Clockwise from top left: Flannery O’Connor (Spencer Museum of Art), poster for film adaptation of Dark Passage with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Tracy K. Smith (Harvard University), Eleanor Roosevelt, and E. L. Doctorow (Public Domain)

What is the past telling us about today? That’s a question we ask often at Library of America, and in our lineup of books for Spring 2027, we present a range of perspectives engaged with what has come before and its echoes. A pathbreaking historical novelist reimagines the myths of America in his early fiction, one of the twentieth century’s most famous figures offers firsthand accounts of history in the making, and a leading contemporary poet looks to a nineteenth-century genius for inspiration and insight. Meanwhile, a singular science fiction writer with a personal biography worthy of a spy thriller joins the LOA series, and a roster of reader favorites—Flannery O’Connor, Wendell Berry, Hannah Arendt, and David Goodis—return in new editions revealing fresh facets of their brilliance.

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

E. L. Doctorow: Three Early Novels
Welcome to Hard Times | The Book of Daniel | Ragtime
Bruce Weber, editor
Library of America #403 / ISBN 978-1-59853-877-9
February 2027

Eleanor Roosevelt: Autobiographies & Political Writings, Volume 1
Susan Ware, editor
Library of America #404 / ISBN 978-1-59853-866-3
March 2027

Eleanor Roosevelt: Autobiographies & Political Writings, Volume 2
Susan Ware, editor
Library of America #405 / ISBN 978-1-59853-867-0
March 2027

Eleanor Roosevelt: Autobiographies & Political Writings (two-volume boxed set)
ISBN 978-1-59853-868-7
March 2027

Wendell Berry: Port William Novels & Stories | The Final Years
Jayber Crow | Hannah Coulter | Marce Catlett | Stories
Jack Shoemaker, editor
Library of America #406 / ISBN 978-1-59853-870-0
April 2027

Wendell Berry: The Complete Port William Novels & Stories (three-volume boxed set)
ISBN 978-1-59853-872-4
April 2027

James Tiptree Jr.: Novellas & Stories
Your Haploid Heart | The Girl Who Was Plugged In | Houston, Houston, Do You Read? | Slow Music | With Delicate Mad Hands | The Only Neat Thing to Do | The Color of Neanderthal Eyes | Backward, Turn Backward | Selected Stories
Stephanie Burt, editor
Library of America #407 / ISBN 978-1-59853-875-5
May 2027

SPECIAL PUBLICATIONS

Dark Passage
David Goodis
Foreword by Megan Abbott
Paperback | ISBN 978-1-59853-864-9
January 2027

On Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt
Introduction by Roger Berkowitz
Paperback | ISBN 978-1-59853-869-4
March 2027

On Dickinson
Tracy K. Smith
Hardcover | ISBN 978-1-59853-873-1
April 2027

Flannery O’Connor on Writing
Introduction by Alice McDermott
Paperback | ISBN 978-1-59853-876-2
May 2027

Inaugurating Library of America’s authoritative edition of the works of E. L. Doctorow, this volume gathers three novels that gave us a major new voice in American fiction, one offering profoundly inventive and unflinching new visions of American history. Doctorow’s impeccably crafted debut, the anti-Western Welcome to Hard Times (1960), centers on the inhabitants of Hard Times, somewhere in the Dakota Territory of the 1870s, as they confront the forces of lawlessness and the fragility of community. In The Book of Daniel (1971), Doctorow turns to the political anxieties of the Cold War. The son of executed spies, Daniel Isaacson struggles to make sense of his inheritance, assembling a fractured narrative that blends memory and confession with historical inquiry and judgment. In Ragtime (1975), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Doctorow invites Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman, and Harry Houdini into his fictional world, giving us a vibrant, expansive, and darkly playful panorama of early twentieth-century America.

Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the most inspiring, influential, and controversial American public figures of the last century. The nation’s longest-serving First Lady, she was a prolific and immensely popular writer. Now Library of America and historian and biographer Susan Ware present a two-volume edition of her writings, spanning the best-selling autobiographies This Is My Story (1937), This I Remember (1949), and On My Own (1958), as well as her essays and articles exploring human rights, democracy, war, labor and civil rights, feminism, education, and the role of government. This edition restores the full texts of her books and recreates their original photographic inserts: personal snapshots of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, their families, and Roosevelt’s work in the now demolished East Wing of the White House. These two volumes will be available separately and in a handsome boxed set.

