Library of America


The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature. Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LOA has published over 300 volumes by authors ranging from Mark Twain to Philip Roth, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Saul Bellow, and includes the selected writings of several U.S. presidents.

Overview and history

The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series published in France provided the model for the LOA, which was long a dream of critic and author Edmund Wilson.
The initial organizers included American academic Daniel Aaron,
Lawrence Hughes, Helen Honig Meyer, and Roger W. Straus, Jr..
The initial board of advisers included Robert Penn Warren, C. Vann Woodward, R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Coles, Irving Howe, and Eudora Welty.
Officers included Richard Poirier, Jason Epstein, Daniel Aaron, and Cheryl Hurley.
, Hurley remains president of the Library of America.
The first volumes were published in 1982, ten years after Wilson's death. Besides the works of many individual writers, the series includes anthologies like Reporting World War II and Writing Los Angeles.
The publisher aims to keep classics and notable historical and genre works in print permanently to preserve America's literary and cultural heritage. Although the LOA sells more than a quarter-million volumes annually, the publisher depends on individual contributions to help meet the costs of preparing, marketing, manufacturing, and maintaining its books. Some books published as additions to the series are not kept in print in perpetuity.
The Publisher of Library of America is Max Rudin; John Kulka is Editorial Director; David Cloyce Smith is Director of Marketing.

Research and scholarship

LOA volumes are prepared and edited by recognized scholars on the subject. Determined efforts are made to correct errors and omissions in previous editions and create a definitive version of the material. Notes on the text are normally included and the source texts properly identified.
For instance, the LOA text of Richard Wright's Native Son restored a number of passages that had been previously cut. The LOA commissioned a new translation of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America by Arthur Goldhammer for their edition of the text.
Each volume also includes a chronology of the author's career or significant incidents in the case of the anthology volumes.

Build and manufacture

The LOA uses the highest standards for production. The paper meets the requirements for permanence set by the American National Standards Institute. Each volume is printed on thin but durable acid-free paper, allowing books ranging from 700 to 1,600 pages to remain fairly compact. All volumes have the same trim size based on the golden ratio.
For the hardcover editions, the binding cloth is woven rayon, and the books are Smyth-sewn for permanence and flexibility. Each includes a ribbon bookmark. The uniform typeface is Galliard.
The LOA publishes selected titles in paperback, mainly for the college textbook market.

The Library of America series

Main series

Special anthologies