago, the century's greatest political theorist turned her focus to these essential questions in two seminal essays, brought together here for the first time. Her conclusions, delivered in searching prose that crackles with insight and intelligence, remain powerfully relevant, perhaps more so today than when they were written. In "Truth and Politics," Arendt explores the affinity between lying and politics, and reminds us that the survival of factual truth depends on the testimony of credible witnesses and on an informed citizenry. She shows how our shared sense of reality-the texture of facts in which we wrap our daily lives-can be torn apart by organized lying, replaced with a fantasy world of airbrushed evidence and doctored documents. In "Lying in Politics," written in response to the release of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt applies these insights to an analysis of American policy in Southeast Asia, arguing that the real goal of the Vietnam War-and of the official lies used to justify it by successive administrations-was nothing other than the burnishing of America's image. In his introduction, David Bromwich (American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us) engages with Arendt's essays in the context of her other writings and underscores their clarion call to take seriously the ever-present threat to democracy posed by lying.

Rediscover Rudolfo Anaya: mythmaker, master storyteller, American original "The godfather and guru of Chicano literature." -Tony HillermanA writer powerfully attuned to the land and history of his native New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya (1937-2020) is one of the giants of Latino literature. Over the course of a remarkable and acclaimed literary career, Anaya redefined the American experience for generations of readers. Anaya broke new ground with his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, a mythic work that captures the richness and complexity of history, community, and place in the American Southwest. Set just after World War II, Bless Me, Ultima revolves around the young boy Antonio and his quest to understand his identity and the demands of his future. Although his mother's heart is set on his entering the priesthood, Antonio is drawn to the charismatic Ultima, an elderly curandera or healer who embodies the ancient wisdom of the pre-Columbian past. The 1979 novel Tortuga draws on Anaya's experience of suffering and recuperation after a diving accident as a teenager. Its hero, nicknamed "Tortuga" because his body cast encases him like a turtle's shell, grapples with the realities of bodily pain as he discovers that true healing is spiritual as well as physical. The story reverberates with local folklore about a mountain, also called Tortuga, home to a sleeping spirit who will one day awaken and journey onward to the sea. Weaving these threads together, Anaya creates, in the words of editor Luis Alberto Urrea, "a tapestry inside of which he was encoding an entire history of our very souls." In the 1992 novel Alburquerque (restoring the "r" to the city's original name), a young Mexican American boxing champion discovers that his white biological mother had given him up for adoption at birth, and he must now reevaluate everything he thought he was. The winner of a PEN West Fiction Award, the novel brims with emotionally powerful characterizations, political commentary, humor, and lyrical writing that reveals Anaya to be, once again, an indispensable American fabulist.

The eloquent and defiant writings of the great American freedom fighter, selected by his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographerFrederick Douglass was one of the greatest orators and essayists in American history. While toiling as an enslaved laborer in the Baltimore shipyards he bought a secondhand copy of The Columbian Orator, a "noble acquisition" that he carried with him on his escape to the North. Douglass began his career as an antislavery lecturer in 1841 and founded his first newspaper, North Star, six years later.For the next five decades he used his voice and wielded his pen in the cause of emancipation, equal rights, and human dignity. Inspired by the Hebrew prophets, Douglass developed a unique oratorical and literary style that combined scriptural cadences with savage irony, moral urgency, and keen insight. In his incandescent jeremiad "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?" Douglass skewered the hypocrisy of the slaveholding republic; and in "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered" he refuted white supremacist ideology. "Resistance to Blood-Houndism" called for forceful opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act; "Capt. John Brown Not Insane" praised the "self-forgetful heroism" of the abolitionist martyr; and "How to End the War," published in 1861, called for the raising of Black troops and the destruction of slavery. In his oration at the Freedmen's Memorial in 1876, Douglass offered a brilliantly perceptive assessment of Lincoln's role in emancipation; "There Was a Right Side in the Late War" attacked the "Lost Cause" mythology of the Confederacy; and "The Lessons of the Hour" denounced lynching and disenfranchisement in the emerging Jim Crow South.As a special feature the volume also includes Douglass's only foray into fiction, the 1853 novella "The Heroic Slave," about a shipboard insurrection.

"Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." Willa Cather's remark describes her own reasons for re-creating in her works the Nebraska frontier of her youth. Set on the vast northern Great Plains, where the earth has only recently come beneath the plow, the stories and novels in this Library of America volume partake of an impressive physical space and a uniquely American ethnic. Panoramas of lonely prairie and open sky reflect the heroic aspirations and stoicism of her characters and the rebelliousness of their spirit.The Troll Garden (1905) was Cather's first book of fiction. It contains seven stories, including the justly famous "Paul's Case," a study of a young man who escapes the world of the ordinary and briefly tastes the life of romance. Also included is "The Sculptor's Funeral," about a world-famous young artist who remains without honor in his native town.O Pioneers! (1913) is the story of a young Swedish-American girl, Alexandra Bergson, who is left to manage the homestead farm when her father dies. Although she must contend with the shiftlessness of two brothers and the brutal murder of a third, her instinctive identification with the forces of nature helps bring the land to abundant fruition, and she finds her own happiness in a kindred spirit-an engraver, gold prospector, and fellow dreamer.In her lyrical novel The Song of the Lark (1915), Cather's love of music and theater and her faith in the spiritual influence of the Western landscape find expression in the ardent and talented Thea Kronborg. Moving from Colorado to Chicago to the primitive Southwest, Thea finds her destiny not in romance, but as a great Wagnerian soprano in the Metropolitan Opera. Her success, and that of all Cather's heroines, derives from what the author calls "the naïve, generous country that gave on its joyous force."A masterpiece at once austere and exuberant, historical and mythical, My Ántonia (1918) portrays a family of Bohemian emigrants on the Nebraska frontier. Despite the suicide of her father and the desertion of the father of her child, Ántonia Shimerda retains an unselfish nature that allows her to undergo years of drudgery and still affirm a courageous passion for life and motherhood-a dauntlessness intrinsically rooted in the awesome wonder of the prairie.One of Ours, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, portrays the blighting effects of twentieth-century progress on a free spirit from the American frontier. Claude Wheeler, its hero, is an imaginative, restless young man who leaves his claustrophobic small town to become a soldier in France during World War I. The Old World shows him culture, art, generosity, and appreciation, and also the horror, waste, and tragedy of war.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Read throughout the world, admired by Dostoyevsky and translated by Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe has become a legendary figure, representing the artist as obsessed outcast and romantic failure. His nightmarish visions, shaped by cool artistic calculation, reveal some of the dark possibilities of human experience. His enormous popularity and his continuing influence of literature depend less on legend or vision than on his stylistic and formal accomplishments as a writer of fiction and a great lyric poet. In this complete and uniquely authoritative Library of America collection, well-known tales of "mystery and imagination" and his best-known verse are collected with early poems, rarely published stories and humorous sketches, and the ecstatic prose poem Eureka.Poe's poetry is famous both for the musicality of "To Helen" and "The City in the Sea" and for the hypnotic, incantatory rhythms of "The Raven" and "Ulalume." "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Cask of Amontillado" show his mastery of Gothic horror; "The Pit and the Pendulum" is a classic of terror and suspense. Poe invented the modern detective story in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and developed the form of science fiction that was to influence, among others, Jules Verne and Thomas Pynchon. Poe was also adept at the humorous sketch of playful jeu d'esprit, such as "X-ing a Paragraph" or "Never Bet the Devil Your Head." All his stories reveal his high regard for technical proficiency and for what he called "rationation."Poe's fugitive early poems, stories rarely collected (such as "Bon-Bon," "King Pest," "Mystification," and "The Duc De L'Omelette), his only attempt at drama, "Politian"-these and much more are included in this comprehensive collection, presented chronologically to show Poe's development toward Eureka: A Prose Poem, his culminating vision of an indeterminate universe, printed here for the first time as Poe revised it and intended it should stand.A special feature of this volume is the care taken to select an authoritative text of each work. The printing and publishing history of every item has been investigated in order to choose a version that incorporates all of Poe's own revisions without reproducing the errors or changes introduced by later editors. Here, then, is one of America's and the world's most disturbing, powerful, and inventive writers published in "the first truly dependable collection of Poe's poetry and tales."LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

A definitive edition of the groundbreaking feminist fiction of a nineteenth century pioneerBest known for her gothic short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a pioneering feminist writer, the author of the utopian novels Herland and With Her in Ourland, about a newly-discovered country in which there have been no men for 2000 years. Both novels are gathered here along with approximately forty of her best stories: "The Yellow Wallpaper," presented in both the published and the almost unknown original manuscript version, which contains a different ending, "The Giant Wistaria" and "The Rocking-Chair," and many others. Also included is an extensive selection of Gilman's poems, many written in support of suffrage and other reforms.

