Orange Is the New Black star is the voice behind first Library of America audiobook

Back in mid-May, Library of America staff members paid a visit to Merlin Studios in New York City for a behind-the-scenes look at an exciting new project: the recording of The Library of America's first audiobook.

The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis,
collected in the forthcoming anthology
Women Crime Writers: Eight
Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s.

The work in question is The Horizontal Man, a 1946 novel by Helen Eustis (1916–2015) that will be included in Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s, a two-volume set coming from The Library of America this fall. (Click here for a list of other titles in the anthology.)

Centered on the murder of a philandering professor at a small Connecticut women’s college, The Horizontal Man allegedly drew on Eustis's own experiences as an undergraduate at Smith College. It won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best first novel, and the eminent scholar and mystery-suspense aficionado Jacques Barzun named it one of the Fifty Classics of Crime Fiction, 1900–1950 in a ranking he published with Wendell Hertig Taylor in 1976.

Actress Barbara Rosenblat.

The Library of America is drawing on veteran talent for its initial foray into audiobooks. Patti Pirooz, the former publisher of audiobooks at Penguin, is producing The Horizontal Man, and the reader is Barbara Rosenblat, a veteran of stage, film, and TV who is perhaps best known for her role as Miss Rosa on the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black. What fans of Rosenblat's work on Orange may not know is that she has also been hailed as "the Meryl Streep of audiobooks"—i.e., a versatile and widely acclaimed reader whose hundreds of credits range from Bridget Jones to classics and numerous mystery series.

Watch Reader's Almanac in the months ahead for more information about Women Crime Writers and our Horizontal Man audiobook, both of which will be released in September.

Photo Gallery: Capacity crowd joins Library of America for Henry Louis Gates, Glenn Hutchins talk

An enthusiastic and engaged crowd turned out last Tuesday, May 26, for a wide-ranging conversation between public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and businessman and investor Glenn Hutchins at The Century Association in New York City. The program was a co-presentation by The Library of America and The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

The editor of The Library of America's Frederick Douglass volume, co-editor of Slave Narratives, and a member of its Board of Directors since 1997, Gates is the Director of the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. In his remarks Gates recounted the Center’s modest beginnings nearly a quarter-century ago and his subsequent collaborations with Hutchins, who supports the Center through his Hutchins Family Foundation.

After Gates described his hope that the Center will expand from its base in the arts and social sciences into public policy, he and Hutchins led the audience through a spirited discussion of questions surrounding affirmative action and access to higher education, among other topics.

Watch this space for highlights and a complete video of the program, and in the meantime, enjoy the following photo gallery featuring Library of America friends and family who came out for a stimulating evening.

All photos © Star Black.

Library of America Trustee Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
and Glenn Hutchins at The Century Association
in New York City on May 26, 2015.

Library of America Fellow Claudia Plottel and Library of America
Board Chair-elect Elizabeth W. Smith.

Anne Metrailler, Metropolitan Museum of Art President
Emily Rafferty, Library of America President Cheryl Hurley,
and Sheila Martin.

Hutchins Center National Advisory Board members Bennett Ashley (L)
and Shahara Ahmad-Llewellyn (R) with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (C).

Library of America Trustee Candace Wainwright and
Library of America Fellows Andrea Stillman and William Buice.

Library of America supporter Janice Bennett and
Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Director of the Schomburg Center
for Research in Black Culture.

Hutchins Center National Advisory Board member Lewis P. Jones III
and Library of America Trustee Emme Deland.

Library of America Publisher Max Rudin
and author Susan Cheever.

Authors Robert and Ina Caro.

Rose Styron and newly-elected Library of America
Trustee Joanne Freeman.

Max Rudin (lower R) introducing the program on May 26, 2015.

Bill Littlefield on how sportswriter W. C. Heinz listened to and respected athletes—and knew their glory was fleeting

The Library of America’s recent title The Top of His Game: The Best Sportswriting of W. C. Heinz collects thirty-eight pieces by sports journalist W. C. Heinz (1915–2008), whose work is distinguished by its timeless human interest and vivid colloquial style.

Bill Littlefield, the book’s editor, met Heinz in 2001, and has attested to being “grateful ever since” for the friendship that developed between them. In the following interview, he discusses why Heinz’s writing has endured and how Heinz was able to create such compelling portraits of iconic athletes like Sugar Ray Robinson and Gordie Howe alongside others who were markedly less successful. Littlefield has been the host of National Public Radio’s weekly sports magazine Only A Game since 1993 and has written commentaries for NPR and Boston’s WBUR-FM for over thirty years. His seven books include two novels, Prospect and The Circus in the Woods, and the 2014 collection of sports verse Take Me Out.

In the earliest pieces in The Top of His Game, from 1947, Heinz seems already fully formed as a writer. Was his literary apprenticeship the reporting he did in World War II, or was there a period even before that in which he learned his craft?

The work Bill did as a war correspondent was certainly important to his development as a writer. I imagine he learned from the men and boys of those days the importance of getting their stories right. And he learned to work very hard at doing that. I’m sure that carried over into his work when he got home and had the opportunity to write about sports.

Heinz profiled many successful, even legendary sports figures, but much of his best work shows an affinity for what today we might call “beautiful losers”—strivers who don’t quite make it. Can you speculate a little as to where this special empathy or attraction of his might have come from?

Bill knew that everybody loses. Undefeated fighters lose. They grow old. They suffer the consequences of the profession. The glorious moments athletes provide us are glorious in part because they are fleeting. But Bill was especially drawn to the athletes he recognized as true professionals—those who brought not only talent but intelligence, determination, and integrity to what they were doing, whether or not they became champions. He respected boxers who listened and learned. The professionals.

