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Twenty years after Appomattox, stricken by cancer and facing financial ruin, Ulysses S. Grant wrote his Personal Memoirs to secure his family's future. in doing so, the Civil War's greatest general won himself a unique place in American letters. His character, intelligence, sense of purpose, and simple compassion are evident throughout this vivid and deeply moving account, which has been acclaimed by readers as diverse asMark Twain, Matthew Arnold, Gertrude Stein, and Edmund Wilson. Annotated and complete with detailed maps, battle plans, and facsimiles reproduced from the original edition, this volume offers an unparalleled vantage on the most terrible, moving, and inexhaustibly fascinating event in American history. included are 174 letters, many of them to his wife, Julia, which offer an intimate view of their affectionate and enduring marriage.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.

James Thurber, whimsical fantasist and deadpan chronicler of everyday absurdities, brought American humor into the 20th century. His comic persona, a modern citydweller whose zaniest flights of free association are tinged with anxiety, remains hilarious, subtly disturbing, and instantly recognizable. Here, in over 1000 pages, editor Garrison Keillor presents the best and most extensive collection ever assembled. Over 100 pieces include "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and "The Catbird Seat," the brilliantly satirical Fables for Our Time, the classic My Life and Hard Times, and the best of The Owl in the Attic, Let Your Mind Alone!, My World-And Welcome to It, and the other famous books. Plus 500 wonderful drawings, including The Seal in the Bedroom and celebrated sequences like "The Masculine Approach" and "The War Between Men and Women." Rounding out the volume is a selection from The Years with Ross, a memoir of the New Yorker publisher, and a number of wonderful early pieces never collected by Thurber.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.

