Library of America approaches fifty

This April Max Rudin gave a nice history of Library of America at the 2026 Whiting Awards ceremony. LitHub brought us the speech. As Mr Rudin, President and Publisher of LoA, puts it “What we now think of as American literature was more or less discovered—invented might be a better word—in the 1920s, by modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and others seeking antecedents more relevant than the genteel Victorians. Until then, readers and critics were handicapped by a self-constructed blind spot.” Early American literary writers had looked to Britain for validation, and mostly went to London for publishing services. American publishing “was geared practically from the beginning to sell to a mass audience at low prices.” “In the early 1960s, while scholars were lamenting the lack of reliable texts, Edmund Wilson called for compact readers’ editions of the collected works of great American writers, along the lines of the French Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.”…