I think his affinity for Pete Reiser, for example, came in part from the recognition that Reiser couldn’t have played baseball any other way. He didn’t run into outfield walls because he wanted to. That was the only way he could play the game, and it was brave and sad at the same time. The loss was built into the glory.

Heinz can make choices that initially might seem counterintuitive, such as his decision, in the long boxing piece “The Day of the Fight,” not to get to the match itself until the startling final paragraph. Did he have certain characteristic strategies in his writing?

I don’t know about characteristic “strategies.” It feels to me as if Bill’s constant strategy was to listen carefully and to see what there was to see. Sometimes he heard and saw things others missed until he pointed them out.

Along those lines: what trait do you most admire about Heinz as a writer?

Bill had great respect for the people about whom he wrote. So much writing about sports is full of smart-alecky asides and sarcasm or derision. Bill didn’t work that way. He cared about getting each story right, and when you read his work, you feel as if he cared not only about that responsibility, but about the people. He liked some of them more than others, certainly, and he didn’t entirely trust some of them, but he always honored them with his attention.

You were already familiar with Heinz’s work and career well before beginning to work on this book. As you sifted through the scrapbooks of his writing that Gayl Heinz, his daughter, lent you, were there any particular surprises—facets of Heinz’s talent you hadn’t come across before, for instance?

Jeff MacGregor said it best. He went through the same scrapbooks for his wonderful Sports Illustrated profile of Bill, and Jeff said, “There aren’t any bad ones.” I agree.

Is there a piece here that readers may find surprising?

The column Bill wrote about “Toughie” Brasuhn, Queen of the Roller Derby. I don’t think most of Bill’s readers will recall that one, but I was delighted to see it. Bill was curious. And he wasn’t reluctant to step away from the gym or the race track or the ball field when something like the roller derby came to town. I really like that column.

The period covered in The Top of His Game, 1947 to 1979, arguably coincides with the zenith of print journalism in this country. Given your own background, what’s the difference between a great print piece and a great TV or radio piece?

I don’t know how to talk about TV pieces in that context, because to such a great extent TV is obviously about pictures. That’s not to say that some of the people writing for television aren’t excellent writers . . . only that they know they can depend on images for a lot of the impact they’re trying to create. But radio is about words, just as obviously, and a good story told well on the radio is not so different from a good story told well in print, except that often radio gives you less time to get the job done. It’s been great to see some of the websites bring back what’s being called “long-form” journalism, the form in which Heinz was the master, because most of the magazines in which that work used to appear are long gone.

Your introduction recounts an episode in which, without having taken any notes, Heinz was able to report “word for word” on a meeting with boxing manager Jack Hurley at Stillman’s Gym. Is it possible today’s reliance on tape recorders and video cameras might make it harder for new writers like W. C. Heinz to emerge?

Several people who have read the introduction have commented on that story. Bill told me that of course he couldn’t reproduce “word for word” what Jack Hurley had said during that afternoon. What he could do was give his readers the cadence of Hurley’s voice, and a sense of his wit, by using some of the words and expressions Hurley favored. Bill could recreate what he’d heard in a smaller space—the space afforded him in a newspaper column.

Some people today wouldn’t be comfortable with that process. I think what makes the work harder for journalists today is that the athletes and the people around them are so careful about their images. A lot of them don’t have much to say, at least while the digital recorders are running or the cameras are rolling or the notebooks are out. And probably most writers now—like most writers in any time—are less patient than Bill was, and less trustworthy, too.

A lot of readers today may be fascinated to learn that in 1968 Heinz co-wrote, under a pseudonym, the novel that inspired the film and TV show M*A*S*H, after his two well-received novels The Professional and The Surgeon. Are there connections to be drawn between his fiction and his sportswriting?

The only novel about which Bill and I spoke at any length was The Professional. Bill put the qualities he’d learned to respect in fighters and in at least one trainer into the characters in The Professional. He was proud of what a good book it is, and proud of the integrity with which he’d written it. I won’t say any more about it, in case some of the people reading this haven’t yet read the novel. I don’t want to spoil it for them.

Audio and text selection: Read the W. C. Heinz classic “Death of a Race Horse” at The Library of America’s Story of the Week website and listen to Bill Littlefield reading the selection in streaming audio.

Ross Macdonald: “Chandler tried to kill me”

Tom Nolan is the editor of The Library of America’s new title Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s. Here, in the first of three exclusive Reader’s Almanac posts about Macdonald’s life and work, he explores the relationships among the “Holy Trinity” of the hardboiled detective novel—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Macdonald—and the complicated dynamics of literary succession.

Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald.

L to R: The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett (Knopf, 1931);
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (Knopf, 1939);
The Moving Target by [John] Ross Macdonald (Knopf, 1949).

That triple-play combo, first suggested by critic Anthony Boucher in the 1950s, had become common parlance by the mid-’70s. It suggests a “Holy Trinity” of literary succession, with Dashiell Hammett as the chief originator of the hardboiled detective novel, Raymond Chandler as the genre’s romantic popularizer, and Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) realizing its moral, psychological, and lyrical fulfillment.

Millar/Macdonald had been greatly influenced as an artist by those two illustrious forebears—one of whom would remain a lifelong inspiration, and the other a writer the mere mention of whose name might throw Millar into a rage.

Hammett made his mark on the future Ross Macdonald circa 1931, when Kenneth Millar was an angry but ambitious teenager in Kitchener, Ontario, who spent half his free time in the public library reading everything from Heraclitus to H. L. Mencken to Agatha Christie, and the other half in McCallum’s Barber Shop, Tobacco Store, and Pool Hall. McCallum’s had a rental library, and it was there that Ken Millar found and read, in a single afternoon, a Hammett novel, probably The Glass Key. It was unlike any book (let alone “mystery”) that he’d come across in the town’s official library.

