Now, The Library of America collects On the Road together with four other autobiographical “road books” published during a remarkable four-year period.The Dharma Bums (1958), at once an exploration of Buddhist spirituality and an account of the Bay Area poetry scene, is notable for its thinly veiled portraits of Kerouac’s acquaintances, including Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth. The Subterraneans (1958) recounts a love affair set amid the bars and bohemian haunts of San Francisco. Tristessa (1960) is a melancholy novella describing a relationship with a prostitute in Mexico City. Lonesome Traveler (1960) collects travel essays that evoke journeys in Mexico and Europe, and concludes with an elegiac lament for the lost world of the American hobo. Also included in Road Novels are selections from Kerouac’s journal, which provide a fascinating perspective on his early impressions of material eventually incorporated into On the Road.

    As companion to its volume of Wilder?s collected plays, The Library of America?s edition of his early novels and stories brings together five novels that highlight his wit, erudition, innovative formal structures, and philosophical wisdom. Drawing on the post-collegiate year he spent in Rome, Wilder fashioned in The Cabala a tale of youthful enchantment with the Eternal City in the form of a fictitious memoir of an American student and the enigmatic coterie of noble Romans who draw him into their midst. He followed this debut novel two years later with The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which catapulted him to literary prominence and earned him the first of his three Pulitzer prizes. ?The Bridge,? Wilder later wrote, ?asked the question whether the intention that lies behind love was sufficient to justify the desperation of living.? Set in 18th-century Peru, the book is a kind of theological detective story concerning a friar?s investigations into the lives of five individuals before they were killed in a bridge collapse. An elegantly told parable, with credible historical ambience and psychologically rounded characters, The Bridge of San Luis Rey is primarily a probing inquiry into the nature of destiny and divine intention: Why did God allow these particular people to die?The Woman of Andros, based on the Andria of Roman writer Terence, is a meditation on the ancient world filtered through the sensibility of a meditative courtesan; Heaven?s My Destination, a departure from Wilder?s historical themes, is a picaresque romp through Depression-era America; and The Ides of March takes up the story of Julius Caesar?s assassination by imagining the exchange of letters among such prominent ancient figures as Catullus, Cleopatra, Cicero, and Caesar himself, ?groping in the open seas of his unlimited power for the first principles which should guide him.? The volume concludes with a selection of early short stories?among them ?Précautions Inutiles,? published here for the first time?and a selection of essays that offers Wilder?s insights into the works of Stein and Joyce, as well as a lecture on letter writers that bears on both The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Ides of March.

    From his base in Tangier he produced globally ranging novels, stories, and travel writings that set exquisite surfaces over violent undercurrents. His elegantly spare novels chart the unpredictable collisions between "civilized" exiles and a Morocco they never grasp, achieving effects of extreme horror and dislocation.This Library of America Bowles set, the first annotated edition, offers the full range of his achievement: the portrait of an outsider who was one of the essential American writers of the last century. In addition to his novels -- The Sheltering Sky (1949), Let It Come Down (1952), The Spider's House (1955), Up Above the World (1966) -- and his collected stories -- including such classics as "A Distant Episode" and "Pages from Cold Point" -- they contain his masterpiece of travel writing, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963). Throughout, Bowles shows himself a master of gothic terror and a diabolically funny observer of manners as well as a prescient guide to everything from the roots of Islamist politics to the world of Moghrebi music. With a hallucinatory clarity as dry and unforgiving as the desert air, Bowles sends his characters toward encounters with unknown and terrifying forces both outside them and within them.

