I'm an LOA subscriber who currently has over 190 of the main series volumes (as well as all the American Poetry Project volumes and several of the non-series volumes). For several years I've been keeping a list of authors -- I'm not sure how best to characterize it -- perhaps a combination of those I'd like to see in LOA, those I expect or anticipate will appear, or those I think deserve one or more volumes. Someplace not too long ago, I read, perhaps in an interview with an LOA person, that the purpose of LOA is not just to enshrine THE CLASSICS (TM), but to include excellent writing of all kinds. I heartily endorse that view and really enjoy and applaud the inclusiveness of LOA.

I thought I'd list some of the authors on my list to see what others think of them, or what other authors they might add:

Peter Matthiessen (novels, stories, natural history, social justice)
Wright Morris (novels)
Ralph Ellison (novels, criticism, essays)
Martin Luther King
Emily Dickinson (I'm surprised she doesn't already have a volume)
Sherwood Anderson (plays and stories)
August Wilson (series of 10 plays plus a few independent ones)
Lorraine Hansberry (probably not enough work to fill a volume, but perhaps can be combined in some other collection)

N. Scott Momaday (novels, memoirs, etc.)
Louise Erdrich (series of loosely interconnected novels)
Leslie Marmon Silko (at least Ceremony and some short stories)
James Welch (novels, especially Fools Crow)
(the previous four are outstanding Native AMerican authors, a group not so far represented in LOA, except minor appearances in anthologies)

Toni Morrison (novels)
e.e. cummings
T.S. Eliot (does he count as an American? Also, I imagine the rights would be difficult to get)

Bruce Catton (Civil War histories -- I admit some bias here -- he and I grew up in the same small town, and his wonderful childhood memoir, Waiting for the Morning Train, describes his adventures with the grandparents of the kids I grew up with)

John Updike (everything)
FDR
Langston Hughes (poetry, stories)
John Hersey (novels, reportage)
Louis Auchincloss (novels, stories)

Paul Horgan (novels, biography, history)
Wallace Stegner (novels, stories, history, more) -- surely the pre-eminent Western writer, but really much more than just a "Western" writer.

Rachel Carson (not only Silent Spring, but her other beautiful natural history writings)

Bernard de Voto (history)

Van Wyck Brooks (especially his 5-volume history of American literature)

Lewis Mumford

Stephen Jay Gould (at least the 10 volumes of his essays on natural history, and of his other books at least The Mismeasure of Man)

What about a volume containg the writings of the Abolitionists (or will they be included in the 4-volume anthology of Civil War literature?)

I also wonder whether we will see more of some of the authors al;ready included, such as Faulkner (short stories), Howells (more novels), Melville (poetry), Henry Adams (articles, letters), Baldwin (later novels), Dreiser, Kerouac, Miller (later plays), Wilder (later novels), Theodore Roosevelt, Singer (novels), Thoreau (journal selections similar to those now appearing by Emerson), Edmund Wison (much more).

"What about a volume containing the writings of the Abolitionists..."

I agree and would ask that it include an individual volume on John Brown. Not just his writings but contemporary (to him) writings about him. I'm currently reading John Brown 1800-1859, A Biography Fifty Years After by Oswald Garrison Villard (grandson to the abolitionist) and am simply fascinated.

I also ditto Bernard de Voto, Rachel Carson and many of your other recommendations.

>1

What is the "4-volume anthology of Civil War literature"? Has LOA indicated such an anthology is forthcoming? I would love to get an LOA edition of Tourgée's A Fool's Errand and De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty to replace my brittle paperbacks.

I too would love to see Albion Tourgee's A Fools Errand.

Django on another thread an LOA marketing representative (DCloyceSmith or David) told us that a 4-volume Civil War anthology was in the works!!

>1 @euphorb: Great thread and great list! I'll be sure to share it with the editors and other staff members on Monday morning; we all eat this stuff up.

A good number of the suggestions listed here have their own unique "stories" that could take hours to tell, the most common thread among them being permissions issues with reluctant publishers. The one I'll single out for explanation, however, is Emily Dickinson, since she comes up a lot. A significant chunk of Dickinson's oeuvre (poetry, letters) was actually published in the middle of the twentieth century and is under copyright protection. (The Little, Brown "Complete Poems of 1924" contains barely half her poems. See http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/155 for a small list of the major collections published since the 1920s.) We continue to try to clear the rights for the entire body of work.

>3 @Django6924: The Civil War anthology currently in production will be a collection on the model of The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence--reporting, speeches, diaries, letters, narratives, etc. The first volume will be published in January 2011, with one volume each year thereafter (one for each year of the war).