For more than sixty years, Wendell Berry has conjured the interconnected lives of the people of Port William, Kentucky, in a multigenerational saga extending from the Civil War to the present day. In the capstone volume of his definitive Library of America edition, Berry’s novels Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter tell of outsiders who become deeply embedded in the fabric of Port William life. His last novel, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story, just published in 2025, recounts the tale of a 1906 tobacco crop that sold for almost nothing and set three generations of the Catlett family on a new course. A three-volume boxed set compiling Berry’s complete novels and stories in the order he intended will accompany the release of this final volume.

James Tiptree Jr. burst onto the science fiction scene in 1968, and for almost a decade brought forth work of unparalleled verve and vision in a jazzy, page-turning style. But who was Tiptree? Like Pynchon or Salinger, the author was famously reclusive, corresponding with publishers and other writers including Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin exclusively through a P.O. Box in Maclean, Virginia. Many assumed Tiptree was a nom de plume, and some suspected the author was an intelligence agent who wished to keep his identity a secret. They were half right: Tiptree was a former CIA analyst, but her real name was Alice Bradley Sheldon. In prescient stories of eco-collapse, doomed patriarchy, and women refugees, Tiptree gave us murderous incels (“The Screwfly Solution”); arguably the first, and perhaps the best, cyberpunk story (“The Girl Who Was Plugged In”); and a classic fable of stranded astronauts and near-future feminism, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Library of America partners with Harvard professor and Tiptree aficionado Stephanie Burt on this edition assembling eight novellas and fourteen stories in a deluxe collector’s edition.

Film poster for Dark Passage starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (Warner Bros.)

From its matter-of-fact opening to its nightmarish conclusion, David Goodis’s 1946 classic Dark Passage plunges readers into a world of pure urban dread and hallucinatory intensity. Wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, Vincent Parry breaks out of San Quentin and is forced to navigate the dangerous streets of San Francisco with a new face and no past. Eighty years after the novel’s original publication, readers can rediscover the thriller that inspired the lauded film starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in this new paperback edition, the first in decades. Best-selling author and noir maven Megan Abbott assesses its influence in a new foreword.

Hannah Arendt in 1958 (Barbara Niggl Radloff)

The latest addition to LOA’s series of compact and affordable paperbacks focusing on issues of moment, On Totalitarianism, gathers three essays by Hannah Arendt that together serve as an introduction to, and final word on, her landmark book On the Origins of Totalitarianism. Writing in the aftermath of World War II, Arendt was not merely a witness to history; she was attempting to understand a terrifying new phenomenon that defied all traditional categories of political science and morality. In “Understanding and Politics,” she explores the heavy burden of coming to terms with a world that has been shattered. “On the Nature of Totalitarianism” dismantles the idea that totalitarianism is merely a modern version of tyranny or authoritarianism. And in “Ideology and Terror,” Arendt lays bare the psychological machinery of oppression. More urgent than ever, these works offer a stark warning about the fragility of democracy and the need to think for ourselves. With an introduction by Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz, this timely edition confronts an era of deep political polarization and digital distortions head-on.

Tracy K. Smith (Harvard) and Emily Dickinson (Public Domain)

In her 2015 memoir Ordinary Light, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith describes reading a poem by Emily Dickinson in her fifth-grade class and feeling a flash of recognition. It “made me feel special, privy to magic, as if whoever was speaking had sought me out, discerning an affinity,” she writes. That extraordinary experience animates Smith’s newest book, On Dickinson, a close reading of twenty of the great poet’s most memorable works, chosen for their ability to provide pleasure, spiritual sustenance, and wisdom. In this intimate volume, one of our most celebrated poets reflects on Dickinson’s enduring strangeness and remarkable relatability, unlocking new pathways for interpreting her art.

Flannery O’Connor at her typewriter (Spencer Museum of Art)

“I want to be the best artist it is possible for me to be, under God,” Flannery O’Connor wrote in 1947 while a student at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Over the next seventeen years, while she published two novels and two short story collections, making a name for herself as an astonishing generational talent, she never stopped considering herself a student of craft. Parallel to her landmark books, and in rich conversation with them, O’Connor produced a body of writing on writing that is full of her trademark wit, wise counsel, and refreshing frankness. Here are revealing letters with other authors and incisive reviews of their work; reflections on how O’Connor conceived her characters and deployed symbols full of religious meaning; and her invaluable thoughts on writing practices and rituals. Introducing the volume is novelist and writing professor Alice McDermott, like O’Connor a master practitioner of the craft of fiction.