More, please—faster, please

A few days ago, Mark Athitakis replied to a piece on the Newsweek website, which complained that “the Library of America is running out of writers.”

The problem started, you see, when “writers who were anything but canonical began to be included—[H. P.] Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Dawn Powell.” The embarrassing phrase anything but canonical is left undefined.

Athitakis rightly laughs at the complaints, which do little more, he observes, than to consecrate a “constricted view of what makes for a canon.” But then the Library of America seems to share some such view, he says. The 2010 titles include John Marshall’s Writings, Mark Twain’s Tramp Abroad and other travel writings, two volumes of selections from Emerson’s Journals, lyrics from the American song book by Stephen Foster and others, and an anthology of Shirley Jackson’s horror fiction.

A little more impatience to include more writers would be welcome, Athitakis concludes. But that raises a question. What books should be added to the Library of America?

What about The Federalist Papers? Although some of them are scattered through volumes of Madison and Hamilton, they have yet to receive single-volume treatment, which seems a little odd. And though Jefferson has been given a volume, John Adams has not. Even more glaringly, a selection from John Quincy Adams’s Diaries does not even seem to be contemplated.

Except for Henry Adams and Francis Parkman, history is under­repre­sented. How about Bernard DeVoto’s great trilogy The Year of Decision: 1846 (1942), Across the Wide Missouri (1947), and The Course of Empire (1952)?

Whitaker Chambers’s Witness is an obvious candidate, but probably will never overcome the political objections to its inclusion. Chambers’s criticism—always provocative, always interesting—could bulk out the book.

For that matter, why not an anthology of American literary criticism from Poe to James Wood with special attention to the debates over realism, the New Humanism, and the New Criticism?

Novelists with large untapped bodies of work, and who are likely candi­dates, are fewer and farther between, although I would make a case for Peter De Vries, Stanley Elkin, and (less passionately) for Wright Morris. But a two-volume set of New York Jewish novels, including The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925), Call It Sleep, and Daniel Fuchs’s Summer in Williamsburg (1934), would be a terrific addition.

Update: Two-and-a-half years ago Patrick Kurp preceded me in calling for nominations to the Library of America. Interestingly, he himself nominated Liebling, Cheever, and Maxwell—all of whom have since been honored with enshrinement. He also urged the inclusion of Gaddis (my heart nearly stopped from shock) and Guy Davenport, one of his favorite writers.

Strat-O-Matic invites their customers to vote on the next historical season to be released in a deluxe version by the company. If the Library of America did the same, Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard would win in a walk!