“I lived in a very self-righteous city when I was going to high school,” Millar told interviewer William Gottlieb in 1973, “a self-righteous city where the slot machine racket was roaring and drawing in thousands of dollars, and corrupting the police force. . . . And this was never mentioned. I didn’t know that it could be mentioned in fiction until . . . I started to read Dashiell Hammett.”

Late in life, Macdonald recalled the electrifying effect that Hammett novel had on him in the tobacco-store rental-library: “Like iron filings magnetized by the book in my hands, the secret meanings of the city began to organize themselves around me. . . . For the first time . . . I was consciously experiencing in my own sensibility the direct meeting of art and contemporary actuality.” Here was the sort of fiction Ken Millar someday hoped to write.

Life intervened. Millar went to college, graduated, married, became a father, a high-school teacher, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan before he came upon his next great crime-fiction influence: Raymond Chandler, who had taken Hammett’s hard-boiled model and (much as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had done with the ratiocinative detective story invented by Edgar Allan Poe) adapted it to his own vivid purposes in books that set the style for a new generation.

Millar was liberated by Chandler’s vivacious prose style, which seemed leagues livelier than anything else in American letters. Chandler “wrote like a slumming angel,” Macdonald would testify, “and invested the sun-blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence.”

In his first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target (1949), Macdonald made free use of the traditions he’d inherited. As in the debut Philip Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep (1939), the rich client is paralyzed; but in Target, it’s a youngish she and not an aged he, and she isn’t dying and charming but full of a cynical life-force. Archer cracks wise, in the Hammett-Chandler mode, but his patter often sounds more like Stephen Leacock or Robert Benchley than Spade or Marlowe. Macdonald from the start was appropriating the p.i. foundation to build something of his own.

But Raymond Chandler didn’t like what he read when critic James Sandoe (a crucial early Chandler booster) brought The Moving Target to his attention. He was already miffed at the many imitators he’d engendered in the past decade, and Macdonald became a special target. Chandler went out of his way to disparage Lew Archer’s creator in letters to Sandoe, to fellow writer James T. Fox, and to an influential Chicago bookseller. The mystery community in the 1950s was a tight-knit group, so it’s likely Millar knew about the old master’s mean-spirited missives. Once the posthumous Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962) was published, with its inclusion of Chandler’s 1949 letter to Sandoe knocking Macdonald’s prose (“The simile that does not quite come off . . . pretentiousness in the phrasing . . . stylistic misuse of language . . . a lack of some kind of natural animal emotion”), the whole world could read all about it.

“Chandler tried to kill me”: that was Millar’s melodramatic description of the older man’s behavior towards him at the outset of his career.

Pocket Books edition of
The Moving Target (1949)
by [John] Ross Macdonald

Even while Chandler was grumbling about Macdonald, Pocket Books—Macdonald’s (and Chandler’s) paperback publisher at the time—complained that Macdonald was wandering too far from established hard-boiled templates, and went as far as to suggest to Alfred Knopf that someone should rewrite Millar’s texts to make them more like Chandler’s.

The situation came to a head in Millar’s extraordinary 1952 letter to Knopf in which he declared his independence from Chandler’s near-Manichean morality and outlined his own map for future work: “I can’t accept Chandler’s vision of good and evil. It is conventional to the point of occasional old-maidishness, anti-human to the point of frequent sadism . . . and the mind behind it, for all its enviable imaginative force, is uncultivated and second-rate. . . . [I]t would be simple self-stultification for me to take him as the last word in the mystery.”

While distancing himself from Raymond Chandler, though, Macdonald continued to learn from and admire Dashiell Hammett, developing certain Hammett-like devices in distinctive ways.

As an ex-Pinkerton detective, Hammett was hyper-alert to people’s physical behavior: a professional investigator is always looking for “the tell”—the furtive glance, the twitch of the lip, the hesitation that indicates truth or falsehood. Hammett specialized in describing people under stress, and Macdonald brought this physiological scrutiny to a near-poetic level in his career-long use of “psychological clues.”

Another Hammett technique Macdonald put to his own good use was the deadpan description of the contents of a given person’s wallet, luggage, or furnishings. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade notes several things found on Joel Cairo’s person: they reveal not only the would-be-client’s recent activities but the elements of a pocket biography. Compare that collage trouvé with what Lew Archer discerns in the personal effects at Lance Leonard’s house in The Barbarous Coast, the poignant souvenirs of Keith Dalling’s existence in The Way Some People Die, the shopworn possessions of the seedy Pat Reavis in The Drowning Pool—each assemblage tracing the trajectory of an entire life.

James M. Cain was another hard-boiled writer admired by Millar. At his peak, he thought, Cain set the most brisk narrative pace he’d ever seen. But Macdonald of course loved and learned from the work of American non-genre authors as well. Two of his favorites were F. Scott Fitzgerald—plot aspects of The Great Gatsby can be found in Macdonald’s The Galton Case and Black Money—and William Faulkner, whose structural technique much impressed Macdonald (he said of Faulkner’s keeping Popeye’s story until the very end of Sanctuary: “That’s control”), and whose gothic-realist streak (exemplified in the final sentence of his chilling story “A Rose for Emily”) had a strong influence on Macdonald’s own: note the almost as startling last-sentence revelation of The Chill.