    For his centennial, The Library of America inaugurates its Macdonald edition with four classic novels from the 1950s, all featuring his incomparable protagonist, private investigator Lew Archer.Set against the background of a glittering yet darkly enigmatic Southern California, Macdonald’s books are both unsurpassed entertainments and emotionally powerful evocations of an outwardly prosperous, inwardly turbulent America. Macdonald mastered the hard-boiled detective form early on and brought to it a prose style of extraordinary beauty. The four novels collected in this volume reveal him broadening the genre into an intensely personal means of expression, transforming the tragedies and dislocations of his own life into haunting fiction. “My interest,” he wrote to his publisher, “is the exploration of lives.”In The Way Some People Die, Lew Archer embarks on a missing persons case that starts at a house in Santa Monica “within earshot of the coast highway and rifleshot of the sea,” and takes him on a violent and twisted journey through Los Angeles high and low. The Barbarous Coast exposes a world of hidden crime and corruption in the movie business, as Archer intrudes on the well-protected secrets of a studio head. A gripping and tightly knit drama of madness and self-destruction, The Doomsters signaled a breakthrough in the Archer novels with its exploration of “an alternating current of guilt” within a family, a theme to which Macdonald would often return. The Galton Case, one of the standout masterpieces of the detective form, is a mythically charged and deeply personal book that traces the calamitous consequences of a young man’s claim to be the lost heir to a fortune. For Macdonald The Galton Case marked a turning point in his career, the realization of his quest to create fiction from “some of the more complicated facts of my experience.”As a special feature, this volume includes five important statements—among them the famous essay “Writing The Galton Case”—in which Macdonald reveals the autobiographical background of his books and his understanding of his own contribution to the evolving genre of detective fiction.

    Along with the four novels for which he is famous, this authoritative collection gathers his work in other genres, including stories, poetry, essays and plays, film scripts and treatments, and letters.When West died in a California highway accident in 1940 at the age of thirty-seven, his originality and brilliance were little known outside an intensely admiring circle of fellow writers: William Carlos Williams, Edmund Wilson, S. J. Perelman, and others. Not until West’s four novels were reissued in the late 1950s was he acknowledged as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. His masterpieces Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, with their blending of manic farce and despairing compassion, and their vision of an America awash in its own mass-produced fantasies, read like a prophecy of much that was to come in American literature and life.Each of West’s novels is distinct in style and theme. In the Dada-inspired The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931), he freely mixes high-flown literary and religious allusions with erotic and scatological humor. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) presents, in a series of grotesque, starkly etched episodes, the spiritual breakdown of a newspaper columnist overwhelmed by his readers’ suffering. By contrast, A Cool Million (1934) reduces the eternal optimism of Horatio Alger’s novels to a brutal, cartoonish farce. In his last work, The Day of the Locust (1939), West renders with hallucinatory precision the reverse side of the Hollywood dream, as he choreographs a cast of failures, has-beens, and deluded glamour-seekers in what becomes an apocalyptic dance of death.Also included is a generous sampling of West’s other surviving work, ranging from freewheeling improvisations and grotesque comic tales to more mainstream work written with Hollywood or Broadway in mind, and including his anti-war satire Good Hunting and his adaptation of Francis Ile’s famous crime novel Before the Fact. The uncollected West shows him as a writer who embodied the contradictions and crazy-quilt exuberance of American culture—and raises the question of how he might have developed had his career not been cut short. Selected correspondence with William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Malcolm Cowley, Bennett Cerf, and others rounds out the volume and sets West’s literary life in fuller context.

    Beginning with Gimpel the Fool, whose title story brought Singer to sudden prominence in America when translated by Saul Bellow in 1953, and concluding with The Death of Methuselah, the collection published three years before his death in 1991, this three-volume edition brings together for the first time all the story collections Singer published in English in the versions he called his "second originals"--translations he supervised and collaborated on, revising as he worked. In addition, Collected Stories includes previously uncollected or unpublished stories from his manuscripts in the Ransom Center collections, providing a rare glimpse into the workshop of a literary genius. Here are nearly 200 stories--the full range of Singer's vision--encompassing Old World shtetl and New World exile. Born in Poland in 1904 into a family of rabbis, Singer was raised in a traditional culture that perished at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War, and his haunting stories testify to the richness of that vanished world. Singer's Old World tales reveal a wild, mischievous, often disturbing supernaturalism evocative of local storytelling traditions. After his immigration to America, Singer's stories increasingly explore the daily lived reality and imaginative boundaries of Jewish culture as it was transplanted to the United States, revealing him to be the emblematic immigrant American writer, a writer whose vision and insights enlarged our idea of what it is to be an American.

