His stories opened up crime fiction to the realities of American streets and American speech. Now The Library of America collects the finest of them: 24 in all, along with some revealing essays and an early version of his novel The Thin Man. The texts, reprinted here for the first time, are those that appeared originally in the pulps, without the cuts and revisions introduced by later editors.Hammett's years of experience as a Pinkerton detective give even his most outlandishly plotted mysteries a gritty credibility. Mixing melodramatic panache and poker-faced comedy, his stories are hard-edged entertainment for an era of headlong change and extravagant violence, tracking the devious, nearly nihilistic exploits of con men and blackmailers, slumming socialites and deadpan assassins. As guide through this underworld he created the Continental Op, the nameless and deliberately unheroic detective separated from the brutality and corruption around him only by his professionalism.

    So too are his abiding themes: the madness of war, the vanity of human striving, and the social costs of technological innovation.Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952), is the story of Dr. Paul Proteus, chief engineer at the Ilium Works, an electronics company in upstate New York. Ill at ease with himself and his changing times, Proteus must choose sides in a looming civil war that threatens the brave new world he has helped to create. A kind of postwar Metropolis, Player Piano is at once a witty satire on the culture of General Electric headquarters, where Vonnegut once worked as a publicist, and a profound meditation on the dignity and necessity of work.Set on Earth, Mars, Mercury, and the moons of Saturn, The Sirens of Titan (1959) is a vertiginous ride down a funnel in space-time with a trio of stuffed shirts spoiling for their pratfalls: Winston Niles Rumfoord, a patrician New Englander and paragon of style; his beautiful touch-me-not wife, Beatrice; and Malachi Constant, the world’s luckiest, wealthiest man. Are they really what they imagine themselves to be, the perfected products of a benevolent universe? Or does somebody up there despise them? Only Salo, the gentleman-robot from the planet Tralfamadore, knows for sure.In 1961 a German American named Howard W. Campbell, Jr.—the Tokyo Rose of the Third Reich—is discovered in Manhattan by a team of Nazi hunters and brought to Jerusalem to stand trial. Mother Night (1962) presents Campbell’s prison-cell confessions, revealing him to be a double agent who infiltrated the highest echelons of the Nazi propaganda ministry in order to broadcast intelligence to the Allies. But as he awaits his date with justice, Campbell faces an even more rigorous trial in the court of his own conscience.Rounding out the volume are six of Vonnegut’s best science fiction stories, including “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” “EPICAC,” “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” and “Harrison Bergeron,” the fantasy that skewered “political correctness” before there was a name for it.

    From the publication of his first collections, A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), Frost was recognized as a poet of unique power and formal skill, and the enduring significance of his work has been acknowledged by each subsequent generation. His poetry ranges from deceptively simply pastoral lyrics and genial, vernacular genre pieces to darker meditations, complex and ironic.Here, based on extensive research into his manuscripts and published work, is the first authoritative and truly comprehensive collection of his writings. Brought together for the first time in a Library of America single volume is all the major poetry, a generous selection of uncollected poems, all of Frost’s dramatic writing, and the most extensive gathering of his prose writings ever published, several of which are printed here for the first time.The core of this collection is the 1949 Complete Poems of Robert Frost, the last collection supervised by Frost himself. This version of the poems is free of unauthorized editorial changes introduced into subsequent editions. Also included is In the Clearing (1962), Frost’s final volume of poetry. Verse drawn from letters, articles, pamphlets, and journals makes up the largest selection of uncollected poems ever assembled, including nearly two dozen beautiful early works printed for the first time. Also gathered here are all the dramatic works: three plays and two verse masques.The unprecedented prose section includes more than three times as many items as any other collection available. It is rich and diverse, presenting many newly discovered or rediscovered pieces. Especially unusual items include Frost’s contribution to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration and two fascinating 1959 essays on “The Future of Man.” Several manuscript items are published here for the first time, including the essays “‘Caveat Poeta’” and “The Way There,” Frost’s remarks on being appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1958, the preface to a proposed new edition of North of Boston, and many others. A selection of letters represents all of Frost’s important comments about prosody, poetics, style, and his theory of “sentence sounds.”