For the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, here is a collection of writings that charts our nation's long, heroic confrontation with its most poisonous evil. It's an inspiring moral and political struggle whose evolution parallels the story of America itself. To advance their cause, the opponents of slavery employed every available literary form: fiction and poetry, essay and autobiography, sermons, pamphlets, speeches, hymns, plays, even children's literature. This is the first anthology to take the full measure of a body of writing that spans nearly two centuries and, exceptionally for its time, embraced writers black and white, male and female. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Phillis Wheatley, and Olaudah Equiano offer original, even revolutionary, eighteenth century responses to slavery. With the nineteenth century, an already diverse movement becomes even more varied: the impassioned rhetoric of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison joins the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and William Wells Brown; memoirs of former slaves stand alongside protest poems by John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Lydia Sigourney; anonymous editorials complement speeches by statesmen such as Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln. Features helpful notes, a chronology of the antislavery movement, and a16-page color insert of illustrations.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 beloved March family trilogy-presented in one "single, beautifully crafted volume" featuring original illustrations (John Matteson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author) From the incidents of her own remarkable childhood, Louisa May Alcott fashioned a trilogy of novels that catapulted her to fame and fortune and that remain among the most beloved works in all of American literature. Here, in an authoritative single-volume edition restoring Alcott's original text as well as her sister May (the original of Amy)'s illustrations, is the complete series. Set in a small New England town during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Little Women introduces Alcott's remarkable heroines, the March sisters-above all, her alter ego Jo March, with her literary ambition and independent spirit. The follow-up, Little Men, follows Jo into adulthood and marriage as she finds herself the caretaker of a houseful of rambunctious children at Plumfield School. Jo's Boys returns to Plumfield a decade later; now grown, Jo's children recount adventures of their own. At once heartwarming and true to life, Alcott's novels will continue to win over readers both young and old, as they have for generations. 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 five novels in The Leatherstocking Tales (collected in two Library of America volumes), Cooper's great saga of the American wilderness, form a pageant of the American frontier. Cooper's hero, Natty Bumppo, is forced ever farther into the heart of the continent by the advance of civilization that he inadvertently serves as advance scout, missionary, and critic. Leatherstocking first appears in The Pioneers (1823), as an aged hunter living on the fringe of settlement near Templeton (Cooperstown), New York, at the end of the eighteenth century. There he becomes caught in the struggles of party, family, and class to control the changing American land and to determine what sort of civilization will replace the rapidly vanishing wilderness. When Natty Bumppo started an American tradition by setting off into the sunset at the novel's close, one early reader said, "I longed to go with him."The Last of the Mohicans (1826) is a pure unabashed narrative of adventure. It looks back to the earlier time of the French and Indian Wars, when Natty and his two companions, Chingachgook and Uncas, survivors of a once-proud Indian nation, attempt a daring rescue and seek to forestall the plan of the French to unleash their Mingo allies on a wave of terror through the English settlements.The Prairie (1827) takes up Natty in his eighties, driven by the continuous march of civilization to his last refuge on the Great Plains across the Mississippi. On this vast and barren stage, the Sioux and Pawnee, the outlaw clan of Ishmael Bush, and members of the Lewis and Clark expedition enact a romantic drama of intrigue, pursuit, and biblical justice that reflects Cooper's historical dialectic of culture and nature, of the American nation and the American continent.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 most comprehensive collection of stories, sketches, burlesques, hoaxes, tall tales, speeches, satires, and maxims of America's greatest humorist, Mark Twain Arranged chronologically and containing many pieces restored to the form in which Twain intended them to appear, this special Library of America volume shows with unprecedented clarity the literary evolution of Mark Twain over six decades of his career.The nearly two hundred separate items in this volume cover Twain's writings from the years 1852 to 1890. As a riverboat pilot, Confederate irregular, silver miner, frontier journalist, and publisher, Twain witnessed the tragicomic beginning of the Civil War in Missouri, the frenzied opening of the West, and the feverish corruption, avarice, and ambition of the Reconstruction era. He wrote about political bosses, jumping frogs, robber barons, cats, women's suffrage, temperance, petrified men, the bicycle, the Franco-Prussian War, the telephone, the income tax, the insanity defense, injudicious swearing, and the advisability of political candidates preemptively telling the worst about themselves before others get around to it.Among the stories included here are "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," which won him instant fame when published in 1865, "Cannibalism in the Cars," "The Invalid's Story," and the charming "A Cat's Tale," written for his daughters' private amusement. This volume also presents several of his famous and successful speeches and toasts, such as "Woman - God Bless Her," "The Babies," and "Advice to Youth." Such writings brought Twain immense success on the public lecture and banquet circuit, as did his controversial "Whittier Birthday Speech," which portrayed Boston's most revered men of letters as a band of desperadoes.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.

For the first time, the complete stories of the master chronicler of tradition and transformation in the twentieth-century South.Born and raised in Tennessee, Peter Taylor was the great chronicler of the American Upper South, capturing its gossip and secrets, its divided loyalties and morally complicated legacies in tales of pure-distilled brilliance. Now, for his centennial year, the Library of America and acclaimed short story writer Ann Beattie present an unprecedented two-volume edition of Taylor's complete short fiction, all fifty-nine of the stories published in his lifetime in the order in which they were composed. This first volume offers twenty-nine early masterpieces, including such classics as "A Spinster's Tale," "What You Hear from 'Em?," "Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time" and "Miss Leonora When Last Seen." As a special feature, an appendix in the first volume gathers three stories Taylor published as an undergraduate that show the early emergence of his singular style and sensibility.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.

In one volume, two landmark novels about the terrible power of race in America from one of the foremost African American writers of the past century.Ann Petry is increasingly recognized as one of the essential American novelists of the twentieth century. Now, she joins the Library of America series with this deluxe hardcover volume gathering her two greatest works. Published in 1946 to widespread critical and popular acclaim--it was the first novel by an African-American woman to sell over a million copies--The Street follows Lutie Johnson, a young, newly single mother, as she struggles to make a better life for her son, Bub. An intimate account of the aspirations and challenges of black, female, working-class life, much of it set on a single block in Harlem, the novel exposes structural inequalities in American society while telling a complex human story, as overpriced housing, lack of opportunity, sexual harassment, and racism conspire to limit Lutie's potential and to break her buoyant spirit. Less widely read than her blockbuster debut and still underappreciated, The Narrows (1953) is Petry's most ambitious and accomplished novel--a multi-layered, stylistically innovative exploration of themes of race, class, sexuality, gender, and power in postwar America. Centered around an adulterous interracial affair in a small Connecticut town between the young black scholar-athlete Link Williams and white, privileged munitions heiress Camilo Sheffield, it is also a fond, incisive community portrait, full of unforgettable minor characters, unexpected humor, and a rich sense of history. Also included in the volume are three of Petry's previously uncollected essays related to the novels and a newly researched chronology of the author's life, prepared with the assistance of her daughter Elisabeth Petry.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.

