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...

This volume in the definitive Library of America edition of Ursula K. Le Guin’s collected works brings together for the first time her five remarkable standalone novels. Not part of her Hainish universe or other series, these books illuminate in unexpected ways Le Guin’s central concerns with power and gender, human freedom and creative possibility. In the Locus Award–winning The...

Over a five-year period in the late 1940s and early 1950s, regular readers of The New Yorker were treated to humorist S. J. Perelman’s “Cloudland Revisited” series, witty and withering reviews of the pulp fiction and silent films that had enthralled the comic genius in his youth. Among the once-innocent-now-guilty pleasures featured were George Barr McCutcheon’s 1901 historical fantasy novel...

S. J. Perelman’s incomparable gift for wordplay, witticism, spoofery, and sheer nonsense never shone brighter than in this classic collection, now restored to print in a deluxe paperback edition. Here are such beloved gems as “Waiting for Santy: A Christmas Playlet,” a rollicking parody of Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty, about seven proletariat gnomes toiling away in Santa’s North Pole...

After contracting tuberculosis while interning at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, Alabama native Walker Percy abandoned the medical profession to become—in words he would use to describe doctor-turned-writer Anton Chekhov—“the pathologist of the strange spiritual malady of the modern age.” Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, published in 1961 on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday, won the National Book Award and...

Boats against the current, we are borne back ceaselessly to The Great Gatsby. Its unforgettable characters—the conflicted narrator Nick Carraway, the golden girl Daisy Buchanan, and the mysterious Jay Gatsby—its indelible symbols and soaring prose, and its large themes of money, class, and American optimism have an enduring fascination and make The Great Gatsby a frequent candidate for “the Great...

An incandescent stylist who emerged from the experimental ferment of science fiction’s New Wave and against the backdrop of the women’s liberation and LGBTQ+ rights movements, Joanna Russ upended every genre she worked in. The essential novels and stories gathered in this Library of America edition reveal not only a beguiling, darkly comic writer of speculative fiction, but, in the...