Library of America

The Library of America (LOA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.

Overview and history

Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LOA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip Roth, Nathaniel Hawthorne to Saul Bellow, including the selected writings of several U.S. presidents.

The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ("La Pléiade") series published in France provided the model for the LOA, which was long a dream of the critic Edmund Wilson.

The initial publishers 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.As of 2009, 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 (in a different format to the above illustration) Writing Los Angeles.