Millar remained a devoted reader all his life and in latter years wrote generous jacket blurbs for a number of novice authors, including Roger Simon, Michael Z. Lewin, Michael Collins, Leonard Gardner, Dick Francis, William McIlvanney, and George V. Higgins. He also unofficially edited several nonfiction and fiction works by friends and acquaintances and mentored many apprentice and beginning writers. “He did tremendous favors,” said his friend Jerre Lloyd. “And there wasn’t anything selfish in it; he kept quiet about it. But I can’t emphasize too much the amount of good that he did. I think the reason was that he’d been so badly treated himself by Raymond Chandler. . . . [H]e thought Chandler had been gratuitously negative, and he was anxious not to do that to anyone else.”

Harlem Renaissance literature plays strong supporting role in MoMA’s Jacob Lawrence exhibition

Now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the exhibition One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North is a rare opportunity to see a landmark of twentieth-century American art in its entire, original form. Conceived in 1939 and completed two years later, Lawrence’s Migration Series consists of sixty numbered tempera paintings, each measuring 18 x 12 inches, in which the young Harlem-based artist documented the huge population shift that brought hundreds of thousands of his fellow African Americans from the rural American South to the urban, industrialized North over the preceding quarter-century.

Because the sixty paintings have been divided between MoMA and the Phillips Collection in Washington for decades, any exhibition that presents them all in sequence is self-recommending. (MoMA’s website also reproduces all sixty panels, with extensive commentary.) But the new show boasts an additional feature that should particularly appeal to Library of America readers—a well-organized side room devoted to literature of the Harlem Renaissance. Aficionados of book design will especially appreciate the display case featuring original hardcover editions, including seven titles reprinted in The Library of America series: Native Son, Black Boy, and Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright; Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson; Cane by Jean Toomer; Home to Harlem by Claude McKay; and Quicksand by Nella Larsen.

The latter three works are included in the two-volume Library of America collection Harlem Renaissance Novels, which incorporates in its jacket and slipcase design several striking illustrations by Aaron Douglas, a major influence on Lawrence as a young artist. The MoMA exhibit showcases two of those illustrations in their original context—on the dust jackets for Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (third edition, Knopf, 1927) and McKay’s Home to Harlem (Harper & Brothers, 1928).

Above: Three books with jackets designed by Aaron Douglas. Elements from
the illustration for Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Home to Harlem
were incorporated in the jacket and slipcase design (below)
for the LOA boxed set Harlem Renaissance Novels.

Taken together, the books on display at MoMA form a literary analogue to the epic story Lawrence chronicled in his Migration Series. A quotation from Wright’s Black Boy (1945) in the accompanying wall text underscores the finality of that “one way” in the exhibition title. Describing his departure from Mississippi on a Chicago-bound train, Wright recalls:

I was leaving without a qualm, without a single backward glance. . . . My mood was: I’ve got to get away; I can’t stay here.

MoMA’s exhibition website offers additional information about Douglas, “the leading Harlem Renaissance artist” who also collaborated with the poet Countee Cullen on the groundbreaking 1927 anthology Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets.

One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through September 7, 2015. Visit moma.org for complete exhibition information.

Reinhold Niebuhr combined “tough-minded political realism with a sympathetic understanding of society’s injustices”

This month The Library of America will publish Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics, which gathers four of his books, along with writings on contemporary events from the 1920s to the 1960s, a selection of prayers, and sermons and lectures on faith and belief.

The volume is edited by Niebuhr’s daughter Elisabeth Sifton, an editor and book publisher for forty years and the author of The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War. We recently interviewed Sifton on why Niebuhr’s writings continue to fascinate and challenge today’s readers.

What’s the aim of this collection, what sorts of pleasures, discoveries, and insights do you hope readers will find?

Reinhold Niebuhr, my father, was a writer and thinker who engaged fully in his times—from 1914 and World War I, through the heady 1920s, into the Great Depression, then World War II, the “nuclear age” and the Cold War. This book shows how he wrestled with the spiritual and political issues of those times: many of them are with us still, and some are with us always. In America—where he was born and raised, his very German name notwithstanding—he worked for better working conditions for people caught up in the rush of industrialization, he called for social justice in all our communities, and he strove for better relations between races. In international affairs, he ceaselessly advocated policies that would lessen the risk of war, and he argued that a rich and newly powerful nation like the US should learn better how to conduct itself vis-à-vis other nations. I hope readers will find wisdom here that deepens their understanding of our world today.

Why Reinhold Niebuhr in The Library of America? How would you characterize his contribution/legacy? His influence?

Niebuhr has been described as the most important American theologian of the twentieth century and as an especially influential American progressive. He knew how hard it was to alter entrenched power structures, but he combined his tough-minded political realism with a sympathetic understanding of society’s injustices and cruelties. Both his secular work and his theology became famous thanks to his memorable gifts as a public speaker, his huge productivity as a writer and teacher, and his frequent participation in national political discussions. In all these activities he never stopped being a pastor, which is how he started (he thought of himself more as a pastor than a theologian).

How would you characterize Niebuhr’s contribution as a public intellectual during the years covered by this volume?

He tried to wake people up to the inequities and failures in American society. He thought it deplorable that Americans were by and large so self-confidently certain of their basic goodness—meanwhile ignoring not only their own inadequacies (sins?) but also the threats and dangers to American democracy and to the world—whether human (in the form of fascist dictators) or material (nuclear weapons). His sermons and speeches were famous for the clarity and urgent force he gave to his exploration of these themes. One key opinion that infused both his theological and secular work was that possessing superior power or force does not make a person or a state wiser or braver, but it does heighten the danger of sinful hubris.

As a religious thinker?