For the 400th anniversary of Moliere's birth, all of Richard Wilbur's unsurpassed translations of Molière's plays-themselves towering achievements in English verse-are brought together for the first time in this two-volume gift set.One of the most accomplished American poets of his generation, Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) was also a prolific translator of French and Russian literature. His verse translations of Molière's plays are especially admired by readers and are still performed today around the world. "Wilbur," the critic John Simon wrote, "makes Molière into as great an English verse playwright as he was a French one." Now, for the first time, all ten of Wilbur's unsurpassed translations of Molière's plays are brought together in two-volume boxed set, fulfilling the poet's vision for the translations.The first volume comprises Molière's delightful early farces The Bungler, Lovers' Quarrels, and The Imaginary Cuckhold, or Sganarelle; the comedies The School for Husbands and The School for Wives, about the efforts of middle-aged men to control their young wives or fiancés, which so delighted female theater goers in Moliere's seventeenth-century France; and Don Juan, Molière's retelling of the timeless story, performed only briefly in the playwright's lifetime before pious censure forced it to close and not part of the repertoire of the Comédie-Française until 1847.The second volume includes the elusive masterpiece, The Misanthrope, often said to occupy the same space in comedy as Shakespeare's Hamlet does in tragedy; the fantastic farce Amphitryon, about how Jupiter and Mercury commandeer the identities of two mortals ; Tartuffe, Molière's biting satire of religious hypocrisy; and The Learned Ladies, like Tarfuffe, a drama of a household turned suddenly upside down. These volumes include the original introductions by Richard Wilbur and an introduction by Adam Gopnik on the exquisite art of Wilbur's translations.

What kind of choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance? These are the dark questions that animate Nemeses, the quartet of thematically related short novels that are published here together for the first time in this final volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works. Everyman (2006) is the sparse and affecting story of one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. Set against the backdrop of the Korean War, Indignation (2008) is the extraordinary narrative of a young man struggling against the conformity of McCarthy-era America and his father's overwhelming fear. In The Humbling (2009), aging actor Simon Axler embarks on a risky and aberrant affair in a desperate attempt to recoup his lost artistic gifts. And in Nemesis (2010), Roth offers an exacting portrait of the emotions-fear and anger, bewilderment and grief-bred by a polio epidemic in Newark in the summer of 1944.Philip Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by The Library of America. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the National Medal of Arts, and the Gold Medal in Fiction, the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

A definitive edition of the landmark book that forever changed our understanding of the Civil War’s aftermath and the legacy of racism in America Upon publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois’s now classic Black Reconstruction offered a revelatory new assessment of Reconstruction—and of American democracy itself. One of the towering African American thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, Du Bois brought all his intellectual powers to bear on the nation’s post-Civil War era of political reorganization, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and ultimately yielded to the consolidation of the unjust social order of Jim Crow. Black Reconstruction is a pioneering work of revisionist scholarship that, in the wake of the censorship of Du Bois’s characterization of Reconstruction by the Encyclopedia Britannica, was written to debunk influential historians whose racist ideas and emphases had disfigured the historical record. “The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself,” Du Bois argued, “has been almost barred from court. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected.” In setting the record straight Du Bois produced what co-editor Eric Foner has called an “indispensable book,” a magisterial work of detached scholarship that is also imbued with passionate outrage. Presented in a handsome and authoritative hardcover edition prepared by Foner and co-editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black Reconstruction is joined here for the first time with important writings that trace Du Bois’s thinking throughout his career about Reconstruction and its centrality in understanding the tortured course of democracy in America. 

Bill Littlefield (NPR''s Only a Game) presents the second installment in the Library of America series devoted to classic American sportswriters, a defintive collector’s edition of the pathbreaking writer who invented the long-form sports story. Like his friend and admirer Red Smith, W. C. Heinz (1915–2008) was one of the most distinctive and  influential sportswriters of the last century. Though he began his career as a newspaper reporter, Heinz soon moved beyond the confines of the daily column, turning freelance and becoming the first sportwriter to make his living writing for magazines. In doing so he effectively invented the long-form sports story, perfecting a style that paved the way for the New Journalism of the 1960s. His profiles of the top athletes of his day still feel remarkably current, written with a freshness of perception, a gift for characterization, and a finely tuned ear for dialogue. Jimmy Breslin named Heinz’s “Brownsville Bum”—a brief life of Al “Bummy” Davis, Brooklyn street tough and onetime welterweight champion of the world—“the greatest magazine sports story I’ve ever read, bar none.” His spare and powerful 1949 column, “Death of a Race Horse,” has been called a literary classic, a work of clarity and precision comparable to Hemingway at his best.Now, for this essential writer’s centennial, Bill Littlefield, the host of NPR’s Only A Game, presents the essential Heinz: thirty-eight columns, profiles, and memoirs from the author’s personal archive, including eighteen pieces never collected during his lifetime. Though Heinz’s great passion was boxing—the golden era of Rocky Graziano, Floyd Patterson, and Sugar Ray Robinson—his interests extended to the wide world of sports, with indelible profiles of baseball players (Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio), jockeys (George Woolf, Eddie Arcaro), hockey players, football coaches, scouts and trainers and rodeo riders.

