Book Review : Library Is Preserving the Best in U.S. Literature

The Library of America marches on. Being published this week is a volume of Edith Wharton, containing four of her novels--”The House of Mirth,” “The Reef,” “The Custom of the Country” and “The Age of Innocence.” It is the 30th title since 1982 in the extraordinary undertaking that aims to do nothing less than preserve all the best of American literature in a series of uniform, attractive, readable, durable and impeccably edited volumes.

The Library, which has hardly begun to invade the 20th Century (Faulkner, Jack London and now Wharton), let alone exhaust the 18th and 19th centuries, will surely run to 100 volumes or more before it is completed. Theoretically, of course, it will never be finished, so long as American writers continue to write, and write well.

Before the Library of America, it often enough happened that only the best-known works of even the best-known American writers were reliably available. Stephen Crane’s fiction, for example, was in print, but his poetry and his compelling journalism were out of print. (Crane covered the Spanish-American War from Cuba, the Greek war of independence from Greece, and more.) The Library’s one-volume complete Stephen Crane makes it possible for us to see Crane as we are accustomed to seeing Hemingway: the novelist and the journalist as one.

Several more titles are already in work. Due out Aug. 1 (or, appropriately, on the Fourth of July if production can be advanced) is a two-volume edition of Henry Adams’ “History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison,” which Adams first circulated in half a dozen privately printed copies each in 1884 and 1885. Some scholars think it’s his finest work, superior even to “The Education of Henry Adams,” which was included in an earlier Adams volume in the Library of America series.

In mid-September the Library will bring out an edition of muckraker Frank Norris’ volume containing several of his essays and three of his novels, including “McTeague,” which became the basis for Erich von Stroheim’s silent film masterpiece “Greed.”

Scheduled for November is a selection of the writings of the sociologist-teacher W. E. B. Du Bois, the son of a French Huguenot and an African slave. Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folk,” which is in the new volume, was first published in 1903. He published his last book in 1961 and died, at the age of 95, in 1963. The book is being edited by Nathan Huggins, with historian John Hope Franklin as consultant.

Also scheduled for November is a Willa Cather volume, the first of two, this embracing novels and short stories from 1896 to 1922 and including “O Pioneers,” “The Song of the Lark,” “My Antonia” and “One of Ours,” for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.

In 1987 there will be additional volumes of Mark Twain (“Tales and Sketches”) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Poetry and Sketches”), the Collected Works of Benjamin Franklin and of Flannery O’Connor (edited by Sally Fitzgerald, who edited O’Connor’s letters and has written her biography) and a volume of William James (“Writings 1902-1910”).

Looking further ahead, the Library hopes to publish in 1988 a volume on the Founding Fathers and the debates over the Constitution, Federalists vs. anti-Federalists. The Library has just received a special grant from the Bradley Foundation to commence work on it. Historian Bernard Bailyn of Harvard will edit the volume.

The Library has had another grant, from the Mellon Foundation, specifically to encourage and abet the acquisition of the whole Library of America collection by public libraries. It is a matching grant: $500 against $500 from qualifying libraries. (The simple qualifications: The library must be open 30 hours a week and have a librarian and very limited book-buying funds.)

Says Gail Rentsch, spokeswoman for the Library, “For its $500 the library receives 60 Library of America titles, the existing 30 and, by 1990, the balance of the 60. We hope with the grant to give the series to a thousand libraries.” It is a considerable bargain, since the individual volumes average $27.50 retail and $21.50 by advance subscription.

Nearly 500 libraries qualified in a first round of applications, and a second round of applications is just now being processed.

“The response, and the intensity of enthusiasm, has been remarkable,” Rentsch says. “Some of the libraries we heard from had never had any of these works on their shelves, except, perhaps, Mark Twain.”

One library auctioned off a homemade quilt to raise its $500; another reported that it raffled off 79 volumes of Louis L’Amour.

Literary critic Edmund Wilson had first proposed the idea of a library of American literature about a quarter-century ago. The Pleiades series embracing French literature in uniform volumes was a model for the idea. But it was not until 1979 that an organization called Literary Classics of the United States Inc. was formed. It received initial grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, with Daniel Aaron of Harvard as president and Cheryl Hurley as executive director, it set up shop in New York.

The first four volumes (Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville) were published in 1982. While its sales figures are not to be compared with John Le Carre and Judith Krantz, they are amazing given the nature, and the prices of the volumes. By now the total number of copies sold is well beyond half a million.

Not all the titles have moved well. William Dean Howells has not gone like hot cakes. But the one-volume edition of Thomas Jefferson has been a big hit, aided by a book club sale, and the two volumes of Francis Parkman--”France and England in North America”--have startled the editors by their popularity. A worthy choice has proved to be an unanticipated best seller.

Since the titles are, in the truest sense, books with a long shelf life and continue to sell steadily over the years, the earliest titles have by now tended to run up the most impressive sales figures. The Library is reluctant to quote specifics, but Whitman, Twain, Hawthorne, Melville and Jack London have done especially well. Several titles have gone back for fourth and fifth printings.

The Library is a nonprofit venture, with different aims from regular trade book publishing. But by now it is a self-supporting enterprise, although it requires special grants for special undertakings, like the Federalist debate.

Instinct for Preservation

“Our timing,” the Library’s executive director Cheryl Hurley says, “has been just right, I think. Earlier might have been too early. We might have been misplaced in all the turmoil of the ‘60s. But by the late ‘70s and now in the ‘80s we as a nation have acquired a whole instinct for preservation. We’ve grown more interested in our culture, in our past. We’ve grown up, and we want to see how we grew up.

“What pleases us enormously is that the libraries that have the series say that it circulates constantly. It doesn’t just sit prettily on the shelves. Librarians tell us that young readers tell them that the books look contemporary and inviting, not like musty items out of the past.”

It is true that the heft and attractiveness of the Library of American volumes matches the appeal of their substance.

The books are relatively small (5 inches by 8 inches) and thick, but they stay open and flat at any page, and the acid-free paper is thin but opaque. The chronology of Wharton’s life given at the back is, as in the earlier volumes, a biography in miniature; and the amplifying notes, fascinating in themselves, are also tucked in at the back to leave the text itself free for uninterrupted reading.

While some of Wharton’s work has remained in print, not least as required reading in college English courses, the likelihood is that the new volume will help a new generation of readers discover her minutely observed, sharp-edged and strikingly contemporary stories of life among the rich, the would-be rich and used-to-be rich.

The volumes in the series are in fact marvels of scholarship, unobtrusively displayed, and a prime effort has been to work from the text that reflects the author’s final word.

The William Faulkner volume (“Novels 1930-35”) published in December and edited by leading Faulkner scholars Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk was a new text, collated from Faulkner manuscripts, typescripts and heavily marked galleys, and undoing later editings to restore Faulkner’s original intentions. The volume includes “As I Lay Dying,” “Sanctuary,” “Light in August” and “Pylon.”

The decisions about what to publish in the Library of America will grow more difficult as the series moves along: More contemporary authors may well exist in other editions; will commercial publishers cooperate in leasing the rights?

“What do you do about Richard Henry Dana’s ‘Two Years Before the Mast,’ ” Cheryl Hurley asks rhetorically. “It’s wonderful but it’s really all he ever wrote.” Although it exists in a Penguin paperback, the local vote would be to include it in the Library, and I suspect Hurley agrees.

“We’re not narrowly confined to belles-lettres, “ Hurley says. “We have a writ to run wide, and I think we all prefer to be inclusive rather than exclusive.”