Library of America continues its definitive edition of Wendell Berry's complete fiction, including the novels The Memory of Old Jack and Remembering and 23 brilliant and beautiful stories In this second volume, Port William faces the disappearance of farms and farmers in the decades after World War II, while Andy Catlett resolves to remain in the Membership Set along the banks of the Kentucky River in America's heartland, fictional Port William, Kentucky, is an agrarian world is peopled with memorable and beloved characters collectively known as the Port William Membership. For more than 50 years, Wendell Berry has told Port William's history from the Civil War to the present day, recapturing a time when farming, faith, and family were the anchors of community and the ligaments that bound one generation to the next. Now Library of America continues its definitive edition, prepared in close consultation with the author and published for his 90th birthday, presenting the complete story of Port William for the first time in the order of narrative chronology. This second volume contains 23 stories and 2 novels that span the years 1945 to 1978, as the town faces the forces of mechanization and the looming possibility of its own disappearance. As the generation that came of age after the Civil War disappears, the younger generation increasingly chooses to leave and not return; one of the only exceptions is Andy Catlett, who resolves to remain in and to maintain the Membership. This definitive edition of Wendell Berry's complete fiction includes detailed notes, endpapers featuring a map of Port William and a Membership family tree, and a chronology of Berry's remarkable life and career.

In 1 volume, 3 classic early works by the Southern physician-turned-novelist who galvanized American literature with stories of spiritual searching amid modern angst Includes the landmark, National Book Award-winning The Moviegoer, in a fully annotation edition A physician-turned-writer and self-described diagnostician of "the malaise," Percy plumbed the depths of modern American angst and alienation as few other writers have. Now he joins the Library of America series with a volume collecting his first 3 books. The Moviegoer (1961), winner of the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction, is the story of John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker who finds in movies a resplendent reality that lifts him, for a time, out of the mire of everydayness. Binx is a modern-day pilgrim whose progress unfolds in what editor Paul Elie calls "the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours." In The Last Gentleman (1966), Percy portrays another troubled, searching young man, this time a southerner living in New York whose intermitent amnesia and odd moments of déjà vu lead him to imagine that the world catastrophe everyone fears has already occurred. A satirical work of speculative fiction, Love in the Ruins (1971) introduces lapsed-Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Thomas More, inventor of the lapsometer, a devise that measures the spiritual sickness of a near-apocalyptic America torn apart by the forces of the far right and left. Rounding out the volume are three short nonfiction pieces by Percy: his speech upon accepting the National Book Award, his special message to readers of the Franklin edition of The Moviegoer, and his address to the Publicists' Association of the National Book Awards concerning Love in the Ruins.

Gathered for the first time: one of America's great humorists revisits the books and movies from his youth--often with some embarrassment--in this complete, 22-piece collection From October 1948 to October 1953, The New Yorker published humorist S. J. Perelman's "Cloudland Revisited" series: 22 reviews of once-popular books and silent films whose expiration dates had passed. All but forgotten even at the time, they were nonetheless part of Perelman's youth and made an indelible mark on him. In the comic genius's biting satire they live once again: Gertrude Atherton's sensationalist fantasy Black OxenSax Rohmer's supervillain blockbuster The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchuthe "underwater" silent film adaptation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the SeaEdgar Rice Burrough's 1914 novel Tarzan of the Apesand George Barr McCutcheon's 1901 historical fantasy novel Graustark--the Game of Thrones of its era--which launched numerous sequels and film adaptations The complete series is collected here for the first time. With self-deprecating humor and frequent embarrassment, Perelman reflects on how rereading and rewatching brings us in contact with how we, like an old book or film, have both changed and remained the same. This paperback includes a tribute to Perelman's art by another beloved New Yorker writer, Adam Gopnik.

