Серия книг «Library of America» — 20 книг

This first volume of The Library of America’s three-volume edition of the complete prose works of Herman Melville includes three romances of the South Seas. Typee and Omoo, based on the young Melville’s experiences on a whaling ship, are exuberant accounts of the idyllic life among the “cannibals” in Polynesia. They remained his most popular works well into the 20th century. Mardi (“the world” in Polynesian) is a mixture of love story, adventure, and political allegory, set on a mythical Pacific island, that looks forward to the complexities of Moby-Dick. Together, these three romances give early evidence of the genius and daring that make Melville the master novelist of the sea and a precursor of modernist literature. Two companion volumes–Herman Melville: Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick and Herman Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, Uncollected Prose, and Billy Budd complete this edition of Melville’s prose.

This first volume of The Library of America’s three-volume edition of the complete prose works of Herman Melville includes three romances of the South Seas. Typee and Omoo, based…

This Library of America volume offers what no reader has ever been able to find—an authoritative edition of all the tales and sketches of Nathaniel Hawthorne in a single comprehensive volume. Everything is included from his three books of stories, Twice-told Tales (1837, revised 1851), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846, 1854), and The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-told Tales (1851), and from his two books of stories for children based on classical myths, A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys (1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853)—along with sixteen stories not found in any of these volumes.

The stories are arranged, as they never have been in any other edition, in the order of their periodical publication. Readers of Hawthorne will thereby get a unique sense of how he became one of the most powerful and experimental writers of American fiction.

Here are many familiar but always surprising works like “Young Goodman Brown,” “Wakefield,” “The Birth-mark,” “The Artist of the Beautiful,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “Ethan Brand.” And here, too, are many others that deserve to be better known, like:
• “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” a suspenseful story of guilt and parricide;
• “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” where the chances for human love are perilously suspended between the silken license of the revelers and the iron rectitude of the Puritans;
• the masterly tale “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” full of the pains and terrors of national and familial separations, the severing of the ties of blood and culture that united the colonies to England;
• and the exquisite little story “The Wives of the Dead,” about the ambiguities of love and loss, in which, as so often in Hawthorne, the reader at the end is left in a kind of awe at the multiple possibilities of meaning.

To read these stories is to understand anew why Hawthorne is a great artist and an astonishingly contemporary one.

This Library of America volume offers what no reader has ever been able to find—an authoritative edition of all the tales and sketches of Nathaniel Hawthorne in a single…

This Library of America edition is the most comprehensive volume of the work of Walt Whitman ever published. It includes all of his poetry and what he considered his complete prose. It is also the only collection that includes, in exactly the form in which it appeared in 1855, the first edition of Leaves of Grass. This was the book, a commercial failure, which prompted Emerson’s famous message to Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.” These twelve poems, including what were later to be entitled “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” and a preface announcing the author’s poetic theories were the first stage of a massive, lifelong work. Six editions and some thirty-seven years later, Leaves of Grass became one of the central volumes in the history of world poetry.

Each edition involved revisions of earlier poems and the incorporation of new ones. In 1856, for example, he added such poems as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and “Spontaneous Me;” in the third edition (1860), “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and two new sections, “Calamus” and “Children of Adam.” In the fourth (1867), he incorporated the Civil War poems published a few years earlier as Drum-Taps and Sequel to Drum-Taps, including the poems on the death of Lincoln, notably “When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom’d.” As it progressed, it was hailed by Emerson, Thoreau, Rosetti and others, but was also, as with the sixth edition in 1881–82, beset by charges of obscenity for such poems as “A Woman Waits for Me.” Printed here is the final, great culminating edition of 1891–92, the last supervised by Whitman himself just before his death.

Whitman’s prose is no less extraordinary. Specimen Days and Collect (1882) includes reminiscences of nineteenth-century New York City that will fascinate readers in the twenty-first, notes on the Civil War, especially his service in Washington hospitals, and trenchant comments on books and authors. Democratic Vistas (1871), in its attacks on the misuses of national wealth after the Civil War, is relevant to conditions in our own time, and November Boughs (1888) brings together retrospective prefaces, opinions, and random autobiographical bits that are in effect an extended epilogue on Whitman’s life, works, and times.

Here it all is, the complete Whitman—elegiac, comic, furtive, outrageous—the most innovative and original of American authors.

