Abraham Lincoln measured the promise—and cost—of American freedom in lucid and extraordinarily moving prose, famous for its native wit, simple dignity of expressions, and peculiarly American flavor. This volume, with its companion, Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writing 1859–1865, comprises the most comprehensive selection ever published. over 240 speeches, letters, and drafts take Lincoln from rural law practice to national prominence, and chart his emergence as an eloquent antislavery advocate and defender of the constitution. included are the complete Lincoln-Douglas debates, perhaps the most famous confrontation in American political history. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

This second Library of America volume of Washington Irving brings together for the first time three collections of his stories and sketches. Written at the peak of his popularity, these three works reveal Irving’s remarkable diversity, his skill at adapting European legends to his own style, and the talent for entertainment that made him America’s first literary celebrity. Bracebridge Hall (1822) was published, like The Sketch Book, under the pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon, and centers on an English manor, its inhabitants, and the tales they tell. Interspersed with witty, evocative sketches of country life among the English nobility is the well-known tale “The Stout Gentleman” and stories based on English, French, and Spanish folklore, vividly recounted with Irving’s inimitable blend of elegance and colloquial dash. Tales of a Traveller (1824), written after a year-long stay in Germany, is a pivotal work in Irving’s career, marking his last experiment with fiction before he turned to the writing of history, biography, and adaptation of folktales. Irving felt his new stories to be “some of the best things I have ever written. They may not be as highly finished as some of my former writings, but they are touched off with a freer spirit, and are more true to life.” The Alhambra (1832) was inspired by Irving’s stay during the spring and summer of 1829 at the ancient Moorish palace in Granada, which he called “one of the most remarkable, romantic, and delicious spots in the world.” This rich compendium of tales, deftly interwoven with historical accounts and picturesque sketches, was assembled from Spanish and Moorish folklore, history, guidebooks, and anecdotes of Irving’s experiences among the local residents. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Often compared to the works of E.E. Cummings and Elizabeth Bishop, these poems are a free-ranging exploration of outer and inner worlds, of nature and the human mind In celebration of the centenary of May Swenson’s birth, The Library of America presents a one-volume edition of all of the poems that Swenson published in her lifetime—from her first collection Another Animal (1954) to the innovative shaped poems of Iconographs (1970) to her final work In Other Words (1987)—as well as a selection of previously uncollected work. The collection reveals the sweeping compass of Swenson’s curiosity: nature poems display her keen observation of wildlife; exuberant and erotic love poems celebrate beauty and passion; place poems record her travels to the American Southwest, France, and Italy and her residence in New York City and Sea Cliff, Long Island; verse “analyses” investigate baseball, wave motion, the DNA molecule, bronco busting, James Bond movies, and the first walk on the moon. Swenson was an inveterate reviser: poems in earlier volumes were frequently reworked for inclusion in later volumes, such as To Mix with Time (1963) and New and Selected Things Taking Place (1978). While preserving the order of publication, this volume presents the author’s final or definitive version. Substantive textual variants and title changes are detailed in the notes to the volume. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The four novels collected in this Library of America volume are among the classic works from the immensely productive career of America’s most influential man of letters at the turn of the twentieth century. William Dean Howells was a champion of French and Russian realistic writers and a brilliant advocate of the most controversial American writers of his own time. In A Foregone Conclusion (1875), a young American painter roams through Europe for years before at last deciding to marry the woman who, he erroneously thinks, has been in love with an Italian priest turned agnostic. A Modern Instance (1882) offers an unflinching portrait of an unhappy marriage and ends with a hero barred by his perhaps overscrupulous conscience from marrying the divorced heroine. Once again personal dilemmas are seen as symptoms of the rapid displacement of older social and religious stabilities by opportunism and commercial progress. One of the most engaging of all his novels, Indian Summer(1885), is touched with the Jamesian glamour of romantic confusion among two American couples in Italy. Here Howells’s realism takes a quietly humorous turn. Situations which might be exploited by another novelist for their theatrical or melodramatic possibilities are instead eroded by the often trivial or casual experiences of everyday living. Characteristically, Howells is opposed to exaggeration in the interest of discovering how people, despite the crises that beset them, manage to find their way. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Howells’s best-known work, gives a brilliantly skeptical portrait of American business life and its perils, celebrating not the rise but the loss of fortune that makes possible the hero’s recovery of his earlier integrity and happiness. “There are,” remarked a contemporary reviewer, “thousands of Silas Laphams throughout the United States,” and present-day readers might agree that there still are. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

A historian and former presidential speechwriter presents an unprecedented two-volume collection of the greatest speeches in American history.

The first volume in a four-volume series on the American Civil War—featuring first-hand writings from Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and more This “mesmerizing and deeply troubling” glimpse into the Civil War era “will forever deepen the way you see this central chapter in our history . . . a masterpiece” (Newsweek). After 150 years the Civil War is still our greatest national drama, at once heroic, tragic, and epic-our Iliad, but also our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a "new birth of freedom.” Drawn from letters, diaries, speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs, The Civil War: The First Year gathers over 120 pieces by more than sixty participants to create a unique firsthand narrative of this great historical crisis. Beginning on the eve of Lincoln's election in November 1860 and ending in January 1862 with the appointment of Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war, this volume presents writing by figures well-known—Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Frederick Douglass, and Lincoln himself among them—and less familiar, like proslavery advocate J.D.B. DeBow, Lieutenants Charles B. Haydon of the 2nd Michigan Infantry and Henry Livermore Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and plantation mistresses Catherine Edmondston of North Carolina and Kate Stone of Mississippi. Together, the selections provide a powerful sense of the immediacy, uncertainty, and urgency of events as the nation was torn asunder. Includes headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, full-color hand-drawn endpaper maps, and an index. Companion volumes will gather writings from the second, third, and final years of the conflict. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Set between January 1862 and January 1863, this second installment in the ambitious Civil War series paints an unforgettable portrait of the year that turned a secessionist rebellion into a war of emancipation Including eleven never-before-published pieces, here are more than 140 messages, proclamations, newspaper stories, letters, diary entries, memoir excerpts, and poems by more than eighty participants and observers, among them Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, Robert E. Lee, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Clara Barton, Harriet Jacobs, and George Templeton Strong, as well as soldiers Charles B. Haydon and Henry Livermore Abbott; diarists Kate Stone and Judith McGuire; and war correspondents George E. Stephens and George Smalley. The selections include vivid and haunting narratives of battles-Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, the gunboat war on the Western rivers, Shiloh, the Seven Days, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Iuka, Corinth, Perryville, Fredericksburg, Stones River-as well as firsthand accounts of life and death in the military hospitals in Richmond and Georgetown; of the impact of war on Massachusetts towns and Louisiana plantations; of the struggles of runaway slaves and the mounting fears of slaveholders; and of the deliberations of the cabinet in Washington, as Lincoln moved toward what he would call "the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century": the revolutionary proclamation of emancipation. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Includes indexes. Part 2 American journalism 1969-1975.

Presents over one hundred newspaper and magazine articles and book excerpts that chronicle the Civil Rights movement from 1941 to 1963, and includes a chronology, journalist biographies, and photographs.

Volume Two : E.E. Cummings to May Swenson.