The Library of America (LoA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.
Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published nearly 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 i...
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The Library of America (LoA) is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.
Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published nearly 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 who with Jason Epstein co-founded the series. .
An early sponsor of LoA was American academic Daniel Aaron.
The first volumes were published in 1982. 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.
The publisher aims to keep classics in print permanently to preserve America's literary heritage. Although the LoA sells more...
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