Library of America

Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...

"Gary Snyder is one of America's indispensable poets, the "Thoreau of the Beat Generation" and our "laureate of Deep Ecology." Now, for the first time, all of Snyder's poetry is gathered in a single, authoritative Library of America volume. Here are all of Snyder's published books of poetry spanning a career of almost seventy years. Early collections such as Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Myths & Texts, and The Back Country reflect his hardscrabble...

"For the first time, here is the full, definitive story of the movement for voting rights for American women, of every race, told through the voices of the women and men who lived it. Here are the most recognizable figures in the campaign for women's suffrage, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but also the black, Chinese, and American Indian women and men who were not only essential to the movement but expanded its directions and aims....

"Mythmaker, master storyteller, and a writer powerfully attuned to the land and history of his native New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya is one of the undisputed fathers of Chicano literature. Writing in an era when Latino voices were marginalized and just beginning to be read and acknowledged, Anaya broke new ground with Bless Me, Ultima (1972), a mythic novel that captures the richness and complexity of history, community, and place in the American Southwest....

Portrays the contrasting personalities and nostalgic reminiscences of a group of American soldiers engaged in a combat operation against the Japanese during World War II.

“Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin
 
When she began writing in the 1960s, Ursula K. Le Guin was as much of a literary outsider as one can be: a woman writing in a landscape dominated by men, a science fiction and fantasy author in an era that dismissed “genre” literature as unserious, and a westerner living far from fashionable...