The Library of America was launched in 1982 with volumes devoted to Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Twain, Harriet Beecher Stoew, Jack London and William Dean Howells, a venerable group of classic 19th Century authors.  Twenty-six years later, the series encompasses 181 volumes, most clad in the now-familiar black dust jacket bisected by narrow stripes of red, white and blue.

The roster of American authors represented is a mind-boggling pantheon of greatness; as well as the writers previously mentioned there are Henry James and Williams James, Stephen Crane, Poe and Thoreau, Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, Cooper, Edith Wharton, Henry Adams, Eugene O’Neill and on and on. Founding Fathers like Franklin, Washington and Jefferson are included, as well as prose from political,   military and cultural figures like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, generals Grant and Sherman and Theordore Roosevelt. 

Deeper into the 20th Century, we get Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck, Gertrude Stein and James Thurber, Nathanael West and James Baldwin and Richard Wright, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens. There are some surprising inclusions: Three volumes of Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction in English; three volumes of I.B. Singer’s stories; two volumes for Paul Bowles. And, in an unusual innovation, the LOA began a series of volumes of the novels of Philip Roth in 2005. 

And the non-profit series has not hesitated to move into genre fiction; there are two volumes devoted to American crime fiction of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, as well as collections of the works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. H.P.   Lovecraft was recently admitted, and Jack Kerouac shortly thereafter.  Last year, LOA published “Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s.” Well, O.K., I thought, that’s fine, but I will admit being brought up short on learning that as well as adding Elizabeth Bishop and William Maxwell to the fold this spring, LOA is bringing out another collection of Dick’s novels in July.

Does Philip K. Dick deserve this attention when the series has not included such essential figures as Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot?

I called Max Rudin, publisher of The Library of America, to ask what’s up with the series. (We had a similar conversation in 1996.)

“The problem with Dickinson and Hemingway,” said Rudin, “is with copyright issues that make it impossible to proceed. When the series first started, all the works were in the public domain, but as we moved more into the 20th Century, a lot of negotiation was required, with publishers and authors’ estates, to secure permission. Hope springs eternal in our discussions with Harvard about Dickinson, but we don’t know where that will go. With Hemingway, there’s no movement, but we keep the channels open. Maybe some year it will happen.”

As far as the ”Roth collection” is concerned, Rudin said that while the prolific and versatile novelist had been on the short list for some time, “part of it was happenstance, because the agent for Saul Bellow’s estate was also Roth’s agent.” (Bellow came out with LOA in 2003 and 2007.)  ”The issue here isn’t whether a writer is living or dead but of the literary reputation and what they add to the series.” Eudora Welty was alive when the LOA published her fiction and nonfiction in two volumes in 1998, and Bellow was alive in 2003. LOA will release a collection of the work of poet John Ashbery, who is 80, in its fall 2008 season.

But another collection of novels by Philip K. Dick? “Our mission is to publish the best and most significant American writing,” Rudin said. “Popular and genre fiction are part of that mission. We look for great writing and for authors who use the conventions of  genre fiction for literary ends. We’ll continue to mine the genre category as appropriate. Dick happens to fulfill those requirements brilliantly. We thought his best work deserved another volume. There’s a lot of discussion about science fiction, and we’ve been talking about Vonnegut and Pynchon, but there are no firm plans.”

I emailed Rudin a list of authors I thought the LOA had neglected. These were Booth Tarkington, Hamlin Garland, Sherwood Anderson, George Washington Cable, Mary McCarthy, John Cheever, Clifford Odets, Edward Albee, John Berryman, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, T.S. Eliot.

Here is his reply:

“All of the names you ask about are under discussion. A two-volume Cheever set, ‘Complete Novels’ and ‘Collected Short Stories and Other Writings,’ edited by Blake Bailey, is scheduled for spring 2009 to coincide with Bailey’s authorized Cheever biography. A collected Odets is in development, to be edited by Morris Dickstein. The others are on various burners, waiting either for a persuasive editorial/publishing plan, for rights to be successfully negotiated, for the right editor or publishing opportunity, or, where sales are expected to be low, for financial support/subvention. There’s also a question of texts: there are definitive critical editions underway of both the poems and prose of T.S. Eliot, and given our textual policy it probably makes sense for us to wait until they become available.”