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...

In “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849), better known as “Civil Disobedience,” Henry David Thoreau writes about the night he spent in jail for refusing to pay taxes that he believed supported slavery and a war of expansion in Mexico. Urging us to act likewise on our own deepest convictions, he articulates individual conscience as a revolutionary force in American politics....

No twentieth-century writer had greater influence on American fiction than Ernest Hemingway. This volume, the second in Library of America’s definitive edition of Hemingway’s works, brings together Men Without Women, A Farewell to Arms, and Death in the Afternoon, the three books that followed his groundbreaking debut novel, The Sun Also Rises, and solidified his status as a preeminent literary...

A mainstay of countless American childhoods, MAD magazine exploded onto the scene in the 1950s and gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties. Unfazed by lawsuits, the ire of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and the scorn of critics and scolds unwilling or unable to get the joke, MAD became the zaniest, most subversive satire magazine ever sold on...

Set on and around the Louisiana cotton plantation where he was born in 1933, the novels and stories of Ernest J. Gaines conjure a world alive with the rich traditions of oral storytelling. Generous, compassionate, and deeply moving, they portray women and men caught in the vortex of race in America, struggling in hope toward hard-won moments of justice and...

For nearly five centuries, the rich tapestry of Latino poetry has been woven from a wealth of languages and cultures—a “tremendous continental MIXTURAO,” as the poet Tato Laviera writes. The Latino poetic imagination has flourished in the United States, distinguished by its profound engagement with pasts both historical and mythic; its reckoning with the complexities of language, land, and identity;...

Wendell Berry’s indelible portrait of rural America—seen through the lens of Port William, Kentucky—is one of the most fully imagined narratives in American literature. The river town and its environs are home to generations of Coulters, Catletts, Feltners, and other families collectively known as the Membership, women and men whose stories evoke the richness of life in community. Now, in...

Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual, James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the postwar era, and one of the greatest African American writers of this century. A self-described “transatlantic commuter” who spent much of his life in France, Baldwin joined cosmopolitan sophistication with a fierce engagement in social issues. “One writes,” he stated, “out...

THE BLOCKBUSTER HIT--Over two million copies sold! A New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller Poignant, engrossing.--People - Lisa Wingate takes an almost unthinkable chapter in our nation's history and weaves a tale of enduring power.--Paula McLain Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family's Mississippi...