Together for the first time, all 5 standalone novels from the Hugo and Nebula award-winning writer who reinvented science fiction, including one restored to print Spans from the 1971 classic The Lathe of Heaven to her career-crowning 2008 masterpiece Lavinia This 7th volume in the definitive Library of America edition of Ursula K. Le Guin's works presents 5 remarkable standalone novels that showcase her boundless creativity and literary range. In the Locus Award-winning The Lathe of Heaven (1971), one of Le Guin's most admired works of science fiction, George Orr begins have effective dreams: dreams that change reality itself. But when he turns to the sleep researcher William Haber for help, the doctor sees an opportunity to use Orr's strange gift for his own ends. A former Terran prison colony on the planet Victoria seems destined for revolution in The Eye of the Heron (1978), when the authoritarian leaders in the City try to assert control over the peaceful farmers who have been sent to live around them. The Beginning Place (1980) is a parable-like story in which Hugh and Irena have both found their way to the Beginning Place, a gateway to another world. The two initially become enemies, but must learn to work together when the utopia they've found turns out to have a shadow. The long out-of-print Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand (1991) is a Winesburg, Ohio-like series of linked stories set in a small vacation town on the Oregon coast, where some of the characters have come for a weekend and some for longer, but all are pilgrims in the grip of inexpressible longings. And Le Guin's final, powerfully feminist novel, Lavinia (2008), reimagines Virgil's Aeneid from the perspective of a woman who, in poet's telling, never speaks a word. Special features include an appendix presenting three essays by Le Guin related to the novels, previously unseen hand-drawn maps by author herself, helpful annotation, and a chronology of Le Guin's life and career. Brought together here for the first time, these 5 remarkable standalone novels showcase a Hugo and Nebula Award-winning master at her very best.

A beloved classic returns: S. J. Perelman's own selection of the very best of his hilarious stories and sketches Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joshua Cohen (The Netanyahus) reintroduces America's zaniest humorist to a new generation of readers When asked about himself the writer Sidney Joseph Perelman once quipped, "before they made him, they broke the mold." Nowhere is S. J. Perelman's one-of-a-kind, madcap sensibility--his gift for wordplay, witticism, spoofery, and sheer nonsense--on better display than in his classic collection Crazy Like a Fox, here restored to print for the first time in decades. In a playful, loving tribute to the funny man, novelist Joshua Cohen--also an erudite wordsmith and punster--introduces Perelman's sui generis comic pieces to a new generation of readers, certain to fall in love with the writer whom The New York Times once noted for his ability "to transform the common cliché or figure of speech into an exploding cigar." Included here are such beloved classics as: the Joycean virtuoso performance "Scenario""A Farewell to Omsk," Perelman's hilarious homage to Dostoevskyand "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer," his side-splitting send-up of the hardboiled detective fiction of Raymond ChandlerHere is Perelman's own selection of the very best of his inimitable humor, restored to print for the first time in decades.

In her own words, the legendary American icon who overcame adversity to become a brilliant writer and powerful advocate for the disabled: The Story of My Life, The World I Live In, plus a dozen revealing personal letters, public speeches, essays, and more Here, in a deluxe hardcover edition, is the inspiring story of an American icon--"the greatest woman of our age," as Winston Churchill put it--in her own words. The Story of My Life (1903), published just before she became the first deaf-blind college graduate in the United States, brought Helen Keller worldwide fame, and has remained a touchstone for generations. Recounting her astonishing relationship with her teacher, Annie Sullivan, "the Miracle Worker," it offers still-vivid testimony of the transformative power of love and faith in overcoming adversity. Keller's underappreciated literary artistry and philosophical acumen are especially evident in the personal essays that make up The World I Live In (1908): exploring her own "disability," she reflects profoundly on language, thinking, dreams, belief, and the relations between the senses. Also included are more than a dozen letters, speeches, essays, and other works--most of them from out-of-print, uncollected, or previously unpublished sources--charting more than 50 years of Keller's exemplary life and career. These pieces reveal her commitments to women's rights, workers' rights, racial justice, and peace, as well as her advocacy for the disabled. Kim E. Nielsen, Keller's biographer and the author of A Disability History of the United States, introduces the volume, which includes a 16-page portfolio of photographs and a newly researched chronology of Keller's life, along with authoritative notes and an index.

