Library of America

The three essential John Updike novels collected here form a triptych of the social upheaval which roiled America from the Kennedy to the Nixon years. These books reveal Updike's genius in characterization, his formal versatility as a novelist, and his audacity. They also have profound things to say about the complexities of marriage and family, social class and personal morality, and the ceaseless struggles of flesh and spirit. Couples (1968) —...

"In The Coup, a surprising departure from his prior novels, Updike stages a withering take down of an array of targets, from American materialism and its baleful effects on the developing world to the follies of Cold War geopolitics and the fevered megalomania of the dictatorial mind. In Rabbit Is Rich, the third installment of the Rabbit tetralogy, we meet up with Harry Angstrom, now 46, dealing as best he can with the challenges and cares of midlife,...

A definitive edition of the landmark book that forever changed our understanding of the Civil War's aftermath and the legacy of racism in America. Upon publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois's now classic Black Reconstruction offered a revelatory new assessment of Reconstruction--and of American democracy itself. One of the towering African American thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, Du Bois brought all his intellectual powers to bear on...

One of the greatest African American leaders and one of the most brilliant minds of his time, Frederick Douglass spoke and wrote with unsurpassed eloquence on almost all the major issues confronting the American people during his life from the abolition of slavery to women's rights, from the Civil War to lynching, from American patriotism to Black Nationalism. Between 1950 and 1975, Philip S. Foner collected the most important of Douglass's hundreds...

"For the first time, here is the full, definitive story of the movement for voting rights in all its diversity and intersectionality, told through the voices of the women and men who lived it: the most recognizable figures in the campaign for women's suffrage, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but also the black, Chinese, and American Indian women and men who were not only essential to the movement but expanded its directions and aims,...

Over the course of a career that spanned six decades, the southern novelist and short story writer Elizabeth Spencer established herself as one of the finest literary artists of a generation that included Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and Eudora Welty. This definitive volume brings together three remarkable novels: The Voice at the Back Door, her powerful masterpiece about racial politics in the world of Jim Crow Mississippi; the beloved classic...

"For the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower's arrival, a landmark collection of firsthand accounts charting the history of the English newcomers and their fateful encounters with the region's native peoples. For centuries the story of the Pilgrims and the Mayflower has been told and retold -- the landing at Plymouth Rock and the first Thanksgiving, and the decades that followed, as the colonists struggled to build an enduring and righteous community...

This long-awaited second volume of Library of America’s authoritative edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald features the author’s acknowledged masterpiece and most popular book, The Great Gatsby. It was Gatsby that solidified his reputation as the chronicler of the Jazz Age and established him as one of the leading American novelists of his generation. Perhaps no other novel of the twentieth century makes a greater claim to being our Great American...

The first Latino novelist to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013) wrote rich and radiant novels that brought the Cuban American immigrant experience into the heart of American literature. "I marveled," recalls Juan Felipe Herrera, at "how meticulous he was and how deep he got into the lives of Latino and Cuban Americans in the United States." Hijuelos launched his career with Our House in the Last World (1983), a masterful recreation...

"Mythmaker, master storyteller, and a writer powerfully attuned to the land and history of his native New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya is one of the undisputed fathers of Chicano literature. Writing in an era when Latino voices were marginalized and just beginning to be read and acknowledged, Anaya broke new ground with Bless Me, Ultima (1972), a mythic novel that captures the richness and complexity of history, community, and place in the American Southwest....

Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the World War II, "The Naked and the Dead" received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its 1948 publication and has since become part of the American canon. Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an Army platoon stationed on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei.

“Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin
 
When she began writing in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin was as much of a literary outsider as one can be: a woman writing in a landscape dominated by men, a science fiction and fantasy author in an era that dismissed “genre” literature as unserious, and a westerner living far from fashionable...