On a personal note: I'm going to hunt down Albion Tourgee's A Fool's Errand and read it for myself. Thanks for the recommendation.

David (LOA director of marketing)

>1
Put me down for Melville's poetry, James Baldwin, more Edmund Wilson (is Patriotic Gore included in the current volumes?) and Ralph Ellison. In fact, I like most of that list.

I 'd also like to see The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic published by loa. It's a great novel that is almost forgotten. The sort of thing that loa should definitely consider. Unfortunately, I don't know what else he has written, so I'm not sure how much there is to fill a volume.

I think we need a Bret Harte volume as well. While we're at it, maybe a volume or two on Westerns to go with the Crime Novels?

I like the idea of a collection of Westerns. Two classic candidates for that collection would be The Virginian by Owen Wister and The Oxbow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark.

Patriotic Gore is not included in the current Edmund Wilson volumes, but it would be great for a volume of Wilson that includes that to come out in conjunction with the forthcoming Civil War anthology volumes.

I'll put down some more names from my list that I left off my initial post:

Adward Albee (plays)
Nelson Algren (novels)
Ray Bradbury (novels, memoirs)
Don DeLillo (novels)
John Dewey (non-fiction)
Ellen Glasgow (novels)
Lillian Hellman (plays)
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (poetry and breakfast table books) and Jr. (legal writings)

Ring Lardner (stories)
Lewis & Clark journals
Norman Mailer (novels, reportage, non-fiction novels)
Bernard Malamud (novels, stories)
David Mamet (plays)
John Marquand (novels)
Cormac McCarthy (novels)
Mary McCarthy (novels)
James Merrill (poetry, novels, plays)
Samuel Eliot Morison (history, biography)
Joyce Carol Oates (novels, stories)
John O'Hara (some novels, but especially his many wonderful stories)
Thomas Pynchon (novels)
Upton Sinclair (novels)
William Styron (novels)
Robert Penn Warren (novels, poetry)
Thomas Wolfe (novels)

I realize many of these are too contemporary to expect any appearances soon, and with relatively few new volumes each year, it will be a long time before we see any substantial number of these -- I am also pleased to see each year the appearance of authors that I had not thought of.

I think Cormac McCarthy is being considered, which is great news.

Of this list, I'd most like to get my hands on Pynchon, Oates, Mamet, DeLillo and Mailer. And I'll also nominate Riders of the Purple Sage for a Western volume.

I'll add Harry Crews, Henry Roth, Joseph Mitchell and Zitkala-Sa in addition to Harold Frederic.

In the field of journalism, we have two excellent volumes each for WWII and Vietnam.

I vote for a volume on the Korean Conflict, a precursor to Vietnam and a war few people know much about—even though the US alone lost 34,000 men.

I'd like to cast a vote for Upton Sinclair--in particular the eleven Lanny Budd novels, which offer a portrait of the US and its move from a nation of isolationists to the superpower of the 20th century during the years from just before WW I to just after WW II. I have only read the third in the series, Dragon's Teeth, which won the 1943 Pulitzer Prize. The novels have been out of print for some time.

This is a great thread-- I actually joined just so I could add 2 cents. I think that the strength of LOA is not just that is the unofficial canon, but also its willingness to recognize books which are important for other reasons (such as HP Lovecraft, PK Dick, etc).

The one writer who I really really enjoy is Tobias Wolff. His short stories are, in my opinion, wonderful. I am very curious to see how the LOA enshrines the current selection of writers. LOA Dan Brown? Yikes

What about Native American writings such as Black Elk Speaks by Black Elk and John Neihardt or writings about Native Americans such as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown or writings including the photography of the North American Indian such as the works of Edward S. Curtis.

edited because of you guessed it...

Message modifié par son auteur, Fév 8, 2010, 9:23am.

11> Thankfully I don't think we'll have to worry about Mr Brown getting his own volume(s) anytime soon.

>12

Being from Missouri, I'm glad you mentioned John G, Neihardt, who was poet-in-residence at the University of Missouri when I was there. I heard him read from "The Song of Hugh Glass" and was so impressed I read several of his Western Cycle poems and would like to see an LOA volume of sll of them.

13>

I know, but it was more in response to my own thought of the LOA's willingness to include those authors who were socially important at the time of publication (in other words popular), rather than because they were necessarily "good". Then again, maybe that is simply my impression of the included pulp writers, etc. While I enjoy them quite a bit, they strike me as falling into that same category as what Brown is now... Stephen King is maybe a better example of what I am thinking of... Not that either of these guys will be setting their rights free anytime soon...