Rediscover the golden age of journalism, when columns were events, through this collection of more than 70 pieces by a master stylist and larger-than-life character on the New York and national scene from JFK to Trump Plus, on its 50th anniversary, revisit the Watergate summer in How the Good Guys Finally Won, an unforgettable portrait of the Congressional leaders who took down a rogue president "He opened us up to a world of possibilities. What we did with them was our concern. He had his own work to do. No one ever did it better." --John Schulian Across a career spanning six decades, from the Kennedy assassination to 9/11, Jimmy Breslin was the greatest newspaper columnist of his era. The 72 columns selected here by editor Dan Barry, more than half of which have not been reprinted since initial publication, reveal Breslin at his best, addressing stories of national and global importance but more often uncovering tales of ordinary New Yorkers, by turns tragic or absurd but always gripping to read. Gathered here are the highlights of his consummate deadline artistry: his celebrated interview with the man who dug the grave for John F. Kennedy, his coverage of the assassination of Malcolm X, his dispatches from the South at the height of the Civil Rights movement and from Vietnam, accounts of his involvement with the "Son of Sam" case as the serial killer who terrorized New York City in 1977, his story about John Lennon's murder in 1980, his award-winning series about the AIDS crisis in 1986, and his disgusted glimpse of Donald Trump conning the press corps during a book promotion in 1990. These masterful columns are joined by two of Breslin's books: How the Good Guys Finally Won (1976), one of the best accounts of the Watergate scandal, centered on House Majority Leader Tip O'Neill and his allies, whose success in forcing Richard Nixon for office scored an unlikely victory for U.S. democracy; and The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez (2002), the story of an immigrant laborer killed at a construction site in Brooklyn and of the malfeasance among developers, city officials, and others that enabled the accident to happen. As quintessentially a New York figure as the memorable urban characters he portrayed, Breslin nonetheless transcended the confines of his local audience and became a national celebrity, writing with a novelist's awareness of the telling detail that reveals the depth of a person's, and a people's, character.

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 I 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" as the defining issue in American life. The powerful writings gathered here reveal the many ways Americans, Black and white, fought against white supremacist efforts to police the color line, envisioning a better America in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and widespread lynching, mob violence, and police brutality. Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle, Part One brings together speeches, pamphlets, newspaper and magazine articles, public testimony, judicial opinions, letters, and poems and song lyrics--more than eighty essential texts in all--from the end of Reconstruction in 1876 to the bloody "Red Summer" of 1919. The volume includes writing by both famous and lesser known individuals, including: Ida B. Wells on the scourge of lynchingRichard T. Greener's scathing critique of America's "White Problem"Charles Chesnutt on the nullification of the Fifteenth AmendmentBooker T. Washington's historic Atlanta addressJohn Marshall Harlan's eloquent and prophetic dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson;Mary Church Terrell on segregation in the nation's capital and the convict lease systemWilliam Monroe Trotter's dramatic White House confrontation with Woodrow WilsonJeanette Carter's tribute to the men and women who fought back against white mobs in 1919>As the teaching of our nation's history, especially the history of race in America, becomes increasingly contested, this book will serve as a vital resource, a crucial reminder of where we've been, how far we've come, and how long the road ahead remains.

