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THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
The Library of America, a nonprofit publisher and educational outreach entity, was founded in 1979 with grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Although its mission was a well-grounded and no-nonsense business approach to publishing, it essentially was fulfilling a long-held dream by the great critic Edmund Wilson and others. The United States of America, they felt, ought to have a publications series of high standards and high quality of production for its national literature, and it ought to reflect the diversity and traditions of all of its writing.
The first books appeared in 1982, when I first began selling new books in an independent book store here in Carlisle. (The founding of Whistlestop Bookshop was three years away.) I still have my copies of Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. I won’t tell you how many of the 300+ to date I have acquired, but I am happy to say I never regretted one. The books are remarkably beautiful and efficient and scholarly and finely-made. They are sometimes the only respectable edition available (beware of photo-offset print-on-demand editions!). The accompanying chronologies and notes and textual discussions of every volume are a joy and an education. I cannot praise them too highly.
This listing is what I carry in the store. If you would like other volumes, send me an e-mail or call the store. Enjoy browsing, buying, and owning landmark definitive editions of great writers or great American subjects.
The listings are alphabetical by author except for new or recent anthologies at the top. Older anthologies are at the bottom of the page.
All James Baldwin titles and Ursula K. Le Guin titles are on the respective pages of the authors.
Ann Petry: The Street, The Narrows
Ann Petry: The Street, The Narrows
$35.00
Brilliant, daring, and ahead of her time, Ann Petry (1908–1997) is one of the unsung American writers of the last century. Born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and trained in the family business as a pharmacist, she moved to Harlem in 1938 and began working for the radical newspaper The People’s Voice. The pervasive poverty and racism she witnessed there inspired her unforgettable debut novel, The Street, published in 1946.
A work of crackling intensity, The Street is told in the voice of Lutie Johnson, a single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street quickly became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.
Faced with newfound fame and unwanted literary celebrity, Petry returned to the relative quiet of Connecticut to write her most ambitious novel, the 1953 masterpiece The Narrows. Set in industrial, waterfront Connecticut, The Narrows is a wide-ranging social novel, intricately layered and stylistically daring, with a rich vein of humor, inimitably quirky minor characters, and keenly observed historical textures. At its provocative center is an interracial love affair between Link Williams, a young black scholar-athlete and war veteran, and Camilo Sheffield, a white fashion reporter and munitions heiress. Their attraction sets in motion a tragedy that reveals the bitter fault lines of race and class in America.
Both novels, as Coretta Scott King once said of The Street, are “uncompromising work[s] of social criticism” that reveal “the devastating impact of racial injustice.” They are also impossible to put down: full of characters, to borrow Petry’s words, “as real as one’s next-door-neighbor, predictable and yet unpredictable, lingering in the memory,” in situations as powerfully pertinent today as when they were first written.
This Library of America edition gathers Petry’s two greatest works in one volume for the first time, along with a selection of her never-before-reprinted essays on the art of fiction and the vibrant Harlem life that inspired her. Authoritative notes and a newly researched chronology of Petry’s life, prepared by editor Farah Jasmine Griffin with the assistance of the author’s daughter Elisabeth Petry, illuminate the biographical and historical contexts.