    Scott Fitzgerald wrote the works that brought him instant fame, mastering the glittering aphoristic prose and keen social observation that would distinguish all his writing. Celebrating the riotous energy and naïve optimism of a generation that believed itself liberated from the past, Fitzgerald’s early works, which are collected in this Library of America volume, also sound a plaintive strain beneath the era’s wild cacophony, a lament for the wasted potential of youth. They remain the fullest literary expression of one of the most fascinating eras in American life.This Side of Paradise (1920) gave Fitzgerald the early success that defined and haunted him for the rest of his career. Offering in its Princeton chapters the most enduring portrait of college life in American literature, this lyrical novel records the ardent and often confused longings of its hero’s struggles to find love and to formulate a philosophy of life.Flappers and Philosophers (1920), a collection of accomplished short stories, includes such classics as “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong,” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and “The Ice Palace.”Fitzgerald continues his dissection of a self-destructive era in his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), as the self-styled aristocrat Anthony Patch and his beautiful wife, Gloria, are cut off from an inheritance and forced to endure the excruciating dwindling of their fortune. Here New York City, playground for the pleasure-loving Patches and brutal mirror of their dissipation, is portrayed more vividly than anywhere else in Fitzgerald’s work.Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), his second collection of stories, includes the novella “May Day,” featuring interlocking tales of debutantes, soldiers, and socialists brought together in the uncertain aftermath of World War I, and “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” a fable in which the excesses of the Jazz Age take the hallucinatory form of a palace of unfathomable opulence hidden deep in the Montana Rockies.

    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.

    The longest poem covers less than two pages. Yet in theme and tone her writing reaches for the sublime as it charts the landscape of the human soul. A true innovator, Dickinson experimented freely with conventional rhythm and meter, and often used dashes, off rhymes, and unusual metaphors—techniques that strongly influenced modern poetry. Dickinson’s idiosyncratic style, along with her deep resonance of thought and her observations about life and death, love and nature, and solitude and society, have firmly established her as one of America’s true poetic geniuses.

    The Library of America volume Novels 1956–1964 opens with Seize the Day, a tightly wrought novella that, unfolding over the course of a single devastating day, explores the desperate predicament of the failed actor and salesman Tommy Wilhelm. The austere psychological portraiture of Seize the Day is followed by an altogether different book, Henderson the Rain King, the ebullient tale of the irresistible eccentric Eugene Henderson, best characterized by his primal mantra “I want! I want!” Beneath the novel’s comic surface lies an affecting parable of one man’s quest to know himself and come to terms with morality; like Don Quixote, Henderson is, as Bellow later described him, “an absurd seeker of high qualities.”Henderson’s irrepressible vitality is matched by that of Moses Herzog, the eponymous hero of Bellow’s best-selling 1964 novel. His wife having abandoned him for his best friend, Herzog is on the verge of mental collapse and has embarked on a furious letter-writing campaign as an outlet for his all-consuming rage. Bellow’s bravura performance in Herzog launched a new phase of his career, as literary acclaim was now joined by a receptive mass audience in America.

    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.”

    Includes a detailed chronology of the war, historical maps, a glossary of military terms, and photos and illustrations.

    In his brief, often turbulent life, he left enduring evidence of his unwavering intensity, observant eye, and sometimes savage wit.This Library of America volume collects his fiction along with his extraordinary experiment in what might be called prophetic journalism, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a collaboration with photographer Walker Evans that began as an assignment from Fortune magazine to report on the lives of Alabama sharecroppers, and that expanded into a vast and unique mix of reporting, poetic meditation, and anguished self-revelation that Agee described as “an effort in human actuality.” A 64-page photo insert reproduces Evans’s now-iconic photographs from the expanded 1960 edition.A Death in the Family, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that he worked on for over a decade and that was published posthumously in 1957, recreates in stunningly evocative prose Agee’s childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the upheaval his family experienced after his father’s death in a car accident when Agee was six years old. A whole world, with its sensory vividness and social constraints, comes to life in this child’s-eye view of a few catastrophic days. It is presented here for the first time in a text with corrections based on Agee’s manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.This volume also includes The Morning Watch (1951), an autobiographical novella that reflects Agee’s deep involvement with religious questions, and three short stories: “Death in the Desert,” “They That Sow in Sorrow Shall Not Reap,” and the remarkable allegory “A Mother’s Tale.”

    S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, many other notables.

    A collection of astonishing originality and intensity, it spoke of politics, sexual emancipation, and what it meant to be an American. From the joyful “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric” to the elegiac “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s art fuses oratory, journalism, and song in a vivid celebration of humanity. Containing all Whitman’s known poetic work, this edition reprints the final, or “deathbed,” edition of Leaves of Grass (1891–92). Earlier versions of many poems are also given, including the 1855 “Song of Myself.”Features a completely new—and fuller—introduction discussing the development of Whitman's poetic career, his influence on later American poets, and his impact on the American cultural sensibilityIncludes chronology, updated suggestions for further reading, and extensive notes

    This modern section has been overhauled to reflect the diversity of American writing since 1945. A section on 19th-century women's writing is included.

    From Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, to Robert Haas and Louise Gluck, this anthology takes the full measure of our poetry's daring energies and its tender understandings.

    A must for this counterculture idol's legion of fans.