I’m not qualified to answer this, but perhaps we can say that he sharpened and deepened the discourse about Christian ethics, Christian interpretations of the Gospels and Epistles, Christian understanding of secular society. He was a radical critic of much of American religious life, well known for the vigor with which he made his unclouded assessments. Again, he feared and decried the hubris of so many secular and religious leaders.

Did his thinking and writing fundamentally evolve over the years charted by the works in this collection?

Yes, it did. When he wrote Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) he considered himself a social-democratic Marxist, but the traumas and dangers of the Depression led him to rethink his Marxist presuppositions and reformulate his ideas on the dynamics of social change and betterment. And, as he writes in “An End to Illusions,” included in the volume, he resigned from the Socialist Party in 1940 because he couldn’t go along with its isolationist refusal to take action against the fascists threatening Europe. Thereafter one sees a deepening and refinement of his positions. He insisted always on the important distinction to be made between Communism and socialism.

The fame and influence of The Irony of American History (1952) have made Niebuhr's contribution to an understanding of American foreign policy well known, but can his thought also be brought to bear on domestic political considerations—such as inequality in America?

Yes, certainly. Indeed, Niebuhr believed that domestic and foreign policies were, and should be, related to each other; only despots or would-be despots separated them. As this book shows, America’s social-political-economic life, and the disparities separating rich and poor, were major concerns for Niebuhr from the very start of his ministry until his death a half-century later.

How might Niebuhr have responded to the widening gap between rich and poor that we see today?

I can’t “channel” my father, but it’s clear in everything he wrote and did that he considered social and economic inequities as unethical, immoral, even sinful. And he denounced the self-delusions and proud deceits that people invoke to preserve them. One prayer, included in this volume, reads in part: “We confess the indifference and callousness with which we treat the sufferings and the insecurity of the poor, and the pettiness which mars the relations between us. May we with contrite hearts seek once more to purify our spirits, and to clarify our reason so that a fairer temple for the human spirit may be built in human society.”

How might Niebuhr have responded to the new sorts of religious extremism we see with al Qaeda and now ISIS?

He frequently inveighed against religious fanaticism and against theocrats, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or secular (as in the Soviet Union under Stalin). Al Qaeda and ISIS are new for us, but the history of violence-prone religious extremism is, tragically, as old as that of civilization itself. He could not have supported a foreign policy that requires America to battle jihadism around the globe while ignoring the social and spiritual strife that gives rise to it in the first place.

A new collection edited by Harold Holzer “brings readers back to the very moment of Lincoln’s death 150 years ago”

For the sesquicentennial of Lincoln’s murder, The Library of America has just published President Lincoln Assassinated!! The Firsthand Story of the Murder, Manhunt, Trial, and Mourning, which gathers more than eighty eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, medical records, trial transcripts, speeches, letters, diary entries, and poems.

Harold Holzer, editor of the volume, is one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era. He has authored, coauthored, and edited more than forty books, including Lincoln and the Power of the Press; Lincoln at Cooper Union; and, for The Library of America, The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now. He is Roger Hertog Fellow at the New-York Historical Society.  (Photo: Dan Pollard)

What’s the aim of this collection, what sorts of insights and discoveries do you hope readers will find?

The idea is to bring readers back to the very moment of Lincoln’s death one hundred and fifty years ago and show how his mourners, his avengers, his admirers, and his foes all reacted. From the people in the Lincolns’ box that night to the funeral to the testimony at the trial of the conspirators, here are the fascinating firsthand accounts of the unfolding events, expressing shock, sorrow, indignation, and thirst for revenge. In the days of emotional upheaval that followed, and later, we see the event fully considered, what it meant for posterity, and the elevation of Lincoln, in literature and memory, into an American icon. It’s pretty remarkable to hear these voices again.

What does the experience of reading these contemporary, firsthand eyewitness accounts offer readers that standard narrative histories don’t?

There are many wonderful books about the assassination and its aftermath. But they’re unavoidably reflective and interpretive. The firsthand accounts, written in a rush of immediate emotion, have a palpable reality to them that one can’t find in narrative history. These writers did not know how events were going to turn out. Newspaper reports were long and beautifully written. The true-crime-type reports of the manhunt for the conspirators are edge-of-seat dramatic. And the lamentations, familiar and unseen, prose and poetry, take a reader’s breath away.

What do the pieces tell us about the diversity of responses to Lincoln’s murder in the North and the South?

Not everyone mourned Lincoln, as my introduction tries to make clear. But I think it’s fair to say that the overwhelming number of Northern responses, even from Democrats, was respectful, bordering on reverential. Partisan politics was for a time forgotten in the wave of mass grief. Recent studies suggest a wave of celebratory defiance, but in truth these were isolated incidents—quantitatively they add up to very, very little. Read, for example, the reporting from the anti-Lincoln New York World. They once ridiculed Lincoln—taunted him—and now they echoed the voice of grief.

What does the volume tell us about Lincoln’s place in the stories Americans tell about themselves, then and now?

Murdered or not, Lincoln would always have occupied a significant place in American history as the president who preserved the Union and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. He certainly thought so, and I couldn’t agree more. But as this book reveals, Lincoln achieved an almost divine status in America’s so-called civil religion by becoming the symbolic final casualty of the war for union and freedom. In giving his life that the nation might live—as some saw it, and to paraphrase his own tribute to fallen soldiers at Gettysburg—he became a martyr to liberty, and you can see that sacred place emerging for him as the literature continues to appear in the months and years following his death.

Are there writers you came particularly to like or admire while working on the book?

