Hanna Bercovitch; Editor of the Library of America

Hanna M. Bercovitch, the editor in chief of the Library of America, which publishes a continuing series of classic literary works by American authors, has died. She was 63.

Bercovitch died Monday of lung cancer at the home of her son, Eytan Bercovitch, in Madison, Wis.

An avid reader all her life, Bercovitch joined the nonprofit publishing company in 1980 shortly after it was formed under the name Literary Classics of the United States Inc.

She became the firm’s first staff editor and quickly rose to senior editor and then editor in chief. As scholar, coordinator and editor, she selected and prepared texts for publication and directed preparation of notes on the works and biographies of the authors.

Among the texts she personally corrected and prepared were Richard Wright’s “Native Son” and John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Originally conceived in the early 1960s by literary critic Edmund Wilson, the Library of America was patterned after France’s Pleiades series, which presents French literature in uniform volumes.

The American library published its first four volumes--on the works of Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville--in 1982.

In praise of Bercovitch and her staff, Times critic Charles Champlin wrote in 1986: “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.”

Bercovitch was born in Chicago, but moved with her family to Boyle Heights in Los Angeles when she was 4. There she began her lifelong love affair with the public library.

As a member of the socialist Zionist youth group Hashomer Hatzair, she lived on kibbutzim in Israel in the 1950s.

She was married twice, to Aryeh Jonas, who died of polio when she was only 19, and Eytan Bercovitch, from whom she was divorced. A daughter, Aliza Jonas, died of leukemia in 1967. In addition to her son, Bercovitch is survived by a brother, Leonard Malmquist of Laguna Beach.

Services are scheduled Sunday at 1 p.m. at Beth Olam Cemetery, 6000 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood.