Outside the Scope: Library of America Wishlist
What authors would you like to see be added to the Library of America?
My newsletter last week on The Man Who Lived Underground was the first time I’ve reviewed a book published by the Library of America. The Man Who Lived Underground, however, was a special edition - a slim book principally devoted to a single title. The Library of America is best known for its main series of austere hardbacks that collect the works of famous American authors - usually cramming multiple books into a single volume with 750-1500 thin pages.
The Library of America began in 1982 with the titans of American letters: Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman were the first three writers they published. Before the 1980s were over, they were already moving on to the greats of the 20th century, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Willa Cather, Flannery O'Connor, and Eugene O'Neill. It hit 100 books by 1998, and its 101st book was its first by a living author, Eudora Welty.
Naturally, as the series went on, the relative youth of America caused some to wonder how many more books they could add to their collection. In 2010, cultural critic Malcolm Jones wrote an op-ed for Newsweek arguing that it has “become harder and harder to ignore the fact that the Library of America is running out of writers.” His article sparked a flurry of discussion in the literary world,1 but more than ten years on from Jones’s article the Library of America is still finding new volumes to put out. In fact, they’re speeding up: for their main series, they published 8 books in their first year, but in 2010 they put out 14, and by the end of this year they’ll have 15 new books out.
Jones said the problem with the Library of America is that “great American writers just can't die fast enough,” but really the problem is they can’t fall into the public domain fast enough (to his credit, Jones acknowledges some of the licensing problems the series has faced). Only in 2020 was the publisher able to put out their first Hemingway volume, and they will not issue a Fitzgerald volume with The Great Gatsby until early next year. Due to some rather curious provisions of American intellectual property law, large parts of Emily Dickinson’s oeuvre are still under copyright, so she has not yet gotten the Library of America edition she deserves. 2
Jones’s chief complaint, however, seemed to be that writers added to the Library of America weren’t quite good enough for inclusion. While I’m sympathetic to the argument that publishers of classics should focus more on finding and promoting works of the past based on their literary merit, The Library of America’s sole mission isn’t creating a best-of compilation of American literature. The first author they published was Melville, but the first book of his they put out contained Typee, Omoo, and Mardi - his less-acclaimed novels he wrote before Moby Dick. Their volume on Harriet Beecher Stowe included, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her essentially forgotten later novels The Minister’s Wooing and Oldtown Folks. Their eleventh and twelfth books were dedicated to Francis Parkman's mammoth history of America's colonization, France and England in North America - likely included for its historical interest rather than its literary beauty. What Jones calls “anything but canonical” was part of the series from the start.
Still, there’s a reason I’m thinking about this minor piece of journalism so long after its publication. I’ve been wondering for some time what authors will be coming to the Library of America in the coming years. Recently, I began a list of authors I think deserve inclusion; I initially thought I would only be able to come up with a dozen or so names, but as I worked on it, I soon hit three digits.
I’ve put my wishlist for future Library of America authors below. Some of these writers I have read; a great many more I have yet to read but would welcome an opportunity to do so. I’ve left out authors who are prominent enough that their works are very easily accessible and will almost certainly become part of the Library of America when the rights to their books are available (Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, ect.) I also did not include authors that had been included in the Library of America’s subseries titled the “American Poets Project” - though I hope several of those poets get books in the main series.