I love the newspaper writers—and I am assuming that the “Big Three” New York editors, Henry Raymond of the Times, James Gordon Bennett Sr. of the Herald, and Horace Greeley of the Tribune, wrote or contributed much to the most important editorials their papers ever published. I am also quite taken with the overseas eulogies, from Ibsen, Tom Taylor in London, and the somewhat cooler comments by Disraeli. I can’t help adoring Whitman—he was unparalleled in wringing every last drop of literary opportunity he could wrest for himself after Lincoln’s death. On the one hand the masterful long elegy “Lilacs,” on the other the simpler “Captain,” which was his big performance encore for the rest of his career as a lecturer and reader. I guess my newest favorite is diarist George Templeton Strong, who scrawled daily entries in a tiny hand in his journals for his entire life—he’s quite extraordinary, great attention to detail.

Most interesting discovery you made while assembling the book?

The letter from Clara Harris, the senator’s daughter who was in the presidential box when Lincoln was shot. She confides to a friend that all the spurting blood that souvenir-hunters later swabbed, saved, or sold from the scene, belonged not to Lincoln (she was right—his wound was impacted), but to her poor fiancé, Henry Rathbone, whom Booth slashed with a knife before jumping to the Ford’s Theatre stage. Henry bled profusely and nobody paid much attention with the president of the United States lying unconscious. All those blood-stained fabrics that collectors lust after today—boy, would their owners be shocked if they were somehow subjected to a DNA test.

Piece or pieces you think readers will find most surprising?

I think readers will be galvanized by the testimony we reprint from the trial of the assassination conspirators. It’s rarely printed in such detail. I think it takes the alleged mystery out of the plot—it was all Booth’s and he was rather crazy. No Catholic Church plot, no Confederate government last gasp. One racist, wild-eyed actor who couldn’t differentiate between his stage roles like Marc Antony and real life, and a small band of impressionable followers. Although their audacious plot to dismember the entire government wasn’t entirely successful—the conspirator assigned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson couldn’t bring himself to do it, and General Ulysses S. Grant left town rather than join the Lincolns at Ford’s Theatre—Lincoln was not the only victim. Secretary of State William Seward nearly died as a result of a brutal knife attack that same night. To some Americans, the world as they knew it was coming to an end.

How does Lincoln’s assassination compare with more recent national traumas, such as the assassination of President Kennedy and the September 11 attacks?

I lived through the JFK assassination and even for/as a kid, the shock and sadness were palpable. But Kennedy died a man of great promise unfulfilled; we mourned for a beautiful family of course, but also a presidency largely incomplete—what might have been. Lincoln, on the other hand, died at the apex of his power and popularity, triumphant. I wasn’t there, although sometimes I feel I was, but this volume shows us that Americans mourned the senselessness of the tragedy—an act that made a huge hero into an even greater one (perhaps more like FDR). September 11 was yet another kind of story—that one compares more, I think, to Pearl Harbor, a day that provoked grief and anger over wanton destruction and an assault on the homeland. They’re all somehow linked I suppose in our national litany of violence and death. I still think that Lincoln’s murder stands out—the first presidential assassination, of a man who had been underappreciated in his lifetime and was for many becoming truly beloved.

Do you have a favorite piece in the collection?

I’m divided between the brilliant metaphor of Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” and the incredibly professional report AP Washington bureau chief Lawrence Gobright somehow composed and filed just minutes after learning of Lincoln’s assassination—after rushing to the scene and somehow getting into the presidential box for a few minutes so he could report firsthand. He knew Lincoln well, had covered him ably during the war. He must have been in genuine shock, probably grieving too. But what a consummate professional. He wrote the stories that the whole country first read, before the analysts, eulogists, and odists took over. By the way, Lincoln was a pretty fair writer too, to say the least. The coda to the volume features Lincoln’s own unsurpassed comments on death and sacrifice—Gettysburg and the Second Inaugural—as well as his breathtakingly poignant condolence letters (Ellsworth, McCullough, and Bixby). It doesn’t get any better than that.

Book excerpt: Read Gideon Welles’s account of the night of the assassination and of the chaotic days immediately following.

Forthcoming from The Library of America (Fall 2015)

Last summer we announced the titles for the first half of 2015; several of those titles are still at press and will be arriving in our warehouse in the coming weeks. Meanwhile we've been putting the finishing touches on the list of publications for the remainder of the year—including a collection gathering the works of an author (and subject matter) new to the LOA pantheon, as well as a two-volume anthology that resurrects several under-appreciated novels that are either out of print or hard to find.

At the end of the list we note two last-minute additions—both paperbacks—to our spring list.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA SERIES

Elmore Leonard
Four Novels of the 1980s
Gregg Sutter, editor
City Primeval • LaBrava • Glitz • Freaky Deaky
September 2015
Library of America #267 / ISBN 978-1-59853-412-2

Women Crime Writers
Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (two volumes)
Sarah Weinman, editor
September 2015 / Boxed set: 978-1-59853-451-1
Volume One: The 1940s
Laura, by Vera Caspary • The Horizontal Man, by Helen Eustis • In a Lonely Place, by Dorothy B. Hughes • The Blank Wall, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Library of America #268 / ISBN 978-1-59853-430-6
Volume Two: The 1950s
Mischief, by Charlotte Armstrong • The Blunderer, by Patricia Highsmith • Beast in View, by Margaret Millar • Fools’ Gold, by Dolores Hitchens
Library of America #269 / ISBN 978-1-59853-431-3

Frederick Law Olmsted
Writings on Landscape, Culture, and Society
Charles Beveridge, editor
With 32 pages of illustrations
October 2015
Library of America #270/ ISBN 978-1-59853-452-8

Edith Wharton
Four Novels of the 1920s
Hermione Lee, editor
The Glimpses of the Moon • A Son at the Front • Twilight Sleep • The Children
October 2015
Library of America #271 / ISBN 978-1-59853-435-5