This Library of America edition is the most comprehensive volume of the work of Walt Whitman ever published. It includes all of his poetry and what he considered his complete…

In this Library of America volume are the best and most enduring works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, “the little woman,” as Abraham Lincoln said when he met her in 1861, “who wrote the book that made this great war.” He was referring, with rueful exaggeration, to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), which during its first year had sold over 300,000 copies. Contemporary readers can still appreciate the powerful effects of its melodramatic characterizations and its unapologetic sentimentality. They can also recognize in its treatment of racial violence some of the brooding imagination and realism that anticipates Faulkner’s rendering of the same theme. Stowe was charged with exaggerating the evils of slavery, but her stay in Cincinnati, Ohio, where her father (the formidable Lyman Beecher, head of the Lane Theological Seminary) gave her a close look at the miseries of the slave communities across the Ohio River. People in her circle of friends were continually harboring slaves who escaped across the river from Kentucky on the way, they hoped, to Canada.

Two other novels, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, show the range and variety of her literary accomplishment. The Minister’s Wooing (1859) is set in Newport, Rhode Island, after the Revolution. It is a romance based in part on the life of Stowe’s sister, and it traces to a happy ending the conflicts in a young woman between adherence to Calvinistic rigor and her expression of preference in the choice of a marital partner. The third novel, Oldtown Folks (1869), confirms Stowe’s genius for the realistic rendering of ordinary experience, her talent for social portraiture with a keen satiric edge, and her subtlety in exploring a wide group of themes, from child-rearing practices and religious controversy to romantic seduction and betrayal. But finally, it is the old town and a way of life that no longer exists that is the true subject of this elegiac novel.

In this Library of America volume are the best and most enduring works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, “the little woman,” as Abraham Lincoln said when he met her in 1861, “who wrote…

Mark Twain is perhaps the most widely read and enjoyed of all our national writers. This Library of America collection presents his best-known works, together for the first time in one volume.
Tom Sawyer “is simply a hymn,” said its author, “put into prose form to give it a worldly air,” a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain began Huckleberry Finn the same year Tom Sawyer was published, but he was unable to complete it for several more. It was during this period of uncertainty that Twain made a pilgrimage to the scenes of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a trip that led eventually to Life on the Mississippi. The river in Twain’s descriptions is a bewitching mixture of beauty and power, seductive calms and treacherous shoals, pleasure and terror, an image of the societies it touches and transports.

Each of these works is filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, with horseplay and poetic evocations of scenery, and with characters who have become central to American mythology—not only Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but also Roxy, the mulatto slave in Puddn’head Wilson, one of the most telling portraits of a woman in American fiction. With each book there is evidence of a growing bafflement and despair, until with Puddn’head Wilson, high jinks and games, far from disguising the terrible cost of slavery, become instead its macabre evidence.

Through each of four works, too, runs the Mississippi, the river that T. S. Eliot, echoing Twain, was to call the “strong brown god.” For Twain, the river represented the complex and often contradictory possibilities in his own and his nation’s life. The Mississippi marks the place where civilization, moving west with its comforts and proprieties, discovers and contends with the rough realities, violence, chicaneries, and promise of freedom on the frontier. It is the place, too, where the currents Mark Twain learned to navigate as a pilot—an experience recounted in Life on the Mississippi—move inexorably into the Deep South, so that the innocence of joyful play and boyhood along its shores eventually confronts the grim reality of slavery.

Mark Twain is perhaps the most widely read and enjoyed of all our national writers. This Library of America collection presents his best-known works, together for the first time…

This Library of America volume of Jack London’s best-known work is filled with thrilling action, an intuitive feeling for animal life, and a sense of justice that often works itself out through violence. London enjoyed phenomenal popularity in his own time (which included the depressions of the 1890s and the beginnings of World War One), and he remains one of the most widely read of all American writers.

The Call of the Wild (1903), perhaps the best novel ever written about animals, traces a dog’s sudden entry into the wild and the education necessary for his survival in the ways of the wolf pack. Like many of London’s stories, this one is inspired by the early deprivations of his own pathetically short life: the primitive conditions of life as an oyster pirate in San Francisco; the restless existence of a hobo; the isolation of a prison inmate; the exertion of a laborer in the Oakland slums; and the frustration of a failed prospector for gold in the Alaskan Klondike.

