The adventurous and sometimes shocking later works of playwright Tennessee Williams, from 1957 to 1980, are collected in this volume, which includes "Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer", and "The Night of the Iguana".

    Among the plays included are All My Sons, the story of an industrialist confronted with his moral lapses during World War II; Death of a Salesman, the wrenching tragedy of Willy Loman's demise; The Crucible, at once a riveting reconstruction of the Salem witch trials and a parable of McCarthyism; and A View from the Bridge, Miller's tale of betrayal among Italian immigrants in Brooklyn, presented here in both the original one-act and revised two-act versions. This volume also contains the intriguing early drama The Man Who Had All the Luck, the first of Miller's plays to be produced on Broadway, along with his adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, the autobiographical one-act A Memory of Two Mondays, and Miller's novella The Misfits, based on the screenplay he wrote for Marilyn Monroe.

    Everyman (2006) takes its title from a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death. It tells the story of one man’s lifelong skirmish with mortality, from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers into old age, when, facing the end, he is a man who has become what he does not want to be.Set against the backdrop of the Korean War, Indignation (2008) is the extraordinary narrative of Marcus Messner of Newark, New Jersey, a sophomore at conservative Winesburg College in Ohio. Aspiring to intellectual independence and sexual experience while struggling to shake off the stifling conformity of his classmates and the suffocating spectre of a father mad with fear and apprehension for his beloved boy, Messner is schooled in “the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.”Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of The Humbling (2009), Roth’s thirtieth book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. Into this inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire so risky and aberrant that it points not toward comfort and gratification but to a yet darker and more shocking end.It is the summer of 1944 and Newark playground director Bucky Cantor is waging his own private war against a terrifying polio epidemic besieging his closely knit, family-oriented neighborhood. Focusing on Cantor’s mounting dilemmas as the epidemic ravages the children he loves, Nemesis (2010) is a tenderly exact portrait of the emotions—fear and anger, bewilderment and grief—that spread with the contagion.Library of America #237

    "Complete Novels" gathers all of Welty's longer fiction, from "The Robber Bridegroom" (1942) to her Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Optimist's Daughter" (1972).

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    By the time of his death in 1999 he had become a unique and legendary figure in modern literary culture. From his base in Tangier he produced novels, stories, and travel writings in which exquisite surfaces and violent undercurrents mingle.This Library of America volume, containing his first three novels, with its companion Collected Stories and Later Writings, is the first annotated edition of Bowles’s work, offering the full range of his literary achievement: the portrait of an outsider who was one of the essential American writers of the last half century.The Sheltering Sky (1949), which remains Bowles’s most celebrated work, describes the unraveling of a young, sophisticated, and adventuresome married couple as they make their way into the Sahara. In a prose style of meticulous calm and stunning visual precision, Bowles tracks Port and Kit Moresby on a journey through the desert that culminates in death and madness.In Let It Come Down (1952), Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions of the corruption and decadence of the International Zone in the last days before Moroccan independence, Bowles’s second novel is an alternately comic and horrific account of a descent into nihilism.The Spider’s House (1955), the longest and most complex of Bowles’s novels, is set against the end of French rule in Morocco. Its characters—ranging from a Moroccan boy gifted with spiritual healing power to an American writer who regrets the passing of traditional ways—are caught up in the clash between colonial and nationalist factions, and are forced to confront cultural gulfs widened by political violence.Bowles—who once told an interviewer, “I’ve always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born”—charts the collisions between “civilized” exiles and unfamiliar societies that they can never really grasp. In fiction of slowly gathering menace, he achieves effects of horror and dislocation with an elegantly spare style and understated wit.