Rediscover one of America’s pioneering women crime writers with this classic noir starring a Long Beach private investigator reminiscent of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe“Are you trying to tell me you don''t want the job, Mr. Sader?” It started as a missing persons case and grew more puzzling with the discovery of another strangely coincidental disappearance. Private eye Jim Sader finds himself deep in a multilayered intrigue revolving around oil and real estate and the sleazy underpinnings of Long Beach, California, in the 1950s. Taut, suspenseful, and gritty, many consider Sleep with Strangers to be Dolores Hitchens’ best novel.

STEPH CURRY''S "UNDERRRATED" BOOK CLUB PICK FOR APRIL 2022NAACP IMAGE AWARD FINALISTNEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLERONE OF TIME''S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2021ONE OF OPRAH''S 15 FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021ONE OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE''S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2021A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF 2021A major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel about race and police violence by the legendary author of Native Son and Black BoyFred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up by the police after a brutal double murder and tortured until he confesses to a crime he did not commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from custody and flees into the city’s sewer system. This is the devastating premise of this scorching novel, a masterpiece that Richard Wright was unable to publish in his lifetime. Written between his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), at the height of his creative powers, it would eventually see publication only in drastically condensed and truncated form in the posthumous collection Eight Men (1961). Now, for the first time, by special arrangement with the author''s estate, the full text of this incendiary novel about race and violence in America, the work that meant more to Wright than any other (“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration”), is published in the form that he intended, complete with his companion essay, “Memories of My Grandmother.” Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson, contributes an afterword.

From The Federalist to Citizens United, a bestselling historian presents key writings on five crucial questions confronting American democracy today Amid the frenzied overload of 24-hour cable news and incessant social media, at a time when many of us fear for the future of our democracy, it is becoming harder and harder to think clearly about politics. American Democracy: 21 Historic Answers to 5 Urgent Questions provides an alternative for those who want to step back and look to the past for inspiration and guidance.   Edited with perceptive and provocative commentary by bestselling historian and journalist Nicholas Lemann (The Promised Land, Transaction Man), the book presents key writings from the American past that speak to five contemporary flashpoints in our political landscape: race, gender, immigration, and citizenship; opportunity and inequality; the purpose and powers of the federal government; money, special privilege, and corruption; and protest and civil disobedience. Some of the selections are well-known—George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the 4th of July,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from Birmingham Jail—while others will be new to many readers—Horace Mann’s argument for public schools as a means of fighting inequality, Jane Addams’s perceptive analysis of gender and social class in charity work, Randolph Bourne envisioning a “Trans-National America.”   American Democracy presents a remarkable range of insightful and eloquent American political writing, while serving as an invaluable resource for concerned citizens who wish to become better-informed participants in the ongoing drama of our democracy.

In their own voices, the full story of the women and men who struggled to make American democracy wholeWith a record number of female candidates in the 2020 election and women''s rights an increasingly urgent topic in the news, it''s crucial that we understand the history that got us where we are now. For the first time, here is the full, definitive story of the movement for voting rights for American women, of every race, told through the voices of the women and men who lived it. Here are the most recognizable figures in the campaign for women''s suffrage, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but also the black, Chinese, and American Indian women and men who were not only essential to the movement but expanded its directions and aims. Here, too, are the anti-suffragists who worried about where the country would head if the right to vote were universal. Expertly curated and introduced by scholar Susan Ware, each piece is also introduced by a headnote so that together these 100 selections by over 80 writers tell the full history of the movement--from Abigail Adams to the Declaration of Sentiments to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the limiting of suffrage under Jim Crow. Includes writings by Ida B. Wells, Mabel Lee, Margaret Fuller, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, presidents Grover Cleveland on the anti-suffrage side and Woodrow Wilson urging passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as a wartime measure, Jane Addams, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among many others.