White Fang (1906), in which a wolf-dog becomes domesticated out of love for a man, is apparently the reverse side of the process found in The Call of the Wild, yet for many readers its moments of greatest authenticity are those which suggest that, in actual practice, civilization is pretty much a dog’s life for everyone, of “hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony.”

Though London was a reader of Marx and Nietzsche and an avowed socialist, he doubted that socialism could ever be put into practice and was convinced of the necessity for a brutal individualism. He thought of The Sea-Wolf (1904), the story of Wolf Larsen and his crew of outcasts on the lawless Alaskan seas, as “an attack upon the superman philosophy,” but the Captain is far more memorable than any of the book’s civilized characters. London is an immensely exciting writer partly because the conflicts in his thinking tend to enhance rather than hinder the romantic and thrilling turns of his plots.

The stories of the Klondike, which are based on his personal experiences and the stories of California, Mexico, and the South Seas, span the whole of London’s career as a writer. He is one of the great storytellers in American literature, and his politics, with all their passion and contradiction, come to life through the vigor and red-blooded energy of his prose.

This Library of America volume of Jack London’s best-known work is filled with thrilling action, an intuitive feeling for animal life, and a sense of justice that often works…

By turns an impoverished laborer, a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent in Mexico, a declared socialist, and a writer of enormous popularity the world over, Jack London was the author of brilliant works that reflect his ideas about twentieth-century capitalist societies while dramatizing them through incidents of adventure, romance, and brutal violence. His prose, always brisk and vigorous, rises in The People of the Abyss to italicized horror over the human degradations he saw in the slums of East London. It also accommodates the dazzling oratory of the hero of The Iron Heel, an American revolutionary named Ernest Everhard, whose speeches have the accents of some of London’s own political essays, like the piece (reprinted in this volume) entitled “Revolution.” London’s prophetic political vision was recalled by Leon Trotsky, who observed that when The Iron Heel first appeared, in 1907, not one of the revolutionary Marxists had yet fully imagined “the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capitalism and labor aristocracy.”

Whether he is recollecting, in The Road, the exhilarating camaraderie of hobo gangs, or dramatizing, in Martin Eden, a life like his own, even to the foreshadowing of his own death at age forty, or confessing his struggles with alcoholism in the memoir John Barleycorn, London displays a genius for giving marginal life the aura of romance. Violence and brutality flash into life everywhere in his work, both as a condition of modern urban existence and as the inevitable reaction to it.

Though he is outraged in The People of the Abyss by the condition of the poor in capitalist societies, London is even more appalled by their submission, and in the novel he wrote immediately afterward, The Call of the Wild (in the companion volume, Novels and Stories), he constructed an animal fable about the necessary reversion to savagery. The Iron Heel, with its panoramic scenes of urban warfare in Chicago, envisions the United States taken over by fascists who perpetuate their regime for three hundred years. It constitutes London’s warning to his fellow socialists that mere persuasion is insufficient to combat a system that ultimately relies on force.

By turns an impoverished laborer, a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent in Mexico, a declared socialist, and a writer of enormous popularity the world over, Jack London was…

The four novels collected in this Library of America volume are among the classic works from the immensely productive career of America’s most influential man of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. William Dean Howells was a champion of French and Russian realistic writers and a brilliant advocate of the most controversial American writers of his own time. A close friend of Mark Twain and Henry James, he defended them against the attacks of their more genteel and nationalistic compatriots, and he was also sympathetic to the realistic starkness and radicalism of younger writers like Frank Norris and Stephen Crane. Howells’s own realism elaborates what he called a “merciful distrust of our own judgements.” This distrust, in part a recognition of the degree to which social institutions intrude upon and shape our private lives, informs both the subjects of his novels and the way they are written. Howells is always more deferential than didactic, and the difficulties of human relationships are intentionally left unresolved.

In A Foregone Conclusion (1875), a young American painter roams through Europe for years before at last deciding to marry the woman who, he erroneously thinks, has been in love with an Italian priest turned agnostic. A Modern Instance (1882) offers an unflinching portrait of an unhappy marriage and ends with a hero barred by his perhaps overscrupulous conscience from marrying the divorced heroine. Once again personal dilemmas are seen as symptoms of the rapid displacement of older social and religious stabilities by opportunism and commercial progress.

