The end of World War I transformed the struggle for racial equality in the United States as the “New Negro” began to challenge the oppressive regime of disenfranchisement, segregation, racial terror, and cultural calumny that had emerged from the ruins of Reconstruction. Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle captures firsthand how courageous Americans, Black and white, fought against...

W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified the problem of the color-line as the defining issue in American life in the twentieth century. The powerful writings gathered here reveal the many ways Americans, Black and white, fought against white supremacist efforts to police the color line, envisioning a better America in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and widespread lynching, mob violence, and...

This volume gathers the essential prose writings of our “poet laureate of Deep Ecology,” spanning the entire arc of his seventy-year career and sounding his deepest themes: How can we learn to tread lightly on the land we inhabit? What can ancient faiths and traditions teach us about living creatively and in community in the here and now? A companion...

In 1951, a monumental book by a relatively unknown German-Jewish émigré cast a spotlight on the terrifying new mode of political organization underlying the simultaneous emergence of Nazism and Stalinism. Herself a refugee from Nazi persecution, Hannah Arendt sought from her exile in New York City to answer the fundamental questions raised by the unprecedented atrocities in the Soviet Union...

One of our leading interpreters of ancient literature, acclaimed translator Sarah Ruden (the Aeneid) has long had a passion for Sylvia Plath’s poetry. In I Am the Arrow: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems, she offers a profound reconsideration of Plath’s genius. Ruden argues that Plath is more than a consummate mythmaker; the poet herself takes...

For more than fifty years, in writings of remarkable breadth and insight, John Quincy Adams shaped the politics of a young America, becoming its greatest champion and most penetrating critic. Despite a persistent interest in Adams’s extraordinary life and career, there has never been a volume of his essential political writings. Here, for the first time in an anno­tated edition,...

Boats against the current, we are borne back ceaselessly to The Great Gatsby. Its unforgettable characters, indelible scenes, and grand themes of money, class, and American optimism have made it an enduring classic. In this lavishly illustrated and annotated 100th anniversary edition, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece comes to life once more, presented anew in the authoritative Library of America text...

Inspired by Afrofuturist pioneers like Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, a new generation of Black writers is fashioning a renaissance in speculative fiction. Edited and introduced by SF expert andré m. carrington, The Black Fantastic brings together Hugo, Locus, Nebula, Bram Stoker, Tiptree/Otherwise, and World Fantasy Award winners with emerging voices to showcase this watershed moment in American...

Transcendentalist, journalist, pioneering feminist, public intellectual, war correspondent, poet—Margaret Fuller’s diverse and radical achievements in her short life are vividly captured in her brilliant and still surprising writings. This authoritative Library of America volume is the first new edition of her works in more than a generation and the most comprehensive ever published. An account of Fuller’s travels to the...

Expansive, dynamic, displaying an electrifying command of language and sound, Theodore Roethke’s poems pulse with a rich, seductive music. They are also audaciously honest. Writing with the courage to strip away consoling illusions, Roethke explored the depths of his inner life to create a testament to the mysteries of being. This perceptive selection by poet and critic Edward Hirsch includes...

With the publication of Chicago Poems in 1916, Carl Sandburg became one of the most famous poets in America. The voice of a midwestern literary revolt, Sandburg fused free-verse poetics with hard-edged journalistic observation and spirited protest. Critic Paul Berman’s career-spanning selection casts a fresh eye on Sandburg’s still underappreciated genius, highlighting his use of the “rapid-fire catch-phrases of the...

Elegant risqué, suffused with understated emotion, delightful in their bursts of comic invention, the witty and romantic lyrics of Cole Porter evoke a golden age of song. Porter was one of the few master songsmiths who wrote both music and lyrics, and even in the absence of his melodies his words still dance on the page. From Porter’s more than...

For many of the Americans who crossed the Atlantic to confront Hitler’s Third Reich, the Second World War was a traumatic and transformative experience about which they were reticent to speak. This volume presents the memoirs of five individuals who served in Europe and later told their own stories with honesty and insight. Remarkable literary achievements that capture history with...

Completing the definitive, three-volume Library of America edition of one of the most electrifying writers of our time, here are the achingly beautiful memoirs of loss and the masterful collections of reporting that crowned Joan Didion’s career. In the essays of Political Fictions (2001), Didion casts a cool, wry, bracingly critical eye over late twentieth-century American democracy. Joining the working...

The ultimate Didion: all 17 of her major works of fiction, journalism, and memoir together for the first time. In 1968, a collection of reportage appeared that was unlike anything seen before, remarkable in its literary aspiration and a milestone in what would become known as the New Journalism. A series of wickedly incisive portraits of California and its people—from...