Literary criticism

Volume 1: Essays on Literature; American writers; English writers

Henry James, renowned as one of the world’s great novelists, was also one of the most illuminating, audacious, and masterly critics of modern times. This Library of America volume and its companion are a fitting testimony to his unprecedented achievement. They offer the only ...

Crane: prose and poetry

Maggie: a girl of the streets. The red badge of courage. Stories, sketches, journalism. The black riders and war is kind

This Library of America volume shows why Stephen Crane has come to be recognized as one of the most innovative and diversely talented writers of his generation, even though he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. This comprehensive collection includes all his most ...

Mark Twain

The innocents abroad. Roughing it

This Library of America volume contains the novels that, when published, transformed an obscure Western journalist into a national celebrity. The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It (sometimes called The Innocents at Home) were immensely successful when first published and they remain today the most popular ...

Henry James: novels 1871-1880

Watch and ward. Roderick Hudson. The american. The europeans. Confidence

A resourceful and prolific writer of fiction, travel, criticism, and cultural commentary, Henry James is one of the most entertaining of American writers. His first five novels, presented complete in this Library of America volume, are filled with sparkling dialogue, masterfully timed suspense, and the ...

France and England in North America

Volume II: Count Frontenac and New France; A half-century of conflict; Montcalm and Wolfe

This is the second of two Library of America volumes (the companion volume here) presenting, in compact form, all seven parts of Francis Parkman’s monumental narrative history of the struggle for control of the American continent. Thirty years in the writing, Parkman’s “history ...

Poe: poetry and tales

Read throughout the world, admired by Dostoyevsky and translated by Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe has become a legendary figure, representing the artist as obsessed outcast and romantic failure. His nightmarish visions, shaped by cool artistic calculation, reveal some of the dark possibilities of human experience ...

Melville

Redburn. White-jacket. Moby-Dick

Between 1849 and 1851, Melville wrote three masterful stories of the sea (including the classic Moby-Dick) that captured colorful and comic glimpses of shipboard life, the excitement of the whale hunt, and seascapes that move from the brutal to the sublime; they also displayed a ...

A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walden; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod

This Library of America edition collects for the first time in one volume the four full-length works in which Henry David Thoreau combined his poetic sensibility, classical learning, philosophical austerity, and Yankee love of practical detail into literary masterpieces on humanity’s communion with nature ...

The Leatherstocking Tales II

The Pathfinder; The Deerslayer

When Cooper’s most memorable hero, Leatherstocking, started an American tradition by setting off into the sunset in The Pioneers, one early reader said of his departure, “I longed to go with him.” American readers couldn’t get enough of the Leatherstocking saga (collected in ...

The Leatherstocking Tales I

The Pioneers; The Last of the Mohicans; The Prairie

The five novels in The Leatherstocking Tales (collected in two Library of America volumes), Cooper’s great saga of the American wilderness, form a pageant of the American frontier. Cooper’s hero, Natty Bumppo, is forced ever farther into the heart of the continent by ...

Literary criticism

Volume 2: European writers; Prefaces to the New York edition

Henry James, renowned as one of the world’s great novelists, was also one of the most illuminating, audacious, and masterly critics of modern times. This Library of America volume is one of two volumes of the most extensive collection of his critical writings ever ...

Poe: essays and reviews

This is the most complete one-volume edition of Poe’s essays and reviews ever published. Here are all his major writings on the theory of poetry, the art of fiction, and the duties of a critic: “The Rationale of Verse,” “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The ...

Jefferson: writings

Autobiography. Notes on the State of Virginia. Public and private papers. Addresses. Letters

Now fully represented in this Library of America volume is the most comprehensive testimony of the writings of our third president and foremost spokesperson for democracy. Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant political thinker, is perhaps best known for the Declaration of Independence, but he was a ...

Emerson: essays and lectures

Nature; Addresses, and lectures. Essays: first and second series. Representative men. English traits. The conduct of life

This first Library of America volume of Emerson’s writing covers the most productive period of his life, 1832–1860. Our most eloquent champion of individualism, Emerson acknowledges at the same time the countervailing pressures of society in American life. Even as he extols what ...

Adams

Democracy. Esther. Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. The education of Henry Adams

This Library of America volume includes the best-known works of Henry Adams, one of the most powerful and original minds to illuminate the American scene from the Civil War to World War I. Now brought together for the first time in a single volume, these ...

Three novels

Uncle Tom's cabin; The Minister's wooing; Oldtown folks

The library of America is dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as the "finest-looking, longest-lasting editions ever made" (The New Republic), Library of America volumes make a fine gift for any occasion. Now ...

Novels 1875-1886

A foregone conclusion; A modern instance; Indian summer; The rise of Silas Lapham

The four novels collected in this Library of America volume are among the classic works from the immensely productive career of America’s most influential man of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. William Dean Howells was a champion of French and Russian ...

Novels and social writings

The people of the Abyss; The road; The iron heel; Martin Eden; John Barleycorn; Essays

By turns an impoverished laborer, a renegade adventurer, a war correspondent in Mexico, a declared socialist, and a writer of enormous popularity the world over, Jack London was the author of brilliant works that reflect his ideas about twentieth-century capitalist societies while dramatizing them through ...

Hawthorne: tales and sketches

This Library of America volume offers what no reader has ever been able to find—an authoritative edition of all the tales and sketches of Nathaniel Hawthorne in a single comprehensive volume. Everything is included from his three books of stories, Twice-told Tales (1837, revised ...

London: novels and stories

The call of the wild. White fang. The sea-wolf. Klondike and other stories

This Library of America volume of Jack London’s best-known work is filled with thrilling action, an intuitive feeling for animal life, and a sense of justice that often works itself out through violence. London enjoyed phenomenal popularity in his own time (which included the ...