    The remarkable novels presented here in this Library of America volume combine brilliant satire with a lingering affection for the men and women, who, as Lewis wrote of Babbitt, "want "to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late.""Main Street (1920), Lewis's first triumph, was a phenomenal event in American publishing and cultural history. Lewis's idealistic, imaginative heroine, Carol Kennicott, longs "to get [her] hands on one of those prairie towns and make it beautiful," but when her doctor husband brings her to Gopher Prairie, she finds that the romance of the American frontier has dwindled to the drab reality of the American Middle West. Carol first struggles against and then flees the social tyrannies and cultural emptiness of Gopher Prairie, only to submit at last to the conventions of village life. The great romantic satire of its decade, Main Street is a wry, sad, funny account of a woman who attempts to challenge the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of her community."I know of no American novel that more accurately presents the real America," wrote H.L. Mencken when Babbitt appeared in 1922. "As an old professor of Babbittry I welcome him as an almost perfect specimen. Every American city swarms with his brothers. He is America incarnate, exuberant and exquisite."In the character of George F. Babbitt, the boisterous, vulgar, worried, gadget-loving real estate man from Zenith, Lewis fashioned a new and enduring figure in American literature—the total conformist. Babbitt is a "joiner," who thinks and feels with the crowd. Lewis surrounds him with a gallery of familiar American types—small businessman, Rotarians, Elks, boosters, supporters of evangelical Christianity. In biting satirical scenes of club lunches, after-dinner speeches, trade association conventions, fishing trips and Sunday School committees, Lewis reproduces the noisy restlessness of American commercial culture.In 1930 Sinclair Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely for his achievement in Babbitt. These early novels not only define a crucial period in American history—from America's "coming of age" just before World War I to the dizzying boom of the twenties—they also continue to astonish us with essential truths about the country we live in today.

    Studies in the exercise of power that marks relations between sexes, classes, and cultures, they show James’s special solicitude for the young heroines who occupy the center of his fictional world.Washington Square (1880) examines the life of Catherine Sloper, a plain, sweet, young woman who lives imprisoned by the selfishness of those close to her: her lover, who cares only for her fortune; her aunt, who meddles for the sake of romantic intrigue; and her protective father, who repays her adoration with irony and wit. Set in the New York of the 1840s, Washington Square evokes the still-intimate city of James’s childhood while presenting a frightening moral lesson in the human consequences of manipulation and indifference.The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is the story of Isabel Archer, a beautiful, idealistic, and inexperienced American woman who is made wealthy by her uncle at the instigation of her dying cousin. Surrounded by the seductive pleasures of nineteenth-century Europe, she preserves her idealism despite involvement with some who would divert her life to uses of their own—Caspar Goodwood, virile American captain of industry; Lord Warburton, scion of British aristocracy; Gilbert Osmond, connoisseur and collector of beautiful objects; Madame Merle, subtle and charming expatriate of unknown connections, and indomitable Henrietta Stackpole, roving journalist and steadfast friend. James’s many-layered masterpiece concerns the perilous American pursuit of individual freedom.The Bostonians (1886) presents an unusual contest for the affections of Verena Tarrant, the lovely, naïve, and pliant daughter of a mesmerist lecturer. She is courted by two cousins: Basil Ransom, an impractical Mississippi landowner now pursuing a meager New York legal practice, and Olive Chancellor, a rich young Boston feminist. Against the richly textured backdrop of Boston and New York society, they enact a drama of confused identity and willful calculation that demonstrates the power and the perils engendered by the refusal of self-knowledge.

    Lost Tribe features stories and commentary from a brilliant mixture of critically acclaimed and emerging writers.Steve AlmondAimee BenderGabriel BrownsteinJudy BudnitzNathan EnglanderJonathan Safran FoerMyla GoldbergEhud HavazeletDara HornRachel KadishGloria DeVidas KirchheimerBinnie KirshenbaumJoan LeegantMichael LowenthalEllen MillerTova MirvisPeter OrnerJon PapernickNelly ReiflerBen SchrankSuzan ShermanGary ShteyngartAryeh Lev StollmanEllen UmanskySimone Zelitch