One of the most engaging of all his novels, Indian Summer (1885), is touched with the Jamesian glamour of romantic confusion among two American couples in Italy. Here Howells’s realism takes a quietly humorous turn. Situations which might be exploited by another novelist for their theatrical or melodramatic possibilities are instead eroded by the often trivial or casual experiences of everyday living. Characteristically, Howells is opposed to exaggeration in the interest of discovering how people, despite the crises that beset them, manage to find their way.

The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Howells’s best-known work, gives a brilliantly skeptical portrait of American business life and its perils, celebrating not the rise but the loss of fortune that makes possible the hero’s recovery of his earlier integrity and happiness. “There are,” remarked a contemporary reviewer, “thousands of Silas Laphams throughout the United States,” and present-day readers might agree that there still are.

The four novels collected in this Library of America volume are among the classic works from the immensely productive career of America’s most influential man of letters at the…

Well over a century after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, Moby-Dick is a haunting, mesmerizing, and important social commentary populated with several of the most unforgettable and enduring characters in literature. Written with wonderfully redemptive humor, Moby-Dick is a profound and timeless inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

Well over a century after its publication, Moby-Dick still stands as an indisputable literary classic. It is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war…

Here, in one Library of America volume, are all five of Hawthorne’s world-famous novels. Written in a richly suggestive style that seems remarkably contemporary, they are permeated by his own history as well as America’s.

In The House of the Seven Gables, for example, Hawthorne alludes to his ancestor’s involvement in the Salem witch trials, as he follows the fortunes of two rival families, the Maules and the Pyncheons. The novel moves across 150 years of American history, from an ancestral crime condoned by Puritan theocracy to reconciliation and a new beginning in the bustling Jacksonian era.

Considered Hawthorne’s greatest work, The Scarlet Letter is a dramatic allegory of the social consequences of adultery and the subversive force of personal desire in a community of laws. The transgression of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale; the innate lawlessness of their bastard child, Pearl; and the torturous jealousy of the husband Roger Chillingworth eventually erupt through the stern reserve of Puritan Boston. The Scarlet Letter engages the moral and romantic imagination of readers who ponder the question of sexual freedom and its place in the social world.

Fanshawe is an engrossing apprentice work that Hawthorne published anonymously and later sought to suppress. Written during his undergraduate years at Bowdoin College, it is a tragic romance of an ascetic scholar’s love for a merchant’s daughter.

The Blithedale Romance is a novel about the perils, which Hawthorne knew first-hand, of living in a utopian community. The utilitarian reformer Hollingsworth, the reticent narrator Miles Coverdale, the unearthly Priscilla, and the sensuous Zenobia (purportedly modeled on Margaret Fuller) act out a drama of love and rejection, idealism and chicanery, millennial hope and suicidal despair on an experimental commune in rural Massachusetts.

The Marble Faun, Hawthorne’s last finished novel, uses Italian landscapes where sunlight gives way to mythological shadings as a background for mysteries of identity and murder. Its two young Americans, Kenyon and Hilda, become caught up in the disastrous passion of Donatello, an ingenuous nobleman, for the beautiful, mysterious Miriam, a woman trying to escape her past.

Here, in one Library of America volume, are all five of Hawthorne’s world-famous novels. Written in a richly suggestive style that seems remarkably contemporary, they are…

This Library of America volume, along with its companion, incorporates, for the first time in compact form, all seven titles of Francis Parkman’s monumental account of France and England’s imperial struggle for dominance on the North American continent. Parkman conceived the project in 1841, when he was a Harvard sophomore, and persisted in it despite chronic disorders that affected his eyes. The last volume of what he called his “history of the American forest” appeared almost thirty years after the first. Deservedly compared as a literary achievement to Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Parkman’s accomplishment is hardly less awesome than the explorations and adventures he so vividly describes. His own indomitable spirit is reflected in two of the history’s most fiercely resolute figures: La Salle, obsessed with colonizing the Mississippi Valley, and Frontenac, determined to bolster France’s tottering position in the New World. He tells a story of great empires maneuvering in an unfamiliar and hostile terrain with all the guile, sophistication, and ingenuity learned from centuries of European rivalry.

Pioneers of France in the New World (1865) begins with the early and tragic settlement of the French Huguenots in Florida, then shifts to the northern reaches of the continent and follows the expeditions of Samuel de Champlain up the St. Lawrence River and into the Great Lakes as he mapped the wilderness, organized the fur trade, promoted Christianity among the natives, and waged a savage forest campaign against the Iroquois.