    Born in 1862 into an exclusive New York society against whose rigid codes of behavior she often rebelled, she lived to regret the passing of that stable if old-fashioned community and to appreciate the sense of personal identity its definitions provided. She became a prolific professional writer, author of more than forty published volumes, including novels, short stories (many of them tales of the supernatural), poetry, war reportage, travel writing, and books on gardens and house decoration. An expatriate in France for three decades before her death in 1937, she included among her many distinguished friends men as various as Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, Kenneth Clark, and André Gide.The four novels in this Library of America volume show Wharton at the height of her powers as a social observer and critic, examining American and European lives with a vision rich in detail, satire, and tragedy. In all of them her strong and autobiographical impulse is disciplined by her writer’s craft and her unfailing regard for her audience.The House of Mirth (1905), Wharton’s tenth book and her first novel of contemporary life, was an immediate runaway bestseller, with 140,000 copies in print within three months of publication. The story of young Lily Bart and her tragic sojourn among the upper class of turn-of-the-century New York, it touches on the insidious effects of social convention and upon the sexual and financial aggression to which women of independent spirit were exposed.The Reef (1912) is the story of two couples whose marriage plans are upset by the revelation of a past affair between George Darrow (a mature bachelor) and Sophy Vener, who happens to be the fiancée of his future wife’s stepson. Henry James called the novel “a triumph of method,” and it shares the rich nuance of his own The Golden Bowl.The Custom of the Country (1913) is the amatory saga of Undine Spragg of Apex City—beautiful, spoiled, and ambitious—whose charms conquer New York and European society. Vulgar and voracious, she presides over a series of men, representing the old and new aristocracies of both continents, in a comedy drawn unmistakably from life.The Age of Innocence (1920) is set in the New York of Wharton’s youth, when the rules and taboos of her social “tribe” held as-yet unchallenged sway. A quasi-anthropological study of a remembered culture and its curious conventions, it tells the story of the Countess Olenska (formerly Ellen Mingott), refugee from a disastrous European marriage, and Newland Archer, heir to a tradition of respectability and family honor, as they struggle uneasily against their sexual attraction.

    In his poems, he gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the plain style of New England speech. Now, The Library of America brings together these indispensable works in one authoritative volume.Spanning his entire career, the 27 essays gathered here vary in style from the ambling rhythm of "Natural History of Massachusetts" and "A Winter Walk" to the concentrated moral outrage of "Slavery in Massachusetts" and "A Plea for Captain John Brown". Included are "Civil Disobedience", Thoreau's great exploration of the conflict between individual conscience and state power that continues to influence political thinkers and activists; "Walking", a meditation on wildness and civilization; and "Life Without Principle", a passionate critique of American materialism and conformity. Also here are literary essays, including pieces on Homer, Chaucer, and Carlyle; the travel essay "A Yankee in Canada"; the three speeches in defense of John Brown; and essays such as "Autumnal Tints", "Wild Fruits", and "Huckleberries" that explore natural phenomena around Concord.Seven poems are published here for the first time, and others are presented in new, previously unpublished versions based on Thoreau's manuscripts.

    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.

    A collection of 26 stories:Soldiers (15 stories)"A Horseman in the Sky""An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge""Chickamauga""A Son of the Gods""One of the Missing""Killed at Resaca""The Affair at Coulter's Notch""The Coup de Grâce""Parker Adderson, Philosopher""An Affair of Outposts""The Story of a Conscience""One Kind of Officer""One Officer, One Man""George Thurston""The Mocking-Bird"Civilians (11 stories)"The Man Out of the Nose""An Adventure at Brownville""The Famous Gilson Bequest""The Applicant""A Watcher by the Dead""The Man and the Snake""A Holy Terror""The Suitable Surroundings""The Boarded Window""An Heiress from Redhorse""The Eyes of the Panther"

    Today her groundbreaking works, suffused with the culture and traditions of African-Americans and the poetry of black speech, have won her recognition as one of the most significant African-American writers. This volume, with its companion, Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs & Other Writings brings together for the first time all of Hurston's best writings in one authoritative set. "Folklore is the arts of the people," Hurston wrote, "before they find out that there is any such thing as art."

    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.