Books: A Library in the Hands

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Best of all, this series provides authoritative texts stripped of scholarly fussiness. During his last years, Wilson railed at the academic editing factories that sprang up across the U.S. in the mid-'60s; he argued that they were churning out editions of American classics unreadable by anyone but specialists. He had a point, but the work went on and eventually produced sound, if unspectacular, results. They are available to Libary of America editions. Many texts have been purged of errors that crept into them over years of reprintings. Some have grown. One research team found and restored 36,000 words excised from the manuscript of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie; a forthcoming edition of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage adds 5,000 words that were cut before publication. When the Library of America. gets around to Crane (spring 1984) and Dreiser, editors will have to decide whether such additions constitute improvements.

Also pending is the question of solvency, once the initial funds are gone. Will new subsidies appear? Or can the library somehow become selfsupporting? Answers are several years away. In the meantime, readers can watch Melville develop into the author of Moby Dick and observe Whitman tinkering with and expanding Leaves of Grass. All of Hawthorne's eerie, ambiguous short fiction can be tucked into a purse or briefcase. Harriet Beecher Stowe never looked better, nor did Uncle Tom's Cabin, the melodramatic novel that abetted a war. That is not a bad beginning for a publishing project resting on a slim but worthwhile hope: that the writers who helped define this nation can some day be given a comfortable and permanent home.

— By Paul Gray