James Baldwin
Later Novels
Darryl Pinckney, editor
Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone • If Beale Street Could Talk • Just Above My Head
October 2015
Library of America #272/ ISBN 978-1-59853-454-2

BOXED SET

The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (three volumes)
Ilan Stavans, editor
The complete Library of America edition • 197 stories • more than 2,500 pages • includes Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Album, a 128-page illustrated guide to the life and work of the Nobel Prize-winning writer
September 2015
Collects Library of America #149, 150, 151 /ISBN 978-1-59853-455-9

NEW PAPERBACKS: MAY 2015

Thomas Paine
Common Sense, The Crisis & Other Writings from the American Revolution
Edited and with an introduction by Eric Foner
ISBN 978-1-59853-433-7

Football
Great Writing about the National Sport
John Schulian, editor
ISBN 978-1-59853-417-7

An interview with Tim Page on the music critic who “managed to demystify an art that was often regarded as otherworldly”

The Library of America recently published Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles 1940–1954, which gathers hundreds of reviews and several essays by a musician who did double duty as a composer and a critic. Tim Page, who edited the collection, describes Thomson’s importance and the many joys awaiting music lovers who encounter his writings for the first time.

Tim Page is a professor of journalism and music at the University of Southern California. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997 for his writings about music for The Washington Post. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of more than twenty books, including Parallel Play, a memoir; Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson; and the two-volume Library of America edition of the novels of Dawn Powell. (Above: Virgil Thomson with Tim Page giving a master class in criticism at Juilliard in 1987. Photo © Bonnie Geller Geld)

What’s the aim of this collection? What sorts of pleasures and insights do you hope readers will find?

Virgil Thomson wrote about music so vividly that one can almost hear it on the page—it was an extraordinary gift, almost synesthetic. He invokes the years before and after World War II and summons a musical civilization that has now largely vanished. We wanted to preserve the best of Virgil’s music reviews for the New York Herald Tribune, for which he was music critic from 1940 to 1954. He published three large collections of his work during his lifetime, as well as a paperback selection in the late 1960s that gathered some later reviews. We included all of these pieces, and added about 100 pages of reviews that were never reprinted.

Why Virgil Thomson in The Library of America? How would you characterize his contribution and legacy? His influence?

Criticism is an art in itself, and a number of American writers—Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and Willa Cather among them—have practiced this art as journalists at the highest level. Virgil was likely the best American music critic—indeed, perhaps the finest such critic who ever worked for a daily newspaper. He wrote about music as a professional, without undue romanticism and with a healthy suspicion of what he called “the music appreciation racket.” He was brilliantly succinct and funny and he managed to demystify an art that was often regarded as otherworldly. What makes Virgil so wonderfully interesting is his use of the English language and his ability to convey pretty complicated musical ideas in terms that all readers can understand.

How did you come to know Virgil Thomson, and how did you come to edit this collection?

We had met in 1979 but he never remembered me until I began to publish in The New York Times a few years later. He liked my criticism and asked me if I, along with my then-wife Vanessa Weeks Page, would edit a collection of his letters. The book was published, Virgil was pleased, and we were asked if we would compile a collection of his complete music criticism. We ended up with a huge amount of material, enough to fill several volumes, but for a number of reasons the project was shelved in the mid-1990s.

Twenty years later, I got a call from The Library of America, for whom I had also assembled two volumes of the writing of Dawn Powell. We decided not to do all of Virgil’s work—like many critics, he had to do some hack work every now and then—but we kept the best of it, and the book stands as a monument to his originality, audacity, and importance to musical thinking in the mid-twentieth century.

Why a book of writing about music? What’s the connection between writing-writers and composers-musicians in this period?

You learn a great deal about an art when you read articulate reviews of practitioners of the art. Many composers have been fine critics—one thinks immediately of Schumann and Berlioz and there are others. None was better than Virgil Thomson. And the staff of writers that Virgil brought to the Herald Tribune was remarkable—Elliott Carter, Lou Harrison, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, John Cage, William Flanagan, Arthur Berger (who had a staff position), and many more.

What was the Herald Tribune’s contribution, and place, in cultural life during the years Thomson worked there?

The Herald Tribune was liberal, educated Republican in its outlook, back when the GOP was far less populist than it is now. It placed a high premium on good writing, unlike the much more literal (back then) New York Times.

Virgil arrived as what our parents might have called a “whippersnapper”—a gifted composer known in avant-garde circles with a cosmopolitan Parisian background of which he made much. He could be maddeningly arrogant and dismissive but he was also so brilliant that the paper not only put up with him but spurred him on, much to the outrage of more traditional musicians.

What parallels/contrasts would you draw between Thomson’s world and the classical music world today?

We’re living in a vastly different era. As recently as thirty years ago, all four of the New York general-interest newspapers (the Times, the Daily News, the New York Post, and Newsday) had staff classical music critics, and the Times had five or six of them. Today, I would guess that less than twenty people in the United States make their living mostly as music critics. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are all down to one staffer each. Information is spread very differently than it was, and an education in classical music is no longer to be expected of one’s audience. There are some advances—internet reviews and the general understanding of technology that allows our young people to create their own experimental music at home for next to nothing—but much has been lost, too. It always seems to be the best of times and worst of times, doesn’t it?

How did you decide which of the uncollected pieces to include?

There were a number of reviews of artists and compositions that have inspired much recent interest that Virgil did not include in his own collections. Aficionados of the baritone Gerard Souzay, the Brazilian singer Elsie Houston, the violinist Ginette Neveu, and the pianist Michelangeli, among others, will be interested in what Virgil had to say about them.

