Clockwise from top left: Ernest J. Gaines (University of Kansas), Joan Didion (David Shankbone / CC BY-SA 3.0), B-17 Flying Fortress (Airwolfhound / CC BY-SA 2.0), James Baldwin (Allan Warren / CC BY-SA 3.0), Hannah Arendt (Bettmann / Getty Images), Rigoberto González (Intelligent Television, Inc.), Ernest Hemingway (Public Domain), and MAD cover from March 1966.
Library of America’s work combines excavation, restoration, and celebration, and true to form our editors have scoured bookshelves and combed the archives to bring you a landmark Fall 2024 lineup. From recovering the uncensored version of a Hemingway classic to assembling an unprecedented poetry anthology spanning five centuries of Latino verse, these ten new releases (plus two stunning new boxed sets) aren’t just major contributions to our nation’s literary legacy—they’re also emotionally arresting, politically provocative, riveting on the page, and in one specific case, absolutely and completely MAD.
Browse the list below for information about contents and publication dates, and click here for a full description of each new release.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA SERIES
Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology
Rigoberto González, editor
Library of America #382 / ISBN 978–1–59853–783–3
September 2024
Ernest J. Gaines: Four Novels
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman • In My Father’s House • A Gathering of Old Men • A Lesson Before Dying
John Wharton Lowe, editor
Library of America #383 / ISBN 978–1–59853–790–1
September 2024
Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms & Other Writings 1927–1932
Men Without Women • A Farewell to Arms • Death in the Afternoon • letters
Robert W. Trogdon, editor
Library of America #384 / ISBN 978–1–59853–784–0
October 2024
World War II Memoirs: The European Theater
Company Commander, Charles B. MacDonald • The Warriors, J. Glenn Gray • All the Brave Promises, Mary Lee Settle • The Fall of Fortresses, Elmer Bendiner • The Buffalo Saga, James Harden Daugherty
Elizabeth D. Samet, editor
Library of America #385 / ISBN 978–1–59853–785–7
November 2024
Joan Didion: Memoirs & Later Writings
Political Fictions • Fixed Ideas • Where I Was From • The Year of Magical Thinking (memoir & play) • Blue Nights • South and West
David L. Ulin, editor
Library of America #386 / ISBN 978–1–59853–787–1
November 2024
The James Baldwin Collection (three-volume boxed set)
Collected Essays • Early Novels & Stories • Later Novels
Toni Morrison and Darryl Pinckney, editors
Library of America #97, #98, and #272 / ISBN 978–1–59853-793–2
June 2024
The Joan Didion Collection (three-volume boxed set)
The 1960s & 70s • The 1980s & 90s • Memoirs & Later Writings
David L. Ulin, editor
Library of America #325, #341, and #386 / ISBN 978–1–59853–788–8
November 2024
PAPERBACKS
The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America’s Brain
David Mikics, editor
ISBN 978–1–59853–792–5
September 2024
Hannah Arendt and Henry David Thoreau: On Civil Disobedience
With an introduction by Rogert Berkowitz
ISBN 978–1–59853–791–8
October 2024
Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics
Robert Kimball, editor
ISBN 978–1–59853–794–9
November 2024
Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems
Edward Hirsch, editor
ISBN 978–1–59853–795–6
November 2024
Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems
Paul Berman, editor
ISBN 978–1–59853–796–3
November 2024
Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology
Latino poetry is in the midst of a renaissance: in recent years, Latino poets have won two national and twelve state Poet Laureateships, a Pulitzer Prize, and three National Book Awards. Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology celebrates the beauty and power of this vital, multifaceted tradition with an unprecedented collection bringing together more than 180 poets and spanning nearly five centuries. Edited by poet and scholar Rigoberto González, the volume showcases Latino poetry’s distinctive fusion of Anglophone, Hispanic, and Indigenous resonances; its articulation of the enduring importance of family and community; and its commitment to the vision of a nation strengthened by the stories of immigrants, exiles, refugees, and their descendants. For Héctor Tobar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Our Migrant Souls, the book “is a wondrous journey through the passions, the ideas, and the diversity of a people redefining what it means to be American . . . and a gift to the national literature.”
Accompanying the volume’s release will be Latino Poetry: Places We Call Home, a year-long National Endowment for the Humanities–supported initiative encompassing major events in six cities, free programs in public libraries across the nation, and a project website featuring readings from U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, inaugural poet Richard Blanco, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, among many others. For more information, visit latinopoetry.org. And if you’re a librarian or work at a nonprofit, you can apply now for $1,200 grants to host public programs exploring the Latino poetic tradition. Fill out this short form to apply by February 15, 2024.
Ernest J. Gaines, one of the major Black writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, joins the Library of America with this volume gathering four of his greatest novels, brilliant works that grapple with the persistent and pervasive legacy of slavery in America. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman tells the unforgettable story of one woman’s long journey from bondage to freedom. In My Father’s House concerns a civil rights leader who harbors a dark secret. A Gathering of Old Men is a tense and dramatic novel about what it means to claim dignity in the face of violence. And A Lesson Before Dying offers an exquisite and excruciating portrait of a teacher who must prepare an innocent young man for execution. Coming five years after Gaines’s death in 2019 and edited by his authorized biographer, John Wharton Lowe, this volume lets readers take the measure of a still underappreciated American genius.