A radical new vision of the nation's founding era and a major act of historical recovery Featuring more than 120 writers, this groundbreaking anthology reveals the astonishing richness and diversity of Black experience in the turbulent decades of the American Revolution Black Writers of the Founding Era is the most comprehensive anthology ever published of Black writing from the turbulent decades surrounding the birth of the United States. An unprecedented archive of historical sources--including more than 200 poems, letters, sermons, newspaper advertisements, slave narratives, testimonies of faith and religious conversion, criminal confessions, court transcripts, travel accounts, private journals, wills, petitions for freedom, even dreams, by over 100 authors--it is a collection that reveals the surprising richness and diversity of Black experience in the new nation. Here are writers both enslaved and free, loyalist and patriot, female and male, northern and southern; soldiers, seamen, and veterans; painters, poets, accountants, orators, scientists, community organizers, preachers, restaurateurs and cooks, hairdressers, criminals, carpenters, and many more. Along with long-famous works like Phillis Wheatley's poems and Benjamin Banneker's astonishing mathematical and scientific puzzles are dozens of first-person narratives offering little-known Black perspectives on the events of the times, like the Boston Massacre and the death of George Washington. From their bold and eloquent contributions to public debates about the meanings of the revolution and the values of the new nation-- writings that dramatize the many ways in which protest, activism, and community organizing have been integral to the Black American experience from the beginning--to their intimate thoughts preserved in private diaries and letters, some unseen to the present day, the words of the many writers gathered here will indelibly alter our understandings of American history. A foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed and an introduction by James G. Basker, along with introductory headnotes and explanatory notes drawing on cutting edge scholarship, illuminate these writers' works and to situate them in their historical contexts. A 16-page color photo insert presents portraits of some of the writers included and images of the original manuscripts, broadside, and books in which their words have been preserved.

Rediscover the sensational 1967 literary thriller that captures the bitter struggles of postwar Black intellectuals and artists With a foreword by Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America's racial fault lines Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames, a character loosely modelled on Richard Wright. In Amsterdam, among Harry's papers, Max uncovers explosive secret government documents outlining "King Alfred," a plan to be implemented in the event of widespread racial unrest and aiming "to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society." Realizing that Harry has been assassinated, Max must risk everything to get the documents to the one man who can help. Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider's view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, including fictionalized portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. John A. Williams and his lost classic are overdue for rediscovery. Few novels have so deliberately blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality as The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and many of its early readers assumed the King Alfred plan was real. In her introduction, Merve Emre examines the gonzo marketing plan behind the novel that fueled this confusion and prompted an FBI investigation. This deluxe paperback also includes a new foreword by novelist Ishmael Reed. "It is a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb . . . . This is a book white people are not ready to read yet, neither are most black people who read. But [it] is the milestone produced since Native Son. Besides which, and where I should begin, it is a damn beautifully written book." --Chester Himes "Magnificent . . . obviously in the Baldwin and Ellison class." --John Fowles "If The Man Who Cried I Am were a painting it would be done by Brueghel or Bosch. The madness and the dance is never-ending display of humanity trying to creep past inevitable Fate." --Walter Mosely

Library of America caps its six-volume edition of William Faulkner's works with a volume gathering of all the stories he collected in his lifetime, in corrected texts Faulkner called the short story "the most demanding form after poetry" and wrote to an editor that "even to a collection of short stories, form, integration, is as important as to a novel--an entity of its own, single, set for one pitch, contrapuntal in integration, toward one end, one finale." Faulkner was a major practitioner of the short story form and keenly sensitive to its aesthetic demands. The Library of America edition of the collected writings of William Faulkner culminates with this volume presenting all the stories the author gathered for his book collections, in newly edited and authoritative texts. This is Faulkner as he was meant to be read. Faulkner's monumental Collected Stories (1950) presented the author's first two collections, These Thirteen (1931) and Doctor Martino (1934), along with seventeen new stories, all carefully selected and arranged by the author; Knight's Gambit (1949) collected six stories about attorney Gavin Stevens' detective work; and in Big Woods (1955) Faulkner gathered four hunting stories connected with interstitial material. This volume presents these three collections as carefully arranged by Faulkner, with new authoritative and corrected texts that best represent Faulkner's intentions for the stories. Here are such well-known stories as "A Rose for Emily," "Barn Burning," and "A Bear Hunt," as well as some of his most poetic--"Carcassone"--and less known, such as "The Tall Men," "Elly," and "Uncle Willy." Also included are Faulkner's stories "The Hound" (collected in Doctor Martino but omitted by the author from Collected Stories), "Spotted Horses," Faulkner's fictionalized autobiographical essay "Mississippi," as well as his Nobel Prize acceptance speech and helpful explanatory notes by Faulkner scholar Theresa M. Towner.