The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867) traces the zealous efforts of the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic orders to convert the Native American tribes of North America. Jean de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, Marguerite Bourgeoys, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Joseph Bressani represent only a few of that resolute company, many of whom suffered captivity, torture, and martyrdom in the far corners of the wilderness.

La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869) records that explorer’s voyages on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and his treks, often alone, across the vast western prairies and through the labyrinthine swamps of Louisiana. Although he won the respect and admiration of the Native Americans, La Salle often distrusted and alienated his associates. He survived two attempts to poison him before he was finally assassinated by his own men in a lonely Texas outpost.

The Old Régime in Canada (1874) recounts the political struggles among the religious sects, colonial officials, feudal chiefs, royal ministers, and military commanders of Canada. Their bitter fights over the monopoly of the fur trade, the sale of brandy to the natives, the importation of wives from the orphanages and poorhouses of France, and the bizarre fanaticism of religious extremists and their “incessant supernaturalism” animate this pioneering social history of early Canada.

Parkman’s chronicle of nearly two and a half centuries of conflict will permanently transform our image of the American landscape. Written with verve, suppleness, and wit, this grand narrative history of political and theological conflict, of feats of physical endurance, of courtly manners practiced with comic disproportion against the backdrop of a looming wilderness, is itself one of the still-undiscovered treasures of our national and of world literature.

This Library of America volume, along with its companion, incorporates, for the first time in compact form, all seven titles of Francis Parkman’s monumental account of France and…

This is the second of two Library of America volumes (the companion volume here) presenting, in compact form, all seven parts of Francis Parkman’s monumental narrative history of the struggle for control of the American continent. Thirty years in the writing, Parkman’s “history of the American forest” is an accomplishment hardly less awesome than the explorations and adventures he so vividly describes. The story reaches its climax with the fatal confrontation of two great commanders at Quebec’s Plains of Abraham—and a daring stratagem that would determine the future of a continent.

Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877) details how France might have won her imperial struggle with England. Frontenac, a courtier who was made governor of New France by that most sagacious of monarchs, oversaw the colony’s brightest era of growth and influence. Had Canada’s later governors possessed his administrative skill and personal force, his sense of diplomacy and political talent, or his grasp of the uses of power in a modern world, the English colonies to the south might have become part of what Frontenac saw as a continental scheme of French dominion.

England’s American colonies flourished, while France, in both the Old World and the New, declined from its greatness of the late seventeenth century. Conflict over the developing western regions of North America erupted in a series of colonial wars. As narrated by Parkman in A Half-Century of Conflict (1892), these American campaigns, while only part of a larger, global struggle, prepared the colonies for the American Revolution.

In Montcalm and Wolfe (1884) Parkman describes the fatal confrontation of the two great French and English commanders whose climactic battle marked the end of French power in America. As the English colonies cooperated for their own defense, they began to realize their common interests, their relative strength, and their unique position. In this imperial war of European powers we also begin to see the American figures—Benjamin Franklin, George Washington—soon to occupy a historical stage of their own.

Parkman’s chronicle of nearly two and a half centuries of conflict will permanently transform our image of the American landscape. Written with verve, suppleness, and wit, this grand narrative history of political and theological conflict, of feats of physical endurance, of courtly manners practiced with comic disproportion against the backdrop of a looming wilderness, is itself one of the still-undiscovered treasures of our national and of world literature.

This is the second of two Library of America volumes (the companion volume here) presenting, in compact form, all seven parts of Francis Parkman’s monumental narrative history of…

A resourceful and prolific writer of fiction, travel, criticism, and cultural commentary, Henry James is one of the most entertaining of American writers. His first five novels, presented complete in this Library of America volume, are filled with sparkling dialogue, masterfully timed suspense, and the romance of youthful and artistic aspiration. The European-American contrast, which gives a special dimension and sharpness to all of James’s cultural observations, is brilliantly deployed in these early works. And what is additionally appealing about them is an attentiveness, not as frequently found in his other novels, to the American scene in New York and New England.

James’s first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), written when he was only 28, is a Pygmalion-type story in which a proper Bostonian gentleman grows to love and eventually marry the much younger woman whose guardian he is.

Roderick Hudson (1875) is a novel about a headstrong and proud young American sculptor of generous native talent who loses his way among the entanglements and temptations of Italy. Set in Rome, where James was living when he wrote it, the novel describes the studios, society, and excesses of the cosmopolitan artists’ colony there.