The second volume in Library of America’s definitive Ernest Hemingway edition, A Farewell to Arms & Other Writings 1927–1932 presents a new, corrected, and unexpurgated text of Hemingway’s signature classic and one of the greatest war novels ever written. Edited by Hemingway textual scholar Robert W. Trogdon, the LOA text features dozens of corrections and the restoration of Hemingway’s original “offensive” language. The novel is joined by the story collection Men Without Women, considered by many to be Hemingway’s finest, and Death in the Afternoon, the author’s incomparable, fully illustrated meditation on bullfighting, manhood, and the writer’s life, complete with photos restored for the first time from the original negatives. Including a selection of letters from 1927 to 1932 that cast light on his personality, artistic aims, and complicated relationship with his editor, Maxwell Perkins, this is the ultimate Hemingway, and a must-have for fans, students, and libraries.
The year 2024 marks the eightieth anniversary of the Allied assault on Nazi-occupied Europe—a massive undertaking that destroyed the Third Reich and transformed the world. Survivors of that pivotal campaign are now vanishingly few, and World War II Memoirs: The European Theater serves to recognize their valor and preserve their remarkable testimonies. The companion volume to an earlier edition focused on the Pacific theater, this collection is again edited by West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet. It brings together five books that capture a range of American experiences of the war, from the “cold, dirty, rough, frightened, and miserable” life of GIs recounted in Charles B. Macdonald’s Company Commander and J. Glenn Gray’s classic The Warriors; to the haunting aerial combat described by B-17 navigator Elmer Bendiner in The Fall of Fortresses; to Mary Lee Settle’s All the Brave Promises, a memoir of regimented life in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in England; to The Buffalo Saga, James Harden Daugherty’s searing account of his service as a Black soldier in the segregated U.S. Army. Full color endpaper battle maps and restored photos immerse readers in this epoch-defining struggle.
Joan Didion: Memoirs & Later Writings
In the final phase of her extraordinary career, Joan Didion augmented the cool, journalistic detachment that marked her signature style with a new frankness and raw vulnerability in the face of grief and loss, winning her legions of new fans. Memoirs & Later Writings, the third volume in LOA’s definitive Didion edition, brings together seven books from this remarkable period, including the best sellers The Year of Magical Thinking (both the original memoir and Didion’s own acclaimed dramatic adaptation) and Blue Nights. It also restores to print 2003’s Fixed Ideas, tracing the efforts of the Bush administration to “stake new ground in old domestic wars” in the wake of 9/11. All three Didion volumes will also be gathered in The Joan Didion Collection, a gorgeous new boxed set that stands as a fitting tribute to one of the most original and influential literary figures of our time.
And speaking of boxed sets, The James Baldwin Collection, bundling his three LOA volumes—Collected Essays, Early Novels & Stories, and Later Novels—will be released in advance of Baldwin’s centennial in August. This handsome set includes all six of his novels, the story collection Going to Meet the Man, and a comprehensive selection of his brilliant essays, including the complete texts of his seminal Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name, along with the passionate—and still resonant—The Fire Next Time.
The MAD Files
An homage to, in the words of “Weird Al” Yankovic, “one of the all-time greatest American institutions,” The MAD Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America’s Brain makes a convincing case for the continued relevance—and immortal hilarity—of this iconic newsstand fixture. Too determinedly silly to be cool, much less superior, MAD’s slanted yet instantly recognizable view of American pop- and political culture could be summed up by its mascot Alfred E. Newman’s winkingly oblivious catchphrase: “What, me worry?” Distinguished comic book artists including Art Spiegelman, Max Andersson, Mary Fleener, Tim Kreider, Peter Kuper, and R. Crumb, the granddaddy of underground comics, contribute words and art. There’s even one of MAD’s signature fold-ins, courtesy of Jonathan Lethem and Mark Allen. Beloved New Yorker artist Roz Chast contributes a reflection and original cover art. Fans who came of age with the magazine and anyone interested in the way popular culture reflects and reframes our experience will find much to savor in this deluxe paperback collection.
Henry David Thoreau and Hannah Arendt: On Civil Disobedience
Coming in time for what seems destined to be a fraught election year, On Civil Disobedience pairs Henry David Thoreau’s momentous 1849 essay “Resistance to Civil Government” with philosopher Hannah Arendt’s 1970 rejoinder, “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau’s essay, written to justify his refusal to pay poll taxes that he believed supported the Mexican-American War and the expansion of slavery, remains the classic American articulation of the importance of adhering to the “higher law” of one’s own conscience in the face of injustice. It drew a surprisingly stern rebuke from Arendt more than a century later. Instructed by the emergence of totalitarianism in Europe and the civil rights movement in America, Arendt argued that civil disobedience is meaningless outside of collective action. The linking of these two engrossing essays makes for a rich exploration of an issue that has only taken on greater resonance in the wake of January 6, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and other contemporary flashpoints. Roger Berkowitz, director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, offers an introduction. (This volume follows On Lying and Politics, LOA’s 2022 paperback edition gathering two of Arendt’s seminal essays.)
Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics, Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems, and Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems
Finally, we’re delighted to introduce paperback editions of three of the most popular volumes from our hardcover poetry series, the American Poets Project. Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics is a delightful collection of the songsmith’s finest, including “Love for Sale,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and “Anything Goes.” Theodore Roethke: Selected Poems, chosen and introduced by acclaimed poet Edward Hirsch, is a canny introduction to a major twentieth-century American voice in the tradition of Whitman and Emerson. And coming in “on little cat feet” is Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems, chosen and introduced by Paul Berman, and providing a fresh look at the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet laureate of the American Midwest.