I do wonder, are their any living authors besides Roth who have been giving so much to LOA regarding recent work?

Does anyone know if Erskine Caldwell is collected in an LOA volume or anthology? I read Tobacco Road a few years ago and rate him, on the basis of that book, just below Flannery O'Connor, although Tobacco Road was better IMO than Wise Blood and just as good as The Violent Bear it Away, and he has as good a grasp of the South as Faulkner, despite the lurid book covers used to sell his work.

How about "A collected works of the South" for great authors with small output.

How about "Collected Mysteries of the XXXX's" in which the XXXX stands for a decade. This would allow for some Mickey Spillane, Earle Stanley Gardner, and others of that ilk.

Of course I'm sure that LOA has considered all sorts of ways to keep cranking out the volumes. And it ALL depends on availabilty of these works for LOA.

I'm thrilled to see an organization such as LOA having a liaison on a board like this between them and their readership. More publishers could benefit from such a idea.

I understand where you're coming from, but I'm glad loa recognizes someone like Lovecraft who could be truly awful, but, at other times, very good. He's not a master of prose, but his style is effective once you acquire the taste. If you attempt to extrapolate any kind of social agenda from the work, you will be lucky to find anything less than deplorable, but such attempts miss the point.

Where he truly becomes significant is when the influence he has had on fiction and popular culture is examined. His brand of "weird" horror can be seen everywhere, and, at least in concept, it truly is terrifying at its core.

I'm not quite as big a fan of Chandler and Hammet, but can you think of anything more American than Phillip Marlowe and Same Spade? They're part of our folklore now.

So, no, I wouldn't set them high in the pantheon of American letters next to Melville or Whitman, but we would definitely lose something valuable if those stories were lost.

Squidblatt-

I agree with all that you said. What is really exciting to me is the inclusion of other authors who, even as a guy who has a BA and MA in literature, I have never heard of. Some of it may be due to the current focus of English programs on cultural studies, but many of the old authors are falling away. Just the descriptions have me pumped to get into some of the new finds. (IE, James Farrell-- never even heard of him, but it sounds really interesting)...

I am about to subscribe to LOA and currently only own Flannery O'Connor and Lovecraft, but I have the Hammet short story collection from the public library. I have just been reading one short story every night (takes about an hour, give or take, which is the perfect amount of time for me). Mixing it up between detective fiction, wierd tales and southern gothic has been a great experience. If I sit and keep reading any one author all the time-- ie, just plugging straight through Lovecraft-- the stories start to meld too much together. Mixing it up between these three has kept it all fresh and been a really fun way to read them. I haven't gotten to Chandler yet, but I am looking forward to his work.

On the chance that he hasn't been mentioned before, I'd recommend Garry Wills, whose best books might fill an LOA volume or two. Although his books are nonfiction, they might fall into the "long essay" category of someone like Edmund Wilson. I realize that LOA doesn't usually feature contemporary writers, though, so maybe we'd have to wait until 2025 or so.

It strikes me that many of the pulp writers in the LOA, not only P.K. Dick and Lovecraft, but also William Lindsay Gresham and Edward Anderson and Patricia Highsmith, were not very popular while they were alive. Instead, their influence has been magnified by the passage of decades and they loom large over the works produced by subsequent generations of writers. The genre writers of yore may not be Melville or Faulkner or Whitman or (your favorite canonical writer here)--but then again, neither were James Fenimore Cooper or Harriet Beecher Stowe, who nonetheless cast long shadows in spite of the literary qualities of their works.

Similarly, Zora Neale Hurston and Dawn Powell never achieved popularity or even literary respectability while they were alive, but American literature of the last fifty years is hard to imagine without their influence.

Popularity or "bestsellerdom", on the other hand, can be fleeting, however. I can confidently say that you won't be seeing LOA collections of Henry Harland or Temple Bailey or John Fox, Jr. or Lloyd C. Douglas or Hal Lindsey anytime soon.

I would like to see works (or at least compiled volume) by America's Secularists such as Susan B. Anthony and Robert J. Ingersoll.

Message modifié par son auteur, Fév 9, 2010, 4:18pm.

I would love to see a John Lomax and Alan Lomax anthology. I would love an anthology of the spirituals. I would also love to see a blues anthology...I mean the real thing as they were sung by my fore mamas and papas out of Clarksdale, Mississippi.

I want to just mention how much I enjoy the critical material that is collected in several volumes. I'm referring to Poe and Henry James in particular, but the selections in several volumes of other writers are appreciated as well. Please keep printing this kind of material. Sometimes the LOA is the only source for it outside of academia.