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...

What if, in a rural, isolated corner of Mississippi, slavery didn’t end in 1865 but continued uninterrupted into the present? This is the chilling premise of Ronald L. Fair’s dark novel. In fictional Jacobs County, outsiders are rarely allowed in, and Black inhabitants attempting to escape are hunted down and killed. Hope is kindled in the enslaved community with the...

Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. Once an expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of...

William Faulkner called the short story “the most demanding form after poetry.” The fifty-four stories gathered here show him not only mastering the form but revolutionizing its possibilities, distilling an epic breadth of vision into narratives that conjure an intimate sense of place and the abiding presence of history and legend. Library of America caps its Faulkner edition with this...

For too long, African Americans have been left out of the story of the nation’s founding, their voices absent from the memory and celebration of the creation of the American republic. Black Writers of the Founding Era—by far the richest and most expansive anthology of its kind ever assembled—restores these voices. The writings gathered here reveal the complexity and dynamism...

For more than five decades, from the antebellum period through the Civil War and Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age, Frederick Douglass used his voice and wielded his pen in support of abolition and emancipation, equal rights, and human dignity, developing a prophetic style suffused with scriptural cadences and a fierce moral urgency. This boxed set gathers both volumes of...

The end of Reconstruction in the former Confederacy signaled a painful and protracted new phase in the struggle for racial equality in the United States. An oppressive regime of laws and behavioral codes based on disenfranchisement and segregation, racial terror, and relentless calumny against Black Americans spread across the South and transformed the nation as a whole, shaping the life...

Reporters from across America and around the globe converged on Washington in November 1963 to cover the state funeral of John F. Kennedy. One, a thirty-five-year-old columnist from New York, turned his attention not on the stricken first family or the assembled world leaders but on Clifton Pollard, the man who dug the president’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. The...

Helen Keller is an American icon whose trailblazing life redefined human possibilities. Having lost both her sight and hearing in infancy, she broke through formidable barriers to become the first deafblind college graduate in the United States, an activist and public speaker, and a global celebrity. But her most enduring achievement is as a writer. This volume gathers her classic...

Once, during a public reading, Robert Frost was asked why he so frequently recited his poems from memory. “If they won’t stick to me,” he replied, “I won’t stick to them.” In this keepsake edition, acclaimed poet and biographer Jay Parini has chosen sixteen of Frost’s greatest works to learn by heart. In accompanying commentaries, Parini explores Frost’s stylistic genius...