30 August 2006
Library of America Preserves, Spreads American Literature
Reasonably priced volumes popularize classic works for a worldwide audience
Washington -- Among the less probable publishing events of 2006 was the release of two volumes of American political oratory, one of movie criticism and three collecting the 1901-1902 novels of Henry James, the 1926-1929 novels of William Faulkner and the 1973-1977 novels of Philip Roth.
These compilations join more than 170 others in The Library of America, an ongoing series that preserves the best and most significant writing of the United States for the education and enjoyment of future generations.
A SERIES FOR THE 'ORDINARY READER'
In 1962, the renowned literary critic Edmund Wilson proposed to his friend, publisher Jason Epstein, the need for "a complete and compact form of the principal American classics." "It is absurd that our most read and studied writers should not be available in their entirety in any convenient form," Wilson wrote.
Many doubted the market for reprints of American classics. Only in 1979 did the nonprofit Literary Classics of the United States Inc. attract two large grants --from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation -- that enabled it in 1982 to launch the Library of America (LOA) series.
From the outset, LOA sought to present durable, handsome and easily read books in the style of the French Pléiade series. Wilson always had criticized volumes that encumbered the text with footnotes and other scholarly apparatus to gratify "the very small group of monomaniac bibliographers." The LOA focused instead on "authoritative, accurate and unencumbered" reproductions, accompanied only by a chronology of the author's life and work, a few limited notes and one brief interpretive essay.
The books themselves were designed to appeal to the casual reader. Wilson had criticized tomes "too large and heavy to hold and … set with too wide a page for the eye to travel from one line to the next without effort." LOA thus sized its books at a compact 12.2 centimeters by 19.9 centimeters. It used thin "Bible" paper, very light but of exceptional quality, and guaranteed to last 500 years. Each page was sewn (rather than glued -- a cheaper method) into an imported, semi-flexible, unfinished rayon binding. Thus, while LOA volumes could reach 1300-1500 pages, each was light and easy to carry, and could lie open on a table even if opened near its beginning or end.
A DIVERSE LITERATURE FOR A DIVERSE PEOPLE
LOA's first four efforts spanned the 19th century, offering works by Nathanial Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Walt Whitman. At a New York City reading introducing the series, Eudora Welty (featured in two LOA volumes) was among the luminaries who read from the first volumes.
Today, LOA offers something for every taste. Many volumes collect the works of individual writers, from the founding fathers (Franklin, Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson and Madison, among others) to 19th century masters like Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau and Edgar Allan Poe and 20th century craftsmen, including James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. Authors typically are not included in the LOA during their lifetimes, although exceptions have been made for Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow and Phillip Roth.
The library encompasses plays and screenplays, novels and poetry, speeches and journalism. Some volumes arrange thematically the works of different authors. There is, for instance, a volume of American sermons, along with two collections of crime novels in the noir style and two volumes of reportage about the civil rights movement.
Together the LOA volumes display America's diversity. While individuals create literature, each artist is shaped by the sum of his or her experiences. LOA encompasses African-American literature from slave narratives to the essays of intellectuals like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois and the fiction of Richard Wright.
Novelists and playwrights of the American South are prominently represented through the works of James Agee, William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, women by Edith Wharton, Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein. Immigrant writers from Isaac Bashevis Singer to Vladimir Nabokov are here.
The formula of reasonably priced collections of classic literature has won a substantial audience, in many cases for works that long have been out-of-print. Annual sales total about a quarter-million books. LOA actively distributes its titles throughout Europe and Japan, and, through its "LOA Worldwide" program, has donated sets to libraries in such nations as Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Namibia.
For critic Norman Podhoretz, the Library of America "has grown into one of the glories of our civilization." As philanthropist Brooke Vincent Astor remarked on the release of the first four LOA volumes, "Five hundred years from now, when they dig up the books, the literature of America will be here."
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