The American (1877) was written in Paris and is filled with scenes of Parisian life, the expatriate culture of American tourists, and the closed and protective world behind the barriers of old families and traditions. The confrontations between Old World scheming and New World energy are presented through the efforts of Christopher Newman, a successful, handsome, Western businessman, to marry the beautiful, refined, and tragic Madame de Cintré.

In The Europeans (1878) a pristine, conservative, 1830s New England village is invaded by two visiting cousins, brother and sister, from the European branch of one of the town’s leading families. The comic exchanges between Eugenia, with her aura of exoticism and her morganatic marriage, and her American hosts, make this one of James’s most delightful studies in character.

Confidence (1880), a little-known and charming novel of American expatriates traveling through the great cities and watering-places of Europe, is a light drawing-room comedy about the romantic entanglements among two old friends and the two very different women they encounter.

An immensely engaging introduction to one of the great novelists of our own or any country, this is the first volume in our collection of the complete works of James’s fiction.

A resourceful and prolific writer of fiction, travel, criticism, and cultural commentary, Henry James is one of the most entertaining of American writers. His first five novels,…

This Library of America volume includes the best-known works of Henry Adams, one of the most powerful and original minds to illuminate the American scene from the Civil War to World War I. Now brought together for the first time in a single volume, these works show the many forms—fiction, poetry, philosophical and historical speculation, autobiography—in which Adams gave expression to his vision of the meaning of the unsettling changes in American life and values.

Each of the two novels, Democracy and Esther, chooses a woman on whom to center the effects of social change. In Democracy, Madeleine Lee, an emancipated and idealistic young widow, moves to Washington to learn the nature of political power and is disillusioned upon discovering the intrigues of rampant corruption. The free-thinking heroine in Esther, caught in the warfare between science and religion, finds that she cannot surrender her moral independence, even to marry a clergyman.

Adams, though a man of the modern world, remained in temperament a child of the eighteenth century, his political ideals shaped by his presidential ancestors, great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams. The failure of those ideals to withstand the challenges of an industrialized America drove him to seek refuge in the study of the medieval age of faith in France. Out of it came his skeptic’s “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres.” Her presence dominates the book that followed—Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. In evocative and sensitive prose Adams moves from the architecture, sculpture, and stained glass of Chartres to the religion, literature, politics, social order, and crusades of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Adams translates the poetry of courtly love and recounts the drama of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s life and the timeless love of Abelard and Heloise. The narrative rises at the end to the brilliantly re-enacted drama of St. Thomas Aquinas’ victory over the rival philosophers.

If Mont Saint Michel portrayed a world unified by a common faith, The Education of Henry Adams portrayed a world irresistibly moving toward chaos. The world once unified by the Virgin was now ruled by the impersonal Dynamo and was already confronted by the “metaphysical bomb” of radium and the prospect of infinite energy for man’s use. Adams balances, with extraordinary urbanity and wit, the rival claims he found as much in himself as in modern civilization. Together, these two works still pose an urgent question: can the human mind ultimately control the monstrous aggregates of power which it has wrung from nature?

This Library of America volume includes the best-known works of Henry Adams, one of the most powerful and original minds to illuminate the American scene from the Civil War to…

This first Library of America volume of Emerson’s writing covers the most productive period of his life, 1832–1860. Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what he called “the great and crescive self,” he dramatizes and records its vicissitudes.

Here are the indispensable and most renowned works, including “The American Scholar” (“our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes called it), “The Divinity School Address,” considered atheistic by many of his listeners, the summons to “Self-Reliance,” along with the more embattled realizations of “Circles” and, especially, “Experience.” Here, too, are his wide-ranging portraits of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and other “representative men,” and his astute observations on the habits, lives, and prospects of the English and American people.

This volume includes Emerson’s well-known Nature; Addresses, and Lectures (1849), his Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844), plus Representative Men (1850), English Traits (1856), and his later book of essays, The Conduct of Life (1860). These are the works that established Emerson’s colossal reputation in America and found him admirers abroad as diverse as Carlyle, Nietzsche, and Proust.