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur (1735 – 1813)
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (1809 – 1894)
Rebecca Harding Davis (1831 – 1910)
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914)
John Townsend Trowbridge (1827 – 1916)
George Washington Cable (1844 – 1925)
Agnes Repplier (1855 – 1950)
Edgar Saltus (1855 – 1921)
Harold Frederic (1856 – 1898)
Booker T. Washington (1856 – 1915)
Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1929
John Dewey (1859 – 1952)
George Santayana (1863 - 1952)
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869 – 1935)
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906)
Helen Keller (1880 – 1968)
Paul Tillich (1886 – 1965)
H.D. (1886 – 1961)
Marianne Moore (1887 – 1972)
Robinson Jeffers (1887 – 1962)
Anita Loos (1888 – 1981)
Conrad Aiken (1889 – 1973)
Henry Miller (1891 – 1980)
Djuna Barnes (1892 – 1982)
Dorothy Parker (1893 – 1967)
Susanne Langer (1895 – 1985)
Kenneth Burke (1897 – 1993)
Robert Coates (1897 – 1973)
Janet Lewis (1899 – 1998)
Edward Dahlberg (1900 – 1977)
Langston Hughes (1901 – 1967)
Glenway Wescott (1901 – 1987)
R. P. Blackmur (1904 – 1965)
Robert Penn Warren (1905 – 1989)
Henry Roth (1906 – 1995)
Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975)
Jacques Barzun (1907 – 2012)
Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907 – 1972)
Martha Gellhorn (1908 – 1998)
William Saroyan (1908 – 1981)
Clement Greenberg (1909 – 1994)
Nelson Algren (1909 – 1981)
Robert Hayden (1913 – 1980)
Delmore Schwartz (1913 – 1966)
Eleanor Clark (1913 – 1996
Randall Jarrell (1914 – 1965)
James Purdy (1914 – 2009)
Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968)
Alfred Kazin (1915 - 1998)
William Goyen (1915 – 1983)
John Hope Franklin (1915 – 2009)
Jane Jacobs (1916 – 2006)
Elizabeth Hardwick (1916 – 2007)
C. Wright Mills (1916 – 1962)
Murray Kempton (1917 - 1997)
William Eastlake (1917 – 1997)
Robert Lowell (1917 – 1977)
J. F. Powers (1917 – 1999)
Louis Auchincloss (1917 – 2010)
Leslie Fiedler (1917 – 2003)
Howard Nemerov (1920 – 1991)
Walter Kaufmann (1921 - 1980)
Richard Wilbur (1921 – 2017)
William Gaddis (1922 – 1998)
Denise Levertov (1923 – 1997)
Anthony Hecht (1923 – 2004)
Evan S. Connell (1924 – 2013)
Truman Capote (1924 – 1984)
William H. Gass (1924 – 2017)
John A. Williams (1925 – 2015)
Donald Justice (1925 – 2004)
James Salter (1925 – 2015)
Gore Vidal (1925 – 2012)
Frank O'Hara (1926 – 1966)
James Merrill (1926 – 1995)
Alice Adams (1926 - 1999)
Guy Davenport (1927 – 2005)
David Markson (1927 – 2010)
Peter Matthiessen (1927 – 2014)
Edward Albee (1928 – 2016)
Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)
Donald Hall (1928 – 2018)
Anne Sexton (1928 – 1974)
Gilbert Sorrentino (1929 – 2006)
John Barth (b. 1930)
Stanley Elkin (1930 – 1995)
Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007)
Robert Coover (b. 1932)
Leonard Michaels (1933 - 2003)
N. Scott Momaday (b. 1934)
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1934 – 2002)
Janet Malcolm (1934 – 2021)
Jay Wright (b. 1935)
Vivian Gornick (b. 1935)
Stephen Dixon (1936 – 2019)
Andre Dubus (1936 – 1999)
Clarence Major (b. 1936)
William Melvin Kelley (1937 – 2017)
Leon Forrest (1937 – 1997)
Thomas M. Disch (1940 - 2008)
August Wilson (1945 – 2005)
I stopped at 101; I could have gone further, though I doubt some of the more obscure or specialist writers I considered adding to this list (Nelson Goodman, Chandler Brossard) will be coming to the main series any time soon.
I put Thomas M. Disch on at the last minute because he wrote a poem about the Library of America. Of particular interest is this section:
Marquand. Aiken. cummings. Mailer.
What are their chances now, which once
Loomed so large?
Of those four listed in the first line, Mailer has been minted into the main series, Cummings I thought too obvious a pick, Aiken I included in my list, and Marquand seems destined to be forgotten.
Header image by Frank Schulenburg on Wikimedia Commons. No changes were made to the image and the use of the image is not meant to imply that Frank Schulenburg endorses its use or this article.
See commentary on Malcolm Jones’s op-ed from Mark Athitakis and D. G. Myers.
Lotta names on here that are new to me, will have to do some further research. Thank you for sharing!