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...

Adrienne Kennedy has been a force on the American stage since the premiere of her groundbreaking, Obie Award–winning Funnyhouse of a Negro in 1964. Her haunting and powerful plays, filled with unexpected juxtapositions and startling transfigurations, dramatize interior realities “in a dreamlike fashion, never taking a straight path from one event to another if a more beautiful route is available,”...

Save $25 when you purchase both Crime Novels of the 1960s volumes in a boxed set. In the 1960s a number of gifted writers—some at the peak of their careers, others newcomers—reimagined American crime fiction through formal experimentation and the exploration of audacious new subjects and themes. This is the second of two volumes gathering the best of their work,...

Set in Boston, New York, and Virginia, The Prodigal Women tells the intertwined stories of three young women who come of age in the Roaring Twenties, not flappers and golden girls but flesh-and-blood female protagonists looking wearily—and warily—at the paths open to women in a rapidly changing world. Leda March, “frantic with self-consciousness and envy and desire,” is the daughter...

Here in two volumes are 9 timeless novels, including 4 lost classics now restored to print. In the 1960s a number of gifted writers—some at the peak of their careers, others newcomers—reimagined American crime fiction. Here are nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade: Fredric Brown’s The Murderers (1961), a...

Save $25 when you purchase both Crime Novels of the 1960s volumes in a boxed set. In the 1960s a number of gifted writers—some at the peak of their careers, others newcomers—reimagined American crime fiction through formal experimentation and the exploration of audacious new subjects and themes. This is the first of two volumes gathering the best of their work,...

Part religious observance and part commercial extravaganza, a gift basket of cultural customs from many nations, Christmas grew into its modern form in America, and over the last 150 years the most magical time of the year has proven to be glad tidings for American writers. Library of America and acclaimed author Connie Willis invite you to unwrap this diverse...

Library of America collected fifteen of John Updike’s finest novels in a five-volume set: Novels 19591965 The Poorhouse Fair | Rabbit, Run | The Centaur | Of the Farm Novels 19681975 Couples | Rabbit Redux | A Month of Sundays Novels 19781984 The Coup | Rabbit Is Rich | The Witches of Eastwick Novels 19861990 Roger’s Version | Rabbit at...

In 1964 Charles Portis left a promising career as a newspaper reporter in New York and London to return to his native Arkansas. There, working in relative obscurity, he would write the books that led critic Ron Rosenbaum to call him the “least-known great writer” in America. In five novels published over twenty-five years, Portis refined a signature deadpan style...

Throughout a celebrated career that spanned five decades and multiple genres, Ursula K. Le Guin was first and last a poet. This sixth volume in the definitive Library of America edition of Le Guin’s work presents for the first time an authoritative gathering of her poetry—from the earliest collection, 1974’s Wild Angels, through her final publication, So Far So Good,...

Save $42 when you purchase all three volumes of the Bernard Malamud edition. One of America’s great mythmakers, a storyteller who ranks with Flannery O’Connor as an unfolder of the mysteries of human character, Bernard Malamud is a writer of profound sympathy, intensity, and emotional truth. This third and final volume of Library of America’s Malamud edition brings together three...

Save $75 when you purchase the five-volume set of John Updikes novels. Library of America caps its five-volume edition of John Updike’s novels with a trio of resonant late masterpieces. George Steiner, in The New Yorker, wrote of this culminating phase of the author’s career: “Updike’s genius, his place beside Hawthorne and Nabokov have never been more assured.” In the...

Seventy-five years after its publication, Norman Mailer’s gripping, ambitious debut novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), remains one of the most powerful books about World War II and a towering contribution to the global literature of war. Drawing on Mailer’s experience as a soldier in the 1945 invasion of the Philippines, the novel’s depiction of the taking of the...

Including Animal Farm 'Orwell is the most influential political writer of the twentieth century' New York Review of Books Throughout his life George Orwell aimed, in his words, to make 'political writing into an art'. This collection brings together the best of his matchless political essays and journalism with his timeless satire on totalitarianism, Animal Farm. It includes articles on...