Emerson’s enduring power is apparent everywhere in American literature: in those, like Whitman and some of the major twentieth-century poets, who seek to corroborate his vision, and among those, like Hawthorne and Melville, who questioned, qualified, and struggled with it. Emerson’s vision reverberates also in the tradition of American philosophy, notably in the writings of William James and John Dewey, in the works of his European admirers, such as Nietzsche, and in the avant-garde theorists of our own day who write on the nature and function of language. The reasons for Emerson’s durability will be obvious to any reader who follows the exhilarating, exploratory movements of his mind in this uniquely full gathering of his work.

Not merely another selection of his essays, this volume includes all his major books in their rich entirety. No other volume conveys so comprehensively the exhilaration and exploratory energy of perhaps America’s greatest writer.

This first Library of America volume of Emerson’s writing covers the most productive period of his life, 1832–1860. Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson…

This Library of America volume brings together the first four works of Washington Irving, America’s first internationally recognized man of letters. Irving’s early writings earned the admiration of literary figures like Hawthorne, Poe, Coleridge, Byron, Scott, and Dickens. He was widely traveled, a connoisseur of the theater both at home and abroad, and an intimate of royalty and high society in Europe and America.

Irving’s career as a writer began obscurely at age seventeen, when his brother’s newspaper published his series of comic reports on the theater, theater-goers, fashions, balls, courtships, duels, and marriages of his contemporary New York, called Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. Written in the persona of an elderly gentleman of the old school, these letters captured his fellow townsmen at play in their most incongruous attitudes of simple sophistication. Irving’s next work, Salmagundi, written in collaboration with his brother William and James Kirke Paulding, and published at irregular intervals in 1805–06, continued this roguish style of satire and burlesque. Gossipy and current, filled with the latest news of the theater and other goings-on about town, or stirring up yet another literary squabble or scandal, Salmagundi is written with the innovativeness and energy of an accomplished new voice bursting upon a startled literary scene.

A History of New York, publicized by an elaborate hoax in the local newspapers concerning the disappearance of the elderly “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” turned out to be a wild and hilarious spoof that combined real New York history with political satire. Quickly reprinted in England, it was admired by Walter Scott and Charles Dickens (who carried his copy in his pocket). In later years, as Irving revised and re-revised his History, he softened his gibes at Thomas Jefferson, the Dutch, and the Yankees of New England; this Library of America volume presents the work in its original, exuberant, robust, and unexpurgated form, giving modern readers a chance to enjoy the version that brought him immediate international acclaim.

The Sketch Book contains Irving’s two best-loved stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” It also includes many sketches of English country and city life, as well as nostalgic portraits of vanishing traditions, like the old celebrations of Christmas. One of Irving’s most captivating books, it reveals both the brilliance of his realistic depictions and his ability to appropriate European fables and themes to native purposes.

A writer of great urbanity and poise, acutely sensitive to the nostalgia of a passing age, Washington Irving was a central figure in America’s emergence on the international scene.

This Library of America volume brings together the first four works of Washington Irving, America’s first internationally recognized man of letters. Irving’s early writings earned…

Now fully represented in this Library of America volume is the most comprehensive testimony of the writings of our third president and foremost spokesperson for democracy. Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant political thinker, is perhaps best known for the Declaration of Independence, but he was a man of extraordinarily wide interests.

He was exceptionally controversial in his own time, and many of his ideas remain the subject of national debate. In his arguments for a system of general education, for local rather than central authority, for caution in international affairs, for religious and intellectual freedom, and for economic and social justice, Jefferson defined the issues that still direct our national political life centuries after the nation’s formation. This volume will give readers the opportunity to reassess one of our most influential presidents.

Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address is a resounding statement of faith in a democracy of enlightened people. His Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) is an invaluable record of the landscape, inhabitants, life, and daily customs of America in the Revolutionary and early national eras. His letters, more than two hundred and fifty of which are gathered here, are brilliant urbane missives to such men as Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Lafayette, John Adams and James Madison. His slim Autobiography (1821), written “for my own more ready reference, and for the information of my family,” hardly hints at the influence and impact he had as Secretary of State under George Washington, Minister to France, opposition-party Vice President to John Adams, and, after leaving the presidency, founder of the University of Virginia.

His public papers and addresses fully demonstrate both the breadth of his interests and the power of his expressive mind. Extensively read (his personal library of ten thousand volumes became the foundation of the Library of Congress) and widely traveled, Jefferson wrote with ease and spontaneity about science, archaeology, botany and gardening, religion, literature, architecture, education, the habits of his fellow citizens, and, of course, his beloved home, Monticello.

