The Library of America

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The Library of America has been around for a couple of decades now.  They print little blue-covered books with black paper covers, and they use onion-skin paper. 

 

 

They are assembling the definitive collection of the Essential American Writers.

 

 

They started with the obvious: Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, the letters and speeches and writings of the Founding Fathers.

 

 

Then they started to think about what made someone an “American writer.”

 

 

I own their edition of George Washington, and two volumes of Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson, and Wallace Stevens (everything he wrote fits in one book!), and Flannery O’Connor (ditto!), and Philip K. Dick, and one of their Thoreau volumes, and probably a couple of others I’m forgetting. We have a huge literary history in this country, and LOA is memorializing and perpetuating it in this series.  Their books ain’t cheap, but they’re nice editions, and they're worth owning.

 

 

They are not perfect.  In the Lincoln volumes, I would love to know what Lincoln was responding to when he wrote his letters. Even a summary of the other person’s letter would be good. But, no, they just give you Lincoln.  (I have a collection of Groucho Marx’s letters – no, not from the Library of America, but they should think about reissuing it – and you get everything: not just the letters he wrote, but the letters he received.  Most of the time they are just as clever as his, and you get the context too.  So huh, Library of America.  Get a clue.)

 

 

LOA has covered the nineteenth century pretty completely now, I think.  They are doing the same with twentieth-century lit too (as you can probably tell, with Philip K. Dick included above). 

 

 

They are doing a pretty damned good job of preserving our country’s literature.

 

 

They do a neat little thing online: A Story A Week.  They send an email once a week, with a link to their website, and you can go read a story from one of their publications.  It is invariably something I’ve never read before.  Recently I read a bit of Mark Twain, and a short personal reminiscence by Dreiser, and a very odd thing by Edith Wharton, and a couple of things by people I’d never heard of.

 

 

It’s nice to be reminded that we have such a rich literary heritage.

 

 

And it only took us three hundred years to get there!

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For Presidents' Day: "Mark Twain as a Presidential Candidate"

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This little gem from the Library of America came along in my email yesterday morning, just in time for the Presidents’ Day holiday.  I have to admit that Mark Twain is not my favorite writer, but this piece is pretty funny; it is brief, and savage, and it has not aged a bit since it was written in 1879.

 

 

 

I have pretty much made up my mind to run for President. What the country wants is a candidate who cannot be injured by investigation of his past history, so that the enemies of the party will be unable to rake up anything against him that nobody ever heard of before. If you know the worst about a candidate, to begin with, every attempt to spring things on him will be checkmated. Now I am going to enter the field with an open record. I am going to own up in advance to all the wickedness I have done, and if any Congressional committee is disposed to prowl around my biography in the hope of discovering any dark and deadly deed that I have secreted, why—let it prowl.

 

 

 

In the first place, I admit that I treed a rheumatic grandfather of mine in the winter of 1850. He was old and inexpert in climbing trees, but with the heartless brutality that is char­acteristic of me I ran him out of the front door in his night-shirt at the point of a shotgun, and caused him to bowl up a maple tree, where he remained all night, while I emptied shot into his legs. I did this because he snored. I will do it again if I ever have another grandfather. I am as inhuman now as I was in 1850. I candidly acknowledge that I ran away at the battle of Gettysburg. My friends have tried to smooth over this fact by asserting that I did so for the purpose of imitating Wash­ington, who went into the woods at Valley Forge for the purpose of saying his prayers. It was a miserable subterfuge. I struck out in a straight line for the Tropic of Cancer because I was scared. I wanted my country saved, but I preferred to have somebody else save it. I entertain that preference yet. If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon’s mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty. If it is loaded my immortal and inflexible purpose is to get over the fence and go home. My invariable practice in war has been to bring out of every fight two-thirds more men than when I went in. This seems to me to be Napoleonic in its grandeur.

 

 

My financial views are of the most decided character, but they are not likely, perhaps, to increase my popularity with the advocates of inflation. I do not insist upon the special supremacy of rag money or hard money. The great funda­mental principle of my life is to take any kind I can get.

 

 

The rumor that I buried a dead aunt under my grapevine was correct. The vine needed fertilizing, my aunt had to be buried, and I dedicated her to this high purpose. Does that unfit me for the Presidency? The Constitution of our country does not say so. No other citizen was ever considered unworthy of this office because he enriched his grapevines with his dead relatives. Why should I be selected as the first victim of an absurd prejudice?

 

 

I admit also that I am not a friend of the poor man. I regard the poor man, in his present condition, as so much wasted raw material. Cut up and properly canned, he might be made useful to fatten the natives of the cannibal islands and to improve our export trade with that region. I shall recom­mend legislation upon the subject in my first message. My campaign cry will be: “Desiccate the poor workingman; stuff him into sausages.”

 

 

These are about the worst parts of my record. On them I come before the country. If my country don’t want me, I will go back again. But I recommend myself as a safe man—a man who starts from the basis of total depravity and proposes to be fiendish to the last.

 

 

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