Rediscover one of America's best SF writers in a definitive hardcover edition gathering all her finest work together for the first time A LGBTQIA+ pioneer joins the Library of America series An incandescent stylist with a dark sense of humor and a provocative feminist edge, Joanna Russ upended every genre in which she worked. The essential novels and stories gathered in this definitive Library of America edition make a case for Russ not only as an astonishing writer of speculative fiction, but, in the words of Samuel Delany, "one of the finest--and most necessary--writers of American fiction" period. Here is her now-classic novel The Female Man (1975), in which four remarkable women--Jeannine, Janet, Joanna, and Jael--traverse alternate histories and parallel worlds (including the brilliantly imagined all-female utopia, Whileaway) in a multi-voiced, multidimensional voyage that continues to alter readers' sense of gender and reality. We Who Are About To ... (1977), recounting the fate of a misfit band of space-tourists stranded on an alien world, challenges "golden age" expectations about civilization, in what becomes an allegorical thriller. In On Strike Against God (1980), her incisive, darkly comic, and ultimately joyous final novel, Russ returns to Earth to explore LGBTQIA+ and feminist themes and the unfamiliar territory of "coming out" and lesbian romance. Russ's "Complete Alyx Stories"--which feature her inimitably sly, resilient, and stone-cold heroine Alyx, who is plucked from a life of petty crime in ancient Phoenicia to serve as adventurer-for-hire for the Trans-Temporal Authority, and which reinvent the sword and sorcery genre for a postmodern era--are presented in their entirety here for the first time, and newly restored to print. Also included are her unforgettable tales "When It Changed" and "Souls," the former a 1973 Nebula Award winner and the latter the recipient of the 1983 Hugo and Locus Awards.

Library of America presents a deluxe edition of unforgettable crime thrillers of the 1960s Here in two volumes are 9 timeless novels, including 4 lost classics now restored to print In the 1960s a number of gifted writers--some at the peak of their careers, others newcomers--reimagined American crime fiction. Here are nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade: Fredric Brown's The Murderers (1961), a darkly comic look at a murderous plot hatched on the hip fringes of Hollywood.Dan J. Marlowe's terrifying The Name of the Game Is Death (1962), about a nihilistic career criminal on the runCharles Williams's Dead Calm (1963), a masterful novel of natural peril and human evil on the high seas.Dorothy B. Hughes's The Expendable Man (1963), an unsettling tale of racism and wrongful accusation in the American Southwest.Richard Stark's taut The Score (1964), in which the master thief Parker plots the looting of an entire city with the cool precision of an expert mechanic.The Fiend (1964), in which Margaret Millar maps the interlocking anxieties of a seemingly tranquil California suburb through the rippling effects of a child's disappearance.Ed McBain's classic police procedural Doll (1965), a breakneck story that mixes murder, drugs, fashion models, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of the 87th Precinct.Run Man Run (1966), Chester Himes's nightmarish tale of racism and police violence that follows a desperate young man seeking safe haven in New York City while being hunted by the law.Patricia Highsmith's ultimate meta-thriller, The Tremor of Forgery (1969), a novel in which a displaced traveler finds his own personality collapsing as he attempts to write a novel about a man coming undone.Each volume features an introduction by editor Geoffrey O'Brien (Hardboiled America), newly researched biographies of the writers and helpful notes, and an essay on textual selection.