Jefferson’s prose has an energy, clarity, and charming off-handedness, consistent with his conviction that style in writing should impose no barrier between the most educated and the most common reader. For those who want a renewed sense of the opportunity for human freedom that the United States represented to its founders, this is an indispensable book.

Now fully represented in this Library of America volume is the most comprehensive testimony of the writings of our third president and foremost spokesperson for democracy. Thomas…

This Library of America volume shows why Stephen Crane has come to be recognized as one of the most innovative and diversely talented writers of his generation, even though he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. This comprehensive collection includes all his most accomplished and best-known works: five novels, short stories, journalism, war correspondence, and his two completed books of poetry.

Here are the classic novels he published in a span of five years: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), about a young and confused Union soldier under fire for the first time; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a vivid portrait of slum life and a young girl’s fall; George’s Mother (1896), about New York’s Bowery and its effect on a young workingman fresh from the country; The Third Violet (1897), the story of a bohemian artist’s country romance; and The Monster (1899), a novella about sacrifice and rescue, guilt and isolation.

Among his short stories are such masterpieces as “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” His prose is at the same time dense and lean, suited to his description of the elusive forces that impinge upon his characters, and suited also to his desire not to circumscribe them with traditional moral and interpretive definition. Included here as well are the Whilomville stories of children and childhood in small-town America and the Sullivan County sketches of turn-of-the-twentieth-century rural life.

As a journalist, Crane covered the Spanish-American War and the Greco-Turkish War, traveled through Mexico and the West, and reported on the seamier sides of New York City life; the best of his dispatches are gathered here. Also featured are both of Crane’s collections of epigrammatic free verse—The Black Riders (1895) and War is Kind (1899)—and selections from his uncollected poems. His poetry shows strong affinities to Emily Dickinson, while also anticipating the Imagist movement later in the twentieth century.

This is the most substantial gathering of Crane’s work ever made available in one volume; it is an enduring testimony to his heroic achievement.

This Library of America volume shows why Stephen Crane has come to be recognized as one of the most innovative and diversely talented writers of his generation, even though he…

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.

But his enormous popularity and his continuing influence on literature depend less on legend or vision than on his stylistic and formal accomplishments as a writer of fiction and as a great lyric poet (“always for all lands,” as Yeats said), famous for the sensuous musicality of “To Helen,” “The City in the Sea,” and “Annabel Lee” and for the hypnotic, incantatory rhythms of “The Raven” and “Ulalume.”

“The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Cask of Amontillado” show Poe’s mastery of Gothic horror; his “The Pit and the Pendulum” is a classic of terror and suspense. He invented the modern detective story, as 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 “ratiocination.”

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 as a writer, his oeuvre culminates in his vision of an indeterminate universe, 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.”

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…

This is the most complete one-volume edition of Poe’s essays and reviews ever published. Here are all his major writings on the theory of poetry, the art of fiction, and the duties of a critic: “The Rationale of Verse,” “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Poetic Principle,” and “About Critics and Criticism.” Articulating Poe’s passion for technical proficiency and his theory of poetic method, these essays show why he so strongly influenced the French symbolists toward the end of nineteenth century and, through them, the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Hart Crane.

Included in this collection are Poe’s reviews and candid opinions of the leading literary figures of his day: Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Percy Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Margaret Fuller, among others. Here also are reviews of long-forgotten writers, reviews that are interesting not so much for their subjects as for Poe’s unflinching and witty candor. Many of his then controversial judgments have been vindicated by time.

Poe particularly relished his prolonged critical war with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard and America’s most respected poet of the nineteenth century, whom he accused of conventionality and plagiarism. The skirmishes in this campaign are represented here in full.

Poe wrote many articles describing the literary world in which he circulated: “The Literati of New York,” the “Editorial Miscellanies” from the Broadway Journal, “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” and his long running series “Marginalia.”

Also included are a wealth of articles on a wide variety of topics: South Sea exploration, cryptography, drama, geography, music, transcendentalism, phrenology, ancient languages, and modern cities.

As a reviewer Poe was direct, discriminating, and feared; as an essayist he was alert to any possibility that in literature there might be found a sense of unity missing from life. This volume restores an essential and often neglected part of our literary heritage.

This is the most complete one-volume edition of Poe’s essays and reviews ever published. Here are all his major writings on the theory of poetry, the art of fiction, and the…