Which piece do you think readers will find most surprising?

When Virgil was putting together his own collections, I think he had his eye on posterity and tried to leave out some reviews that will strike many later readers as “wrong.” He panned Benjamin Britten’s “Billy Budd,” for example—and wait till you see what he wrote about the Mahler “Resurrection” Symphony!

What do you consider the most important thing you learned from the example of Thomson’s criticism about writing music reviews and music articles? Did Thomson ever offer you any practical advice as a writer?

Virgil read my Times work regularly and was never hesitant about suggesting ways I could have improved it. He taught me to be clear, succinct, and descriptive—also not to fear wit as long as it was organic and didn’t seem tacked on.

I should add that I don’t invariably agree with what Thomson wrote. Indeed, I often find that disagreeing with a critic is a good way to develop your own aesthetic. I got into this line of work because I wanted to argue with a lot of prevailing views. One thing I will say for Virgil is that he managed to review—and review intelligently and with some support—a lot of new music that had nothing in common with his own, a generosity that is not common among composers. As for the standard repertory, he took nothing for granted. If he wanted to take apart the “Missa Solemnis,” he would—and even those of us who love the “Missa” would agree that it just might be, as Virgil suggested, “too high and too loud too much of the time.”

Do you have a favorite piece?

I could be coy and say that I’d choose whatever one I’m reading now! In fact, that’s pretty close to the truth. For me, the joy of this volume is the immersion into Virgil’s sensibility, and that holds steady throughout the book. When I put it down, I miss his company.

Audio: “Virgil Thomson on What Makes a Good Music Critic,”
an interview recorded in 1948, shortly after the publication of The Art of Judging Music, which is included in its entirety in the new Library of America edition.

Bernard Malamud reads from his story,“The Mourners”

This week’s Story of the Week selection is Bernard Malamud’s “The Mourners,” first published in 1955 and collected in The Magic Barrel (1957), which would win the first of his two National Book Awards.

Thanks to Calliope Audio Readings, we can hear Malamud himself read his story. We’ve include the text below this three-minute excerpt, so you can read along while you listen to one of America’s master storytellers.


This free excerpt is provided by Calliope Audio Readings, which offers recordings of Malamud, Nelson Algren, James Baldwin, James Jones, Philip Roth, William Styron, and John Updike reading from their own works.

*   *   *

Arriving at the top floor he banged his fist on Kessler’s door. “Gruber, the landlord. Open up here.”

There was no answer, no movement within, so Gruber inserted his key into the lock and twisted. Kessler had barricaded the door with a chest and some chairs. Gruber had to put his shoulder to the door and shove before he could step into the hallway of the badly lit two-and-a-half-room flat. The old man, his face drained of blood, was standing in the kitchen doorway.

“I warned you to scram outa here,” Gruber said loudly. “Move out or I’ll telephone the city marshal.”

“Mr. Gruber—” began Kessler.

“Don’t bother me with your lousy excuses, just beat it.” He gazed around. “It looks like a junk shop and it smells like a toilet. It’ll take me a month to clean up here.”

“This smell is only cabbage that I am cooking for my supper. Wait, I’ll open a window and it will go away.”

“When you go away, it’ll go away.” Gruber took out his bulky wallet, counted out twelve dollars, added fifty cents, and plunked the money on top of the chest. “You got two more weeks till the fifteenth, then you gotta be out or I will get a dispossess. Don’t talk back talk. Get outa here and go somewhere that they don’t know you and maybe you’ll get a place.”

“No, Mr. Gruber,” Kessler cried passionately. “I didn’t do nothing, and I will stay here.”

“Don’t monkey with my blood pressure,” said Gruber. “If you’re not out by the fifteenth, I will personally throw you on your bony ass.”

Then he left and walked heavily down the stairs.

The fifteenth came and Ignace found the twelve-fifty in his letter box. He telephoned Gruber and told him.

“I’ll get a dispossess,” Gruber shouted. He instructed the janitor to write out a note saying to Kessler that his money was refused, and to stick it under his door. This Ignace did. Kessler returned the money to the letter box, but again Ignace wrote a note and slipped it, with the money, under the old man’s door.

After another day Kessler received a copy of his eviction notice. It said to appear in court on Friday at 10 a.m. to show cause why he should not be evicted for continued neglect and destruction of rental property. The official notice filled Kessler with great fright because he had never in his life been to court. He did not appear on the day he had been ordered to.

That same afternoon the marshal came with two brawny assistants. Ignace opened Kessler’s lock for them and as they pushed their way into the flat, the janitor hastily ran down the stairs to hide in the cellar. Despite Kessler’s wailing and carrying on, the two assistants methodically removed his meager furniture and set it out on the sidewalk. After that they got Kessler out, though they had to break open the bathroom door because the old man had locked himself in there. He shouted, struggled, pleaded with his neighbors to help him, but they looked on in a silent group outside the door. The two assistants, holding the old man tightly by the arms and skinny legs, carried him, kicking and moaning, down the stairs. They sat him in the street on a chair amid his junk. Upstairs, the marshal bolted the door with a lock Ignace had supplied, signed a paper which he handed to the janitor’s wife, and then drove off in an automobile with his assistants.

Kessler sat on a split chair on the sidewalk. It was raining and the rain soon turned to sleet, but he still sat there. People passing by skirted the pile of his belongings. They stared at Kessler and he stared at nothing. He wore no hat or coat, and the snow fell on him, making him look like a piece of his dispossessed goods.

Copyright © 1955, 1958, renewed 1977, 1986 by Bernard Malamud. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. CAUTION: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.