Synopses & Reviews
The Library of America: Now available in one complete collection.Thirty years ago, The Library of America was founded to undertake a historic endeavor: to help preserve the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America's best and most significant writing in durable and authoritative editions. Hailed as "the most important book-publishing project in the nation's history" (Newsweek), this award-winning series maintains America's most treasured writers in "the finest-looking, longest-lasting edition ever made" (The New Republic).
Now the entire Library of America series is available in one complete collection for home, office, or institutional libraries. The set is made up of 255 titles across a wide range of genres, including fiction, history, poetry, drama, essays, philosophy, travel writing, journalism, sermons, speeches, and slave narratives. From the writings of the Founding Fathers to the poetry of Walt Whitman and Robert Frost, from the journalism of the Civil Rights movement to the novels of Zora Neale Hurston and Philip Roth, from Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings to H.P. Lovecraft: Tales, this is the ultimate collection of American letters.
For 2012, the Library of America Complete Collection has been updated and expanded with recently published titles including Kurt Vonnegut: Novels & Stories, John Adams: Revolutionary Writings, H.L. Mencken: Prejudices, and The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael. Click here to see the full list of volumes contained in the collection.
What are the bestselling titles in the Library of America? Here are the recent favorites, including a number of 20th-century writers new to the series: Dick, Lovecraft, Kerouac, Roth, Bierce:
The 50 Funniest American Writers*: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion *According to Andy Borowitz
The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael
Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s (The Man in the High Castle; Ubik, etc.)
Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Dictionary, Tales & Memoirs
Thomas Paine: Collected Writings (Common Sense; Rights of Man, etc.)
H.P. Lovecraft: Tales
The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It
Jack Kerouac: Road Novels, 1957-1960 (On the Road; The Dharma Bums, etc.)
Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works (Wise Blood; Everything That Rises Must Converge; etc.)
Dashiell Hammett: Complete Novels (Red Harvest; The Maltese Falcon; etc.)
Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America
Philip Roth: The American Trilogy (American Pastoral; I Married a Communist; The Human Stain)
Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters
Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; etc.)
Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters (Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant; Selected Letters, 1839-1865)
Raymond Chandler: Stories and Early Novels (The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; etc.)
John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1775-1783
Tennesee Williams: Plays 1937-1955
John Adams: Revolutionary Writings 1755-1775
Raymond Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings (The Lady in the Lake; The Long Goodbye; etc.)
Thomas Jefferson: Writings (Autobiography; Notes on the State of Virginia; etc.)
James Baldwin: Collected Essays (Notes of a Native Son; The Fire Next Time; etc.)
Synopsis
H. L. Mencken was unquestionably the most provocative and influential journalist and cultural critic in twentieth-century America. The six volumes of
Prejudices, published between 1919 and 1927, were both a slashing attack on what Mencken saw as American provincialism and hypocrisy and a resounding defense of the writers and thinkers he thought of as harbingers of a new frankness and maturity. Laced with savage humor and delighting in verbal play, Mencken's prose remains a one-of-a-kind roller-coaster ride through a staggering range of themes: literature and journalism, politics and religion, sex and marriage, food and drink.
In this and a companion volume, The Library of America presents all six series of Prejudices in their original form. The first three series include some of his most famous writing, including "The Sahara of the Bozart," an attack on Southern culture so unbridled as to earn him widespread criticism from politicians and the press; "The National Letters," a lively and free-spoken survey of writing in America; "The Dry Millennium," an analysis of the multiple absurdities of Prohibition; "Exeunt Omnes," an unblinking and deromanticized contemplation of death; and "On Being an American," a humorous celebration of the political and cultural panorama that he saw as "incomparably the greatest show on earth." Here are his harsh summing-up of Theodore Roosevelt's career ("he didn't believe in democracy; he believed simply in government") and his sympathetic portraits of literary friends like James Huneker and George Jean Nathan. Mencken's account of the original reception of Prejudices, from his memoir My Life as Editor and Author, is included as an appendix.
Edmund Wilson wrote: "Mencken's mind . . . has all the courage in the world in a country where courage is rare." That courage may sometimes have been coupled with an inflexible stubbornness that led him into positions hard to defend. But to succeeding generations of writers and readers, Mencken was the figure who had risked charges of heresy and sedition and almost single-handedly brought America into a new cultural era. To read him is to be plunged into an era whose culture wars were easily as ferocious as those of our own day, in the company of a critic of vast curiosity and vivacious frankness.