The books added over the past year fully deserve the title of literature, even as they manifest a topicality and trenchancy, a refusal to conform to dogma, that will displease some on the right and will almost certainly infuriate the left. It has taken initiative and published authors whom our seventh-grade teachers would never have dared assign. It is also perhaps a question that critics may pose of a series whose output veers from the canonical to the obscure.īut 2021 has unquestionably been a bold year for the Library of America. Some may recall this line from the 1973 film The Wicker Man, spoken by a resident of Summerisle to Sergeant Neil Howie from the mainland. “Hello, Sir! Have You Lost Your Bearings?”

Who’s right? People may be wondering whom to believe and where the series should go next. Yet all the writers listed here have ardent fans. Since that attack, the LOA series has gone even more off the beaten path, enshrining in its black covers scored with red, white, and blue stripes the work of writers you may never have heard of, opening itself up even more to Jones’s charge of churning out books every year to fulfill a publishing quota rather than a mission of bringing the imperishable works of American writers to the world. He took potshots at Lovecraft and conceded the greatness of one of Jackson’s tales (“The Lottery,” of course) while disputing the stature of her work in toto. Lovecraft, John Cheever, Shirley Jackson, and others to the series alongside the likes of such undisputed masters as Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain. Jones questioned the addition of Philip K.

Today, the LOA operates in an environment where the number of great writers is finite, some question its editorial choices, and the words of critics like Malcolm Jones in Newsweek, who accused the LOA in 2010 of allowing its production schedule rather than editorial criteria to dictate the inclusion of writers, may still rankle. As we move into the new year, the series faces uncharted terrain, much like a number of authors in the series who came of age on the frontiers of a wild and violent land. To be sure, 2021 was a busy time for the publisher, with a number of coups including the release of long-awaited volumes of Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, O. As the Library of America enters its forty-third year, the nonprofit house can look back on 2021 as a year of hard work and aggressive publication of the works of diverse novelists, short story writers, poets, essayists, and memoirists.

Library of america lovecraft