The Library of America’s inspiring story

Authors of great American literature come from all walks of life. Novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty started as a journalist. Robert Frost farmed poultry and taught school before penning poems of rural life. And Frederick Douglass turned his experiences as a slave into powerful speeches and writings that helped abolish slavery in the U.S.

Founded in 1979, the Library of America captures their work and other disparate American writers’ voices. The novels, short stories, essays, plays and poems the library publishes testify to America’s creative legacy and to the receptiveness of U.S. readers to new ideas, styles and voices.

Max Rudin, the library’s president, says the nonprofit publishes authoritative collections that have significant literary merit or historical significance. “These are the touchstones,” Rudin says. “They are the great texts that bind us together as Americans.”

The library fulfills literary critic Edmund Wilson’s dream of bringing America’s greatest writing to everyday people at an affordable price. One of its founders, editor and publisher Jason Epstein, considered the library an American answer to France’s La Pléiade, a collection of famous French writings.

Its selections offer readers a way to read many books that have gone out of print and also more well-known texts, commonly taught in schools, such as Douglass’ writings and Frost’s poems. In every case, the library delivers authoritative texts written as closely as possible to authors’ intents.

Volumes, each printed in the library’s trademark black cover with its red-white-and-blue ribbon design, include discarded passages from Richard Wright’s Native Son. A William Faulkner collection restores the author’s experimental syntax to early novels that had been heavily revised by editors before earlier publications. Each volume is designed to be compact and easy to hold in one hand while riding on a bus or the subway.

The library’s 390 collections survey American literature back to the Founding era, when George Washington and Thomas Jefferson wrote political philosophy. It continues to evolve. Recent or forthcoming publications track literary movements like the Harlem Renaissance — an outpouring of music and literature in early 20th century New York — or the development of the short story — a largely American art form with its genesis in the early 19th century.

Rudin says publishing collections drawn from entire literary movements enables the library to include influential, but lesser-known writers in addition to established names.

A forthcoming volume of African American science fiction and fantasy stories reveals connections among contemporary writers like N.K. Jemisin and earlier science-fiction writers like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin, whose works the library has published previously in separate volumes.

“Part of the idea of the Library of America is to suggest that the tradition is living,” Rudin says. “We’re publishing these books because they’re still inspiring and provoking writers now.”