    His works were extraordinary bestsellers for their era, achieving fame both here and abroad. Now, for the first time in over 25 years. Poems and Other Writings offers a full-scale literary portrait of America's greatest popular poet. Here are the poems that created an American mythology: Evangeline in the forest primeval, Hiawatha by the shores of Gitchee Gumee, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the wreck of the Hesperus, the village blacksmith under the spreading chestnut tree, the strange courtship of Miles Standish, the maiden Priscilla and the hesitant John Alden; verses, like "A Psalm of Life" and the "The Children's Hour", whose phrases and characters have become part of the culture. Erudite and fluent in many languages, Longfellow was endlessly fascinated with the byways of history and the curiosities of legend. His many poems on literary themes, such as his moving homages to Dante and Chaucer, his verse translations from Lope de Vega, Heinrich Heine, and Michelangelo, and his ambitious verse dramas, notably The New England Tragedies (also complete), are remarkable in their range and ambition. As a special feature, this volume restores to print Longfellow's novel Kavanagh, a study of small-town life and literary ambition that was praised by Emerson as an important contribution to the development of American fiction. A selection of essays rounds out of the volume and provides testimony to Longfellow's concern with creating an American national literature.

    Ten years in the writing (it was the book he retired to Walden to work on) and incorporating essays, passages from his journal, and some of his best poems, it is a superbly crafted achievement, its texture enriched by the idealism of the Transcendentalists, the delighted wordplay of an imaginative linguist, the individualism of a young America, and the earthiness of a lover of nature.Walden is a personal declaration of independence, a social experiment, and a voyage of spiritual discovery, set within the seasonal cycle of a year’s “Life in the Woods.” “Simplify, simplify” is the beat of its “more distant drummer”—to abandon waste and illusion, to get to the bottom of life’s essential needs, and to practice a new economy for humane living. Its witty and pointed rhetoric brings together language and nature, the human and nonhuman in unusual conjunctions that resonate with symbolic meanings. A manual of self-reliance as well as a masterpiece of style, it is one of the most fervently loved classics of American literature.The Maine Woods is an account of three trips taken by boat and canoe in 1846, 1853, and 1857 through an unexplored interior bypassed by westward expansion. It describes the virgin rivers and forests of Maine, the customs of woodsmen and Indian guides, the hunting of moose, and the effects of the timber industry and encroaching settlement. An early and eloquent plea for conservation by a far-sighted naturalist, its close observation of the American wild becomes an examination of “the motives which carry men into the wilderness.”Cape Cod is the bleakest of Thoreau’s works, resembling Melville’s prose in its vision of the titanic indifference of nature. Cape Cod appears as both ocean and desert, a vast expanse of shipwrecks and barren soil, peopled by hardy, weathered inhabitants who seem survivors from the age of the first Pilgrims. Based upon his own visits and upon accounts from the earliest times, it is an unsentimental study of human endurance in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay.

    For Hemingway fans The Complete Short Stories is an invaluable treasury.

    Jones Dues Dale Peck Speckle Trout Ron Rash Sphinxes Timothy Crouse Grace Paula Fox Snowbound Liza Ward Tea Nancy Reisman Christie Caitlin Macy Refuge in London Ruth Prawer Jhabvala The Drowned Woman Frances De Pontes Peebles The Card Trick Tessa Hadley What You Pawn I Will Redeem Sherman Alexie

    Now, for the first time, the works of America's supreme poet of the imagination are collected in one authoritative volume.

    The essays were written during a difficult time in Twain's life; he was deep in debt and had lost his wife and one of his daughters. The book consists of a series of short stories, many of which deal with God and Christianity. Twain penned a series of letters from the point-of-view of a dejected angel on Earth. This title story consists of letters written by the archangel Satan to archangels, Gabriel and Michael, about his observations on the curious proceedings of earthly life and the nature of man's religions. By analyzing the idea of heaven and God that is widely accepted by those who believe in both, Twain is able to take the silliness that is present and study it with the common sense that is absent. Not so much an attack as much as a cold dissection. Other short stories in the book include a bedtime story about a family of cats Twain wrote for his daughters, and an essay explaining why an anaconda is morally superior to Man. Twain's writings in Letters From the Earth find him at perhaps his most quizzical and questioning state ever.