A literary landmark: Kevin Young presents the biggest and best anthology of black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the presentOnly now, in the 21st century, can we fully grasp the breadth and range of African American poetry: a magnificent chorus of many voices, some familiar, others recently rescued from neglect. And only here, in this unprecedented anthology expertly selected by poet and scholar Kevin Young, is this glorious living tradition wholly revealed in all its power, beauty, and multiplicity. Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an antebellum activist like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voiced her own passionate resistance to slavery. Read nuanced, provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond. Experience the transformation of poetic modernism in the works of figures such as Langston Hughes, Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer. Understand the threads of poetic history--in movements such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, Black Arts, Cave Canem, Dark Noise Collective--and the complex bonds of solidarity and dialogue among poets across time and place. See how these poets have celebrated their African heritage and have connected with other communities in the African Diaspora. Enjoy the varied but distinctly Black music of a tradition that draws deeply from jazz, hip hop, and the rhythms and cadences of the pulpit, the barbershop, and the street. And appreciate, in the anthology''s concluding sections, why contemporary African American poetry, amply recognized in recent National Book Awards and Poet Laureates, is flourishing as never before. Taking the measure of the tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.

A landmark of literary recovery: the first major edition of 19th-century America''s greatest woman writerIn her lifetime Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) was considered with George Eliot one of the two greatest women writers of the English language. She wrote fiction of remarkable intellectual power that outsold those of her male contemporaries Henry James and Willian Dean Howells. James enshrined memories of his long, complicated friendship with Woolson in The Beast in the Jungle and The Wings of the Dove, and more recently Colm Tobin treated the relationship in his novel The Master. But Woolson''s close association with James, and her likely suicide in Venice, have tended to overshadow her own literary accomplishments, pigeonholing her as a martyr to the male literary establishment. This volume, the most comprehensive gathering of Woolson''s stories to date, represents the culmination of decades of recovery work done by scholars, and puts the focus back on the work, where it belongs.Set variously in the Great Lakes region, the post-Civil War South, and Europe, Woolson''s short stories often concern outsiders of one kind or another--prophets and misfits living in remote landscapes, uneducated coal miners, impoverished spinsters, neglected nuns, a haunted caretaker of the dead, destitute southerners, and female artists driven to extreme behavior as they seek the admiration or approval of established (male) critics or writers. Woolson''s minute realism captures both the social texture of her time and the inner emotional lives of these overlooked and marginalized characters. Most of all her writings startle us with their simmering intensity, their sensual descriptions of the environment, and refusal to smooth out the ambiguities and tensions that inevitably result from human efforts to communicate and connect. Her fiction is deeply human, resonating with a power across the centuries that makes them remarkably modern for today''s readers.

Library of America's definitive Updike edition continues with three masterful novels on the joys and the discontents of the sexual revolutionHere for the first time in one volume are three of John Updike's most essential novels--the scandalous Couples, the brilliant Rabbit Redux, and the uproarious A Month of Sundays--which together form an unforgettable triptych of the social turbulence that roiled America from the Kennedy to the Nixon years. Written with the grace, verve, and style of one of literature's most sophisticated entertainers, these books not only reveal Updike's genius in characterization and his formal versatility as a novelist but also delve into the complexities of sex and marriage, social class and personal morality, and the difficult quandaries of the flesh and the spirit. As a special feature the volume also presents two short pieces that shed light on the novels and the tale "Couples: A Short Story," the origin of the novel of the same name, written in 1963 but deemed unsuitable for publication by The New Yorker.

Thomas Mallon and Library of America invite readers to rediscover the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels of a classic American writer on the 150th anniversary of his birthMuch in need of rediscovery today, Booth Tarkington was among the most beloved and widely read writers of his era. In such classic novels as The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams, both winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Tarkington displayed a mastery of realism and an astute, strikingly modern feel for psychology, capturing crucial transformations in our national life as they were manifested in changing social customs and in the very landscape itself, altered irrevocably by industrialization and environmental degradation. Out of Tarkington's prolific writings novelist and critic Thomas Mallon has selected three works that show Tarkington at his best. The Magnificent Ambersons, inspiration for Orson Welles's classic film, is a tour-de-force study in egoism, depicting the fall from grace of George Minafer, wayward scion of the once-unassailable Amberson family. The titular protagonist of Alice Adams, portrayed unforgettably by Katharine Hepburn in what many consider her finest performance, is one of the great heroines of American literature: like Henry James's Isabel Archer and the young women of Edith Wharton's novels, she is a spirited, complicated young woman confronting the limits of her time and place with her own headlong desires. These novels are joined here by the story collection In the Arena: Stories from Political Life, published in 1905. The tales were read avidly by Theodore Roosevelt, inspiring perhaps his most famous speech--draw from Tarkington's political career as a state legislator in Indiana, which lasted briefly but had a profound impact on him. Published to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Tarkington's birth, Novels and Stories contains the most enduring works of a Hoosier luminary and an estimable chronicler of the American Midwest.