This Library of America volume brings together one of Henry James’s most unusual experiments and one of his most beloved masterpieces Writing to his friend William Dean Howells, Henry James characterized his experimental novel, The Sacred Fount, as the only one of his novels to be told in the first person, as “a fine flight into the high fantastic.” While traveling to the country house of Newmarch for a weekend party, the nameless narrator becomes obsessed with the idea that a person may become younger or cleverer by tapping the “sacred fount” of another person. Convinced that Grace Brissenden has become younger by drawing upon her husband, Guy, the narrator seeks to discover the source of the newfound wit of Gilbert Long, previously “a fine piece of human furniture.” His perplexing and ambiguous quest, and the varying reactions it provokes from the other guests, calls into question the imaginative inquiry central to James’s art of the novel. James described the essential idea of The Wings of the Dove as “a young person conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world.” The heroine, a wealthy young American heiress, Milly Theale (inspired by James’s beloved cousin Minny Temple), is slowly drawn into a trap set for her by the English adventuress Kate Croy and her lover, the journalist Morton Densher. The unexpected outcome of their mercenary scheme provides the resolution to a tragic story of love and betrayal, innocence and experience that has long been acknowledged as one of James’s supreme achievements as a novelist. This volume prints the New York Edition text of The Wings of the Dove, and includes the illuminating preface James wrote for that edition. 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 Library of America presents this definitive collection of Cheever's novels: "The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal, Bullet Park, Falconer," and "Oh What a Paradise It Seems."

Collects legendary and controversial works by the mid-twentieth-century writer including posthumous, unedited, and previously unseen versions, in a comparative anthology that offers insight into the influence of editor Gordon Lish.

"In The Great American Novel (1973), Roth lifts the lid on the suppressed history of the homeless Ruppert Mundys of baseball's despised and vanquished third major league, turning the national pastime into unfettered picaresque farce. The cast of improbable characters includes: Gil Gamesh, the pitcher who actually tried to kill the umpire; John Baal, the ex-con first baseman, "The Babe Ruth of the Big House," who never hit a home run sober; and the House Un-American Activities Committee." "My Life as a Man (1974) is the savage, sometimes lurid account of the all-out battle waged between the young writer Peter Tarnopol and the wife who is his nemesis, his demon, and his muse. This is the treacherous world of Strindberg nearly a century later: the story of a fierce marital tragedy of obsession and blindness and desperate need." "The volume closes with The Professor of Desire (1977), which charts the second sexual metamorphosis of David Kepesh, protagonist of The Breast. Roth follows Kepesh, an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling, into a vast wilderness of erotic possibility."--BOOK JACKET.

Features a collection of writings across different genres by the mid-twentieth-century author.

Presents four complete novels from William Faulkner.

This landmark volume combines the entire Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, "The Stories of John Cheever," with seven selections from Cheever's first book, "The Way Some People Live."

"The centerpiece of this Library of America edition of Porter's shorter writings is The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965), the career-capping volume that won for its author a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Set in her native Texas and her beloved Mexico, in Greenwich Village, Berlin, and the gothic Old South, these are stories that, in the words of V. S. Pritchett, "suggest the whole rather than the surface of life." They include her first, "Maria Concepcion" (1922), the tale of a Mexican Indian who confronts her husband's lover in a world where jealousy, revenge, and death are constant companions and the first allegiance is always to the living. Also her last, "Holiday" (1960), in which a young woman's account of her summer vacation - as the paying guest of a family of German farmers on the Texas - Louisiana border - deepens into a meditation on mute suffering, the rituals of death, and the death-in-life that is the failure to recognize a fellow person's humanity. All 26 stories - among them such masterpieces as "Flowering Judas," "Noon Wine," and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" - are wide in vision but laser-sharp in focus; they exemplify, in the words of Mary Gordon, "the clarity and inclusiveness of the art we proclaim as great."" "Here too, in the most comprehensive selection ever published, are Porter's short nonfiction writings, including speeches, notes, and essays on the writer's craft, literary reflections on Hardy, Pound, and Welty, political dispatches from revolutionary Mexico, and a personal history of the Sacco-Vanzetti case - some 80 items in all, concluding with two previously uncollected essays in autobiography. Storyteller and critic, reporter and book reviewer, private citizen and public figure, Porter in this collection can at last be seen whole, in all her roles and variety and excellence. She is unforgettable, a multifaceted master of American prose."--BOOK JACKET.

With his second book, They Came Like Swallows (1937), William Maxwell found his signature subject matter—the fragility of human happiness—as well as his voice, a quiet, cadenced Midwestern voice that John Updike has called one of the wisest and kindest in American fiction. Set against the background of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, this short novel presents the loving character of Elizabeth Morison, a devoted wife and mother, through the eyes of those whom she is fated to leave decades before her time. Edmund Wilson described The Folded Leaf (1945) as “a quite unconventional study of adolescent relationships—between two boys, with a girl in the offing—in Chicago and in a Middle Western college: very much lived and very much seen.” He praised this “drama of the immature” for the compassion Maxwell brings to his male protagonists, whose intensely felt, unarticulated bond is beyond their inchoate ability to understand. Time Will Darken It (1948) is a drama of the mature: a good man’s struggle to keep duty before desire and his family’s needs before his own. It paints a portrait of Draperville, Illinois, in 1912, a proud and isolated community governed by gossip, where an ambitious young woman must not overreach the limits society has placed on her sex, and an older, married gentleman must not encourage her should she dare. Together with these major works, this Library of America edition of Maxwell’s early fiction collects his lighthearted first novel, Bright Center of Heaven (1934), out of print for nearly 70 years, and nine masterly short stories. It concludes with “The Writer as Illusionist” (1955), Maxwell’s fullest statement on the art of fiction as he practiced it. 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.

Presents Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road" along with four other of his autobiographical "